Trumpocracy Page 2
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President Obama tried through his two terms in office to negotiate some kind of immigration deal that would include amnesties for most or all the people illegally residing in the United States. Congress rebuffed him, even when Democrats held the majority. Advocates for immigrants pressed the president to extend some form of executive protection to this unauthorized population. Again and again, Obama replied that he lacked the legal authority to do so.
I just want to repeat: I’m president. I’m not king. . . . I can exercise some flexibility in terms of where we deploy our resources, to focus on people who are really causing problems as opposed to families who are just trying to work and support themselves. But there’s a limit to the discretion that I can show, because I am obliged to execute the law. That’s what the executive branch means. I can’t just make up the laws by myself.2
Sometimes when I talk to immigration advocates, they wish I could just bypass Congress and change the law myself. But that’s not how a democracy works.3
We are doing everything we can administratively. But the fact of the matter is there are laws on the books that I have to enforce. And I think there’s been a great disservice done to the cause of getting the DREAM Act passed and getting comprehensive immigration passed by perpetrating the notion that somehow, by myself, I can go and do these things. It’s just not true. . . . We live in a democracy. You have to pass bills through the legislature, and then I can sign it.4
In June 2012, Obama abruptly reversed himself. Facing an election in which his strategists advised that Hispanic votes would be crucial, President Obama issued the very order that he himself had so repeatedly denounced as beyond his authority. In the long history of presidential overreach, there had never been a case like it: a president asserting a power that he himself while actually serving as president had forcefully and repeatedly condemned as unlawful.
The 2012 action deferred enforcement of the immigration laws against people under the age of thirty who had entered the United States before age sixteen, provided they had violated no other laws. This population was estimated at about 800,000 people.5 In November 2014, President Obama issued an even more ambitious order, this time deferring action against the parents of the beneficiaries of the 2012 order, enlarging the protected population to an estimated four million people.6
In June 2016, a 4–4 deadlock on the US Supreme Court would leave in place an appellate court’s ruling that Obama had indeed overstepped his powers.7 Yet Obama did not withdraw from his new assertion of power. He and his defenders argued that congressional inaction had left him no choice but to act alone. It’s a strange version of the Constitution that says the president gains greater power to say yes when Congress tries to tell him no. Pre-2012 Obama, by contrast, recognized that if Congress declines to enact a law, then said law is not enacted, and everybody including the president must live with the consequences. Post-2012 Obama had become more impatient with restraints on his power. Or, rather, his voters had become so, as we shall see in more detail in the final chapter of this book.
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American politics has often enough been poisoned by conspiracy thinking. But there was something more radical and more far-reaching about the Birther hoax of the Obama years than in conspiracy fantasies of the past. (Birthers variously argued that Barack Obama had been born in Kenya, raised a Muslim, or did not qualify as a “natural-born citizen” because his father was foreign born.8)
The hoax was accepted in some form or other by a large majority of Republican voters. Surveys in the final year of the Obama presidency found that only about one-quarter of registered Republicans acknowledged that Barack Obama had been born in the United States. The three-quarters majority expressed either certainty that he had not (about 40 percent) or doubt that he had (about 35 percent). Highly informed Republicans were actually slightly less likely to accept the fact of Barack Obama’s American birth than less-informed Republicans.9
The hoax not only shaped but outright controlled the political possibilities for Republican officeholders. When confronted on television with video of Iowa Republicans insisting that Barack Obama was hiding something about his origins, then-Speaker John Boehner had this to say to NBC’s David Gregory: “It’s not my job to tell the American people what to think. . . . The state of Hawaii has said that he was born there. That’s good enough for me. The president says he’s a Christian. I accept him at his word.” He then repeated: “The American people have the right to think what they want to think. I can’t—it’s not my job to tell them.”10You can multiply Boehner’s contortions endlessly.11 Party leaders personally rejected and derided the Birther hoax. They did not dare do so out loud where their voters and donors might hear.
The hoax almost instantly became decisive in the Republican Party’s presidential politics. Donald Trump seized on the Birther hoax in 2011, shouldering aside its early promoters to emerge as the nation’s preeminent denier of Obama’s Americanism. People forget this now, but Republicans instantly rewarded Trump by acclaiming his as their favorite for the presidential nomination of . . . 2012! An April 2011 poll put Trump in first place among Republican presidential possibilities, by an impressive nine points over the runner-up, Mike Huckabee, and eleven points over the ultimate winner, Mitt Romney.12
Trump took himself out of the 2012 race in May of that year, but his early success was not overlooked. Mitt Romney sought his endorsement; other candidates emulated his methods in 2016. Asked whether Obama was a Christian at a press conference at a 2015 meeting of the National Governors Association, Scott Walker replied, “I don’t know. I’ve actually never talked about it or I haven’t read about that. I’ve never asked him that.”13
Nothing like this radical denial of the Americanism of a serving president had been seen since the Civil War era, if then. The denial also revealed that as the country diversified, its conservatives would insist ever more militantly that no matter who might reside within the United States, the country’s institutions and identity should belong only to those recognizably like them.
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Supreme Court nominations have triggered political battles since the earliest days of the republic. But the rest of the federal judicial system had historically excited Americans much less. Patronage, not ideology, inspired the great majority of lower-court appointments, each party taking turns to reward friends and supporters.
That easygoing rotation has radicalized over the past two decades. The change is often dated to a 2001 article by Bruce Ackerman, a law professor at Yale. George W. Bush had been made president, Ackerman argued, only by the intervention of a conservative Supreme Court. If Bush then appointed further conservative justices, the court would be “packing itself.” For that reason, “when sitting justices retire or die, the Senate should refuse to confirm any nominations offered up by President Bush.”14
Ackerman limited his boycott idea to the Supreme Court itself, but Senate Democrats did him one better. No Supreme Court vacancies opened in George W. Bush’s first term, but a great many appellate court seats did. In a closely divided Senate, Democrats successfully blocked the consideration of ten of these appointees—an unprecedented move.
Republicans struck back after gaining Senate seats in the election of 2004. They threatened to end the Senate minority’s power to filibuster lower-court judicial nominations. The two parties reached a deal. The appellate-judge filibuster was preserved in theory, but with an understanding that the minority would use it only in “extreme cases.” By then, the most controversial of the Bush nominees had removed themselves from consideration, so Democrats could score the exchange as a victory.
This backstory explains why Senate Republicans a decade later felt entitled to use unprecedented tactics of their own against President Obama’s final nominee to the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland. Republicans refused Garland even a hearing, never mind a vote, inventing a new principle against presidents nominating Supreme Court justices in their final year. The outcome of
the 2016 presidential election then allowed Republicans to claim the open seat for one of their own, Neil Gorsuch, a grab that will be regarded by Democrats as justifying whatever revenge they can exact whenever they recover a Senate majority.
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Republicans had pledged and pledged again to repeal and replace Obamacare. They fought the 2012 election very largely as a referendum on that issue. After the defeat, their Congressional leadership tacitly accepted that the issue had closed. They continued the fight anyway. Donors demanded it, and it energized the rank and file. But as Eric Cantor, then the number two House Republican, conceded in an interview published in July 2017, “To give the impression that if Republicans were in control of the House and Senate, that we could do that when Obama was still in office. . . . I never believed it.”15
But a great many others did believe it. These true-believing conservatives assumed that the party in which they had invested so much faith, energy, and money must have developed a plan to repeal and replace Obamacare, if and when the moment should arrive. So that moment did, or seemed to do, in November 2016: united Republican control of the federal government.
At which point it instantly became undeniable that the Republicans’ ideas for replacing Obamacare bubbled with toxicity.
Republicans had excoriated the Affordable Care Act for presenting middle-class taxpayers with increased premiums and heightened deductibles. Their own plans would lower premiums in the individual marketplace a little, for some, by raising deductibles a lot for just about everybody. This was not malice, just arithmetic. It was arithmetic too that reducing the federal government’s future contributions to Medicaid would drop millions of enrollees from the program over the next decade.
What goes around comes around. In 2017, House and Senate Republicans would try to jam through Congress a law every bit as far-reaching as the Affordable Care Act, without hearings, without debate, and (insofar as they could) without scores from the Congressional Budget Office. Ironically, while all attention was focused on President Trump’s raging and bullying, the most radical attack on American norms of governance in his first year was attempted not by Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions, Anthony Scaramucci, or any other late-night demon, but by the regular Republicans of the House and Senate. Senator John McCain vividly described the legislative method of repeal and replace:
We’ve tried to do this by coming up with a proposal behind closed doors in consultation with the administration, then springing it on skeptical members, trying to convince them it’s better than nothing, asking us to swallow our doubts and force it past a unified opposition. I don’t think that is going to work in the end. And it probably shouldn’t.16
Some Republicans, including John McCain, have attempted to compare the methods of ACA repeal to those with which the ACA was enacted in the first place. Yet the original ACA was lengthily debated, examined in committee, and fully scored by the Congressional Budget Office. It represented not novelty, but a somewhat more redistributionist update of the health care reform signed into law in Massachusetts by Governor Mitt Romney and originally sketched at the Conservative Heritage Foundation in the mid-1990s, as a Republican alternative to the health care plan offered by the Clinton administration. Whatever other complaints might be brought against the ACA, nobody can say it was sprung on either Congress or the American people out of nowhere—or that senators lacked full information about its contents and consequences. ACA repeal, however, was pushed through Congress as a black box. The famous line of Nancy Pelosi’s—“We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what’s in it” (ripped from context in her case and distorted in its meaning by her opponents)—literally did apply to the repeal of the Affordable Care Act.
The failure of ACA repeal may deter future Congresses from repeating the smash-and-grab methods of the Republicans of 2017–18. But a sinister precedent has been set, and it will not be soon forgotten.
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The twenty-first century has been an unhealthy era for political incumbents. Between November 2000 and November 2016, partisan control of the House of Representatives flipped twice; control of the Senate, four times. That’s the same number of rotations, for each chamber, as in the entire fifty-five-year period from VJ Day to November 2000.
The presidency had a lower turnover rate, but even there, trouble indicators flashed. George W. Bush was reelected in 2004 with 50.7 percent of the popular vote—the lowest percentage of the popular vote in American history for any incumbent president not actually to lose. In 2012, Barack Obama won his second term by a smaller margin of the vote than he won his first, the only such drop-off since the age of Andrew Jackson.
In almost every survey since the Iraq War began to go wrong in 2004, upwards of 60 percent of Americans assessed the country as on the “wrong track.” In the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008, the wrong-track number spiked past 70 percent. It would return to that disturbing peak at intervals during the slow, weak recovery that followed.17
How removed from interactions with ordinary Americans did political elites have to be to plan the 2016 election as a return engagement between the two most famous political dynasties of late twentieth-century America: Bush versus Clinton? Yet the country’s wealthiest citizens committed hundreds of millions of dollars to secure just that outcome. Could they not foresee trouble? Apparently not.
Rich people faced rising taxes in the Obama years, and understandably they did not like it. They had to deal with a president who seemed unusually unimpressed by their accomplishments, a sore point for a class of people accustomed to accolades and compliments. The venture capitalist Tom Perkins signed a letter to the Wall Street Journal in 2014 calling attention to “the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its ‘one percent,’ namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the ‘rich.’” Perkins warned of the possibility of a “progressive Kristallnacht.”18 Psychic alarms aside, the Obama years were actually a good time for the American affluent. Over President Obama’s eight years in office, the S&P 500 gained 235 percent, more than 16 percent annually—one of the very best returns in US history.19
Yet through those years, one heard the pounding drumbeat of discontent: the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, the Trump campaign. These movements had many points of disagreement with each other, but even more important similarities, including a rising tolerance for violence. It could still shock the nation in 2009 when one man carried a loaded rifle to an Obama political rally in Arizona.20 Dozens of weapons were carried at the Black Lives Matter march in Dallas in 2016 that ended in the killing of five police officers and the wounding of seven more, as well as the injury of two civilians.21 Even more and heavier weaponry would be displayed at the rallies against the removal of Confederate statues in Houston and Charlottesville in 2017.
The affluent and the secure persisted with old ways and old names in the face of the disillusionment and even the radicalization of the poorer two-thirds of American society. They invited a crisis. The only surprise was . . . how surprised they were when the invited crisis arrived.
Donald Trump did not create the vulnerabilities he exploited. They awaited him. The irresponsibility of American elites, the arrogance of party leaders, the insularity of the wealthy: those and more were the resources Trump used on his way to power.
“It’s even worse than it looks,” quipped a 2012 book by Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann.22 Such pessimism invited the reply, “That’s what you said last time.” Things have looked bad before without the world coming to an end. Why panic now? But it can equally be true that things were bad before, that things have gotten worse since, and that things may get even worse in the future. Like a man falling downstairs, each thump and tumble may be a prelude to the next, with the final crash still waiting for him even farther down.
Since the election of Donald Trump, the hard and painful floor seems to be rising toward us faster and faster and faster.
Chapter 2
Enablers
He did not do it by himself. Donald Trump was hoisted into office, and is sustained there by many hands:
by a conservative entertainment complex that propagandized for him;
by fellow candidates for president who appeased him in the hope they could use him;
by a Republican Party apparatus that submitted to him;
by a donor elite who funded him;
by a congressional party that protected him;
by writers and intellectuals who invented excuses for him; and
by millions of rank-and-file Republicans, who accepted him.
Even as the truth about Trump loomed ever larger and more inescapable during the presidential campaign, he drew protection and support from conservative true believers. Some of those people had opposed him in the primaries for his deviations from conservative ideology. Many more of them will rediscover that ideology after his administration ends, and condemn Trump retrospectively as “really a liberal all along.”
But for now, when it matters, they are locked in. They are locked in by their cultural grievances. Donald Trump has delivered very little by way of an affirmative conservative agenda. But how much did that failure matter compared to his successful exploitation of conservative anger and alienation? The radio broadcaster Hugh Hewitt astutely explained on Twitter why so many conservatives enabled a president who achieved so little. Hewitt wrote less than a week after Trump’s soft-on-Nazism response to the August 2017 white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia: “I spoke to a group of influential CA GOPers tonight, long time activists, bundlers, influencers. Support for @realDonaldTrump has increased.”1 He elaborated: “Mostly this audience hates—hates—elite media. . . . It doesn’t mean his supporters aren’t critical. They are. Of many things. But @ealDonalTrump [sic] has all the right enemies.”2