Trumpocracy Read online

  The United States was living through an epochal shift of economic power and cultural status, and Trump’s supporters perceived themselves as the targets and losers in that shift. It’s wrong to imagine those supporters as all displaced factory workers, all struggling coal miners. Many people solidly middle class or even rather affluent also felt that their world was turning upside down in the twenty-first century.

  Many traditional Republicans too, uncomfortable as they might be with Trump’s loudmouthed tweets, wondered if Trump were at least the right man for the times. A contributor to a pro-Trump website lamented:

  Conservatives have won elections for decades yet despair as the country moves further and further left and every generation seems more insane than the last. Actually doing anything to confront the power of Hollywood, the mass media, or leftist corporations remains unthinkable, as doing so would clash with principles such as freedom of speech and limited government. Meanwhile, the Left presses on, destroying every last vestige of “racism,” “sexism,” or “homophobia.” . . .

  This is perhaps why Donald Trump has struck a chord with so many Republicans. Whatever his faults, at least he fights. Trump, for example, is not going to sit there and let the wife of a serial rapist tell him that he’s the commanding general in a “war on women.” For three-quarters of a century, conservatives have stuck to their principles as they have done nothing to challenge the power of those seeking to destroy all they hold dear. The results are clear, and more are waking up to the true nature of the modern Left.43

  That was phrased more pungently than most, but even non-Trumpist conservatives pulsed to such emotions. Peter Augustine Lawler is a distinguished academic who served on President Bush’s Council on Bioethics. Thoroughly Trump-skeptical, he nonetheless offered National Review’s readers some cautious praise for Trump’s brutishness:

  What’s wrong with gentlemen in public life? That’s Trump’s real question. They’re losers! McCain and Romney: nice guys who looked good in going down in flames. McCain, in particular, is a loser Southern Stoic. And no gentleman, such as Jeb “low energy” Bush, could be any match for Hillary Clinton or ISIS or Silicon Valley oligarchs or emasculating political correctness.44

  Even Trump’s most ardent critics on the political Right wondered whether he was not merely symptomatic of a culture in decay, and possibly might even in his rough way offer some kind of antidote. Thus Harvey Mansfield, the noted conservative in Harvard’s government department, wrote in the Wall Street Journal of July 30, 2016: “We are caught between distaste for a man who is not a gentleman and dislike of the political correctness that he so energetically attacks—yet whose effect he illustrates.”45

  Trump’s critics loathed the president as a bully. But bullies pick on the weak. Trump’s supporters saw their cultural enemies as much stronger than themselves. A revealing example made news in midsummer 2017. On June 29, President Trump tweeted a pair of harshly personal attacks on the MSNBC morning host Mika Brzezinski.

  I heard poorly rated @MorningJoe speaks badly of me (don’t watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came..46

  . . . to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year’s Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!47

  The president’s spokesperson, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, insisted at her press briefing later that day that it was Trump, not Brzezinski, who had been the victim of bullying.

  I don’t think that the president has ever been someone who gets attacked and doesn’t push back. There have been outrageous personal attacks not just on him but on everyone around him. People on that show have personally attacked me many times. This is a president who fights fire with fire, and certainly will not be allowed to be bullied by liberal media, or the liberal elites within the media, or Hollywood, or anywhere else.48

  And although a morning show host has no army, no intelligence services, no power to issue orders and pardons, Huckabee Sanders’s version of the case nonetheless resonated with many millions of conservative Americans.

  Whatever else Trump may fail to do—staff a government, enact a program, safeguard US classified secrets, relieve disasters on Puerto Rico—there is one thing at which he never fails: provoking outrage among the people whom Trump supporters regard as overentitled and underdeserving: “the New York theater and arts and croissants crowd,” as Rush Limbaugh calls them.49 But don’t belittle theater! Trump is the producer, writer, and star of an extravaganza performance of the theater of resentment. He summons all those who share that resentment to buy a ticket and enjoy the show.

  The United States has seen many such characters before, of course. The Founding generation warned against them. They warned too of “the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils. How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union?”50 For more than two centuries, through more than fifty presidential elections, those warnings were heeded. This time, not.

  One could say the system failed. But systems are made of people with names, motives, and agency. It was not some big sputtering turbine, some grinding mass of gears and levers, that empowered and enabled Donald Trump. It was people. People with American flag pins affixed to their lapels, people who put their hands over their hearts during the pledge of allegiance, people who swear to uphold the Constitution, people who salute the military on Veterans Day and mourn the brave fallen on Memorial Day . . . people whose throats catch and whose eyes glisten when they declare their love of country and their willingness to sacrifice their all to defend its freedoms.

  Those people have explanations for their actions, as we all do. “The people’s business must be done.” “You don’t have to like the president to work with him for the public benefit.” “You can support Donald Trump when he is right, and still oppose him when he is wrong.” “Just shut out the noise and get to work.”

  Sounds pragmatic. There will be payoffs for those who do business in this way, not only in policy, but also in the form of more personal rewards. The opportunity of an all-Republican government may not last long, and the shrewd will seize the moment. More than in most administrations, the Trump White House has made celebrities of its leading personalities, and celebrity is a highly liquid currency.

  But the payoffs exact a price, and that price is exacted by the megaton from American institutions and to American world leadership. For the remainder of the Trump presidency, American allies will have to make their plans on the assumption of American untrustworthiness. That kind of planning can be habit forming. For the remainder of the Trump presidency, military and intelligence leaders will work around a president who makes impulsive decisions, issues reckless statements, and cannot keep secrets. Those who serve in government will perceive that public integrity has gone out of style, polluted by a president who resents and resists the enforcement of rules. The one-third of America that identifies as “conservative” will be isolated even more profoundly within an information ghetto of deception and incitement. As in his business career, so in government, Donald Trump grabs the benefits for himself and a few associates, while offloading the costs onto those foolish enough to trust him—and anyone else who cannot wriggle away.

  So let us start by looking at Trump’s associates. Without them, Donald Trump would have remained what he was before 2015: a television personality, a tabloid social news presence, and the least bankable name in New York real estate.

  Chapter 3

  Appeasers

  The fix was supposed to be in. Before a single primary vote had been cast, John Ellis (“Jeb”) Bush had locked up the Republican Party’s big money, its top talent, and its senior leadership.

  As governor of Florida, Bush had cut taxes and balanced budgets. He had challenged unions and championed charter schools. He had won accolades from Karl Rove (“the deepest thinker on our side”1) and Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute (“a top
-drawer intellect”2).

  On June 15, 2015, Bush bounded onto the stage at a Miami community college in an event carefully designed to showcase his leadership attributes: his newly trim physique, his policy knowledge, his fluency in Spanish, his deep hold on his must-win home state. That same day, he released a series of uplifting YouTube videos. Over swelling music, he hailed his record: “We led. We reformed. We got results.” He saw solutions where others saw only difficulties, a nation poised to advance into its greatest century yet.3 Within seven weeks of that announcement, Jeb Bush’s candidacy lay in smoldering wreckage.

  As of June 30, 2015, Jeb Bush had raised in excess of $120 million, almost all of it in big gifts from a tiny number of wealthy families.4 Seldom in the history of fund-raising has so much bought so little, so fleetingly. Between December 2014 and September 2015, the heir to the most successful brand in Republican politics plunged from first place in the Republican field to fifth.5 In desperation, the Jeb Bush campaign purchased 60 percent of all political spots aired in New Hampshire in the month of October 2015. That ad barrage pushed his poll numbers in the state from about 9 percent to about 8 percent.

  Donald Trump entered the presidential race the day after Jeb Bush did. He announced his candidacy in terms as grim and despairing as Bush’s had been soaring and hopeful. “We got eighteen trillion in debt. We got nothing but problems . . . We’re dying. We’re dying. We need money . . . We have losers. We have people that don’t have it. We have people that are morally corrupt. We have people that are selling this country down the drain . . . The American dream is dead.”6

  Trump had no organization, no endorsements, no plan, and no money beyond whatever of his own he was willing to spend. Within three weeks, he had surged into first place in the Republican contest. There he stayed, except for an interval in November 2015 when he was briefly overtaken by Dr. Ben Carson.7 From Jupiter Island, Florida, to Greenwich, Connecticut; from Dallas’s Highland Park to Georgia’s Sea Island—not to mention from a numberless horde of pundits and reporters—the cry arose: What went wrong?

  Three years earlier, Republican elites had identified Jeb Bush as the exact solution to their party’s problems. They had been stunned by Mitt Romney’s defeat in 2012. Despite their shock, Republican donors, talkers, and officials rapidly converged on an explanation of the loss and a prescription for the future: immigration. Everything else in the party message was working fine! A fiscal plan that ended the Medicare guarantee for people under the age of fifty-five to finance a big tax cut at the top? Repeal of the Affordable Care Act and its extension of health care to millions? No rethinking needed there at all! They attached all the blame, instead, to the one element of the Mitt Romney platform that the party’s donors, elected officials, and leading ideologists had never much liked anyway: Romney’s gestures toward stricter immigration enforcement.

  Nobody expressed the party elites’ consensus view more assuredly than the Fox News regular Charles Krauthammer. “Ignore the trimmers,” Krauthammer wrote in his first postelection column. “There’s no need for radical change. The other party thinks it owns the demographic future—counter that in one stroke by fixing the Latino problem. Do not, however, abandon the party’s philosophical anchor. . . . No reinvention when none is needed.”8

  “We’ve gotta get rid of the immigration issue altogether,” Sean Hannity told his radio audience the day after the 2012 election. “It’s simple for me to fix it. I think you control the border first, you create a pathway for those people that are here, you don’t say, ‘You gotta go home.’ And that is a position that I’ve evolved on.”9

  Fox News’ principal owner agreed. “Must have sweeping, generous immigration reform,” tweeted Rupert Murdoch on November 7, 2012.10

  “It would be inhumane to send those people back, to send 12 million people out of this country,” the casino mogul and Republican donor Sheldon Adelson told the Wall Street Journal in December of that year. “We’ve got to find a way, find a route, for those people to get legal citizenship.”11

  The Republican National Committee made it all official in a March 2013 postelection report signed by party eminences. The report generally avoided policy recommendations, with a notable exception: “We must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform.”12

  To advance the cause, Paul Singer, one of the most open-pocketed GOP donors, made a six-figure contribution to the National Immigration Forum that spring. Almost as soon as the new Congress convened in 2013, Senate Republicans worked to strike a deal over immigration issues. A bipartisan “Gang of Eight,” including Florida’s ambitious young senator Marco Rubio, agreed on a plan that would create a path to citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants and substantially increase legal immigration limits for both high- and low-skilled workers.

  But otherwise, the post-2012 Republican elite yielded on nothing and doubled down on everything. No U-turns. No compromises.

  More passionately than any other Republican, Jeb Bush had celebrated the contributions of immigrants like his Mexican-born wife, Columba. Yet on every economic issue, no Republican adhered more strictly to party orthodoxy than Bush.

  What the party elite had somehow failed to notice, unfortunately for them, was that their voters did not share the donors’ and pundits’ policy consensus. The Republican Party was built on a coalition of the nation’s biggest winners from globalization and its biggest losers. The winners wrote the policy; the losers provided the votes. While the party elite coalesced upon more immigration, less secure health coverage, and one more Bush, the rank and file were frantically signaling: less immigration, better health coverage, and no more Bushes.

  The other candidates for president in 2016 also missed the signal. Trump alone perceived it. “When do we beat Mexico at the border?” he demanded in his June 16 announcement address. “They’re laughing at us, at our stupidity. And now they are beating us economically. They are not our friend, believe me. But they’re killing us economically. . . . The US has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems. When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us [sic]. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”13

  Trump’s harsh language scandalized almost every pundit who commented on his words. But three weeks later, on July 5, an illegal alien from Mexico, Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, gunned down Kathryn Steinle, a young American woman, on a San Francisco wharf. Lopez-Sanchez discharged a stolen weapon. It’s not clear that he was aiming at Steinle. Aimed or not, Lopez-Sanchez’s bullet struck the thirty-two-year-old in the back and severed her aorta in front of her horrified father. She died in the hospital two hours later. It soon emerged that Lopez-Sanchez, a repeat drug offender, had been ordered deported five times since 1993. He was at large that day in July because San Francisco’s sanctuary city law forbade local police to notify federal authorities when they released him after his most recent detention. Within a week of the Steinle killing, Donald Trump skyrocketed into first place in the Republican field.

  Trump’s language about immigration and the American future likewise failed to impress those who had done well in the Obama years, “the coalition of the ascendant,” as the National Journal’s Ron Brownstein called it: minorities, urbanites, new immigrants, knowledge workers, credentialed professionals, owners of capital assets.14 Yet Trump found an audience all the same.

  Polled in the fall of 2015, half of Trump’s supporters within the GOP reported having stopped their education at or before high school graduation, according to the polling firm YouGov. Only 19 percent had a college or postcollege degree. Thirty-eight percent earned less than $50,000. Only 11 percent earned more than $100,000.15 Trump Republicans were not ideologically militant. Just 13 percent described themselves as “very conservative”; 20 percent described themselves as “mod
erate.”16 Nor were they highly religious by Republican standards.17 What set them apart from other Republicans was their economic insecurity and their cultural anxiety. Sixty-three percent of Trump’s supporters wished to end birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants born on US soil.18 More than other Republicans, Trump’s supporters distrusted Barack Obama as alien and dangerous: Only 21 percent acknowledged that Obama was born in the United States; 66 percent of Trump voters believed that Obama was a Muslim.19

  Trump vowed not only to get tough on undeserving outsiders, but also (and this mattered every bit as much to his rise) to protect deserving citizens from other Republicans’ designs on their pensions and benefits.

  We’ve got Social Security that’s going to be destroyed if somebody like me doesn’t bring money into the country. All these other people want to cut the hell out of it. I’m not going to cut it at all; I’m going to bring money in, and we’re going to save it.20

  Trump promised a campaign independent of the influences of money that had swayed so many Republican races of the past.

  I will tell you that our system is broken. I gave to many people. Before this, before two months ago, I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me. And that’s a broken system.21

  He promised to protect the sons and daughters of farmers and factory workers from being drawn into another war in the Middle East. “If we’re going to have World War III,” he told the Washington Post in October 2015, “it’s not going to be over Syria.” As for the politicians threatening to shoot down the Russian jets flying missions in Syria, “I won’t even call them hawks. I call them the fools.”22