Trumpocracy Read online

  In reply, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz—joined by Mitt Romney from the sidelines—attacked Trump as a con man, as a pathological liar, as a cheat and swindler. Trump was blasted by outside groups as a traitor to Republican ideals and ideology. The premier conservative intellectual magazine, National Review, blazed the title “AGAINST TRUMP” across its February 16, 2016, issue. For good measure, NR illustrated the feature with a cartoon of Trump as a strutting Mussolini. “Sometimes you can’t fix it,” RNC chair Priebus resignedly acknowledged in April 2016. “Sometimes you can just take a seven-alarm fire and just make it a four-alarm fire. It’s still burning, but it’s not as bad as it was.” But everything was fine. “I’m not pouring Bailey’s in my cereal.”23

  Half the contributors to National Review’s “Never Trump” issue would ultimately make their peace with Trump’s leadership. Some, such as Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center, reinvented themselves as his most vigorous defenders. Priebus would reach an accommodation of his own, culminating in his service as President Trump’s first chief of staff. Yet as late as the Republican convention in Cleveland, most Republican officeholders and donors still regarded Donald Trump warily. Speaker Paul Ryan’s convention speech offered only the most glancing references to the party’s nominee: “The next time that there’s a State of the Union address . . . you’ll find me right there on the rostrum with Vice President Mike Pence and President Donald Trump.” “Only with Donald Trump and Mike Pence,” Ryan added, “do we have a chance at a better way.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell sounded barely more enthusiastic in his convention speech, omitting all personal praise of Trump, and instead itemizing bills that President Obama had vetoed and that President Donald Trump would presumably sign.

  The wariness of the big donors persisted post-convention. The people who could write large checks had noticed Trump’s practice of diverting campaign funds to his own businesses: $12.5 million altogether, according to a December 2016 CNN review.24 Trump waited until the last possible minute to write off the $50 million he had loaned his campaign, leaving many donors uncertain until midsummer whether their gifts would be used to elect a president or to reimburse Trump for his takeover of their party. The reluctance of big donors to invest money in any Trump enterprise explains how Hillary Clinton outraised Donald Trump almost two to one for presidential campaign dollars. The large majority of Trump’s $335 million presidential campaign take, $280 million, was given in increments under $200.

  Trump’s surprise win forced a hasty big-money rethink. The convention in Cleveland may have been a pinched and listless affair, but Trump’s 2017 inaugural committee was easily the best funded in history, bumped by large gifts from anti-Trump Republicans seeking to make amends. (Paul Singer alone donated $1 million.25 He was rewarded with a White House visit in February 2017.) Trump’s inaugural committee collected $107 million, double the previous record of $53 million set in 2009.

  Inaugurations cost money, but the largest costs are paid by taxpayers. The ceremony on the Capitol grounds is funded by Congress. The parade along Pennsylvania Avenue is paid out of the military’s budget. Security is covered by the federal government. So how was Trump’s record-breaking $107 million inaugural haul actually used? Good question, and one to which few will ever learn the answer. Many inaugural donors voluntarily disclose their gifts, but there is no obligation upon the inaugural committee to disclose how funds are spent. Nor are there many legal restrictions on how such funds can be used. The inaugural committee could, for example, transfer millions of dollars to pro-Trump PACs without disclosing that fact to anybody. Or it could spend huge amounts at Trump’s hotels and businesses. Or it could simply hoard the money for some future secret use. The Trump inaugural committee promised that any unused funds would be donated to charity.26 No charity ever announced receipt of any gift from this source, nor did Trump’s inaugural committee offer any accounting for the money it received.

  The corporations or individuals who provided the $107 million surely had few illusions about what they were buying and why. Half a million dollars bought a seat at a dinner with the vice president and his wife; a million bought lunch with the new president, congressional leaders, and incoming cabinet secretaries. These donors hoped to buy access and goodwill, even protection from a thin-skinned and vindictive president. But by writing those checks, they also bought into the Trump financial system of pelf and predation.

  As did, one by one, the leading figures of the Republican Party: former presidential rivals; leaders of Congress; the party’s governors, state legislators, and state party organizations; the mighty fund-raising networks of the Koch brothers and other formerly Trump-skeptical donors. With the rarest exceptions, all came to heel.

  Ohio governor and former Trump nomination rival John Kasich publicly disclosed that he had written in John McCain’s name. Jeb Bush refrained from an endorsement, but his son George P. Bush reluctantly backed the ultimate Trump-headed ticket. In almost every other case, the toad was swallowed.

  Senator Ted Cruz epically unloaded on Donald Trump on May 3, 2016, the eve of the Indiana primary. “This man is a pathological liar; he doesn’t know the difference between truth and lies . . . in a pattern that is straight out of a psychology textbook, he accuses everyone of lying. . . . Whatever lie he’s telling, at that minute he believes it . . . the man is utterly amoral.”27 Even at the Cleveland convention, Cruz declined to endorse his former rival. By Election Day, however, Cruz had submitted. He formally endorsed Trump on September 23. “If Clinton wins, we know—with 100 percent certainty—that she would deliver on her left-wing promises, with devastating results for our country.”28

  After the leak of the Access Hollywood video, some Republicans tried to leap off what they thought was a burning boat. Yet when Paul Ryan separated himself from Trump on October 11, 2016, it was Ryan’s support—not Trump’s—that cratered, dropping a net 28 points among Republicans in only ten days.29

  The institutional Republican Party therefore had no choice but to adhere to Trump, and Trump had no choice but to rely on it. Whereas Trump’s presidential fund-raising badly lagged behind Clinton’s, the RNC and the other joint party committees kept pace with their Democratic counterparts: $543 million for the RNC and others versus $598 million for the DNC and its cognates. The RNC paid for Trump’s field operations and much of his digital operation; the RNC and the Republican state parties took responsibility for get-out-the-vote operations. It was RNC data that powered Trump’s most effective ad campaign. Titled “Hillary Thinks African Americans Are Super-Predators,” the short animated video was directed via Facebook to infrequent black voters—not to win them for Trump, but to discourage them from going to the polls at all.30

  Like Ted Cruz, Republicans overcame any distaste they felt for Trump by convincing themselves that a Hillary Clinton presidency represented an unthinkably catastrophic outcome. Every stance and principle that had seemed so important in the long run-up to 2016 was junked in order to avert the Clinton apocalypse. Entitlement reform? The party’s post-2012 rethink of immigration? Judeo-Christian family values? All had to be set aside in the face of the supposedly extinction-level risk of a Clinton presidency. In the impassioned words of the radio host Mark Levin, a Trump opponent all through the primaries:

  If you believe Hillary Clinton is virtually as off-her-rocker left-wing socialist as Senator Bernie Sanders, if you believe that Hillary Clinton is in part responsible for the rise of ISIS and what took care [sic] in Benghazi . . . how the hell could you take any steps, passively or affirmatively, that would put that woman in the Oval Office? . . . As bad as the Republican may be, how could you stay home and allow that?31

  Of all the party institutions that yielded to Trump, far and away the most important was Fox News. “Republicans used to think Fox News worked for us. Now we are discovering we work for Fox News.” I first said that in 2010, and the observation held true for half a decade. Yet here too, Trump changed the rules. He bent Fox News
to his will, not the other way around.

  Fox did not begin the 2015–2016 cycle in the tank for Trump. The first Fox debate, in August 2015, featured the network’s least ideological anchors: Bret Baier, Megyn Kelly, and Chris Wallace. The trio posed tough questions to Trump. Baier took Trump to task for refusing to commit to supporting the ultimate nominee. Megyn Kelly challenged Trump on his long history of demeaning comments about women. Chris Wallace challenged him on his habit of hurling wild, uncorroborated charges.

  Mr. Trump, it has not escaped anybody’s notice that you say that the Mexican government, the Mexican government is sending criminals—rapists, drug dealers, across the border. Governor Bush has called those remarks, quote, “extraordinarily ugly.” I’d like you—you’re right next to him—tell us—talk to him directly and say how you respond to that and—and you have repeatedly said that you have evidence that the Mexican government is doing this, but you have evidence you have refused or declined to share.

  Why not use this first Republican presidential debate to share your proof with the American people?

  It was Kelly’s question, however, that most fiercely enraged Trump. “You’ve called women you don’t like ‘fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals.’” While Trump would respond to Wallace’s question (which came later in the debate) with something approaching professionalism, to Kelly he retorted with a threat.

  What I say is what I say. And honestly Megyn, if you don’t like it, I’m sorry. I’ve been very nice to you, although I could probably maybe not be, based on the way you have treated me. But I wouldn’t do that.

  Of course, Trump soon did “do that.” In an August 2015 telephone interview with CNN’s Don Lemon, Trump complained of Kelly:

  She gets out and she starts asking me all sorts of ridiculous questions. You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever. In my opinion, she was off base. . . . I just don’t respect her as a journalist. I have no respect for her. I don’t think she’s very good. I think she’s highly overrated.32

  Trump then suggested that he would not join any more Fox debates if Megyn Kelly were involved.

  That threat to Fox News opened one of the most decisively successful of Trump’s repeat campaigns for dominance over his perceived foes, especially women. The next Fox debate had been scheduled for January 28, 2016, on the eve of the New Hampshire primary. Trump demanded that Megyn Kelly be excluded from the panel of questioners. Fox issued a press release mocking Trump’s presumption:

  We learned from a secret back channel that the Ayatollah and Putin both intend to treat Donald Trump unfairly when they meet with him if he becomes president—a nefarious source tells us that Trump has his own secret plan to replace the Cabinet with his Twitter followers to see if he should even go to those meetings.33

  Trump persisted. He complained about Kelly on Twitter and Instagram. In a CNN interview three days before the scheduled debate, he bluntly told Wolf Blitzer: “I don’t like her. I don’t think she’s fair to me.” Kelly, Trump said, had been a nobody before the first debate. She owed all her fame to him. He wanted to attend the debate, and so warned Kelly, “She better be fair.” But, he concluded pessimistically, “I don’t think she can treat me fairly. I’m not a big fan of hers. Maybe I know too much about her.”34

  Fox issued a second pro-Kelly statement:

  Sooner or later Donald Trump, even if he’s president, is going to have to learn that he doesn’t get to pick the journalists—we’re very surprised he’s willing to show that much fear about being questioned by Megyn Kelly.35

  So Trump escalated. He announced a boycott of the Fox debate. Instead, he would engage in a fund-raiser “for the vets.” That fund-raiser resulted in the usual shaky outcome; it would take months for Trump to be shamed into disgorging the money he raised and to honor his own million-dollar pledge.36 Politically, though, the stunt more than delivered. The woman who was once acclaimed as the future of Fox News abruptly found herself condemned as the enemy within, a strumpet “fascinated with sex,” in the accusation Newt Gingrich flung at her in an October 2016 interview.37 Trump’s allies at the National Enquirer gathered the salacious gossip that would provide the tabloid with a cover story in May 2017: “Megyn Kelly Exposed—Secrets of Her Rapid Rise to Power, from Her Ruthless Early Career to a Plastic Surgery Makeover.” In December 2016, Kelly disclosed that after Trump’s August outburst against her, she had faced death threats serious enough that she had hired armed guards to protect her three young children, all then under the age of seven.38

  Megyn Kelly would leave Fox in January 2017. After the election, Fox’s coverage descended to new sub-basements of abjectness. Fox would replace Kelly with Tucker Carlson, who filled his hour with trolling and spoofing reminiscent of white-nationalist message boards. The morning show Fox & Friends would dedicate itself to flattery of (and therapy for) the ego-needy president. Sean Hannity, shifted to the prime 9:00 p.m. Eastern Time slot after Bill O’Reilly’s termination, lent credence to any story, no matter how wild, that might deflect attention from the Trump-Russia connection. Hannity reverentially interviewed Julian Assange and publicized the fantasy that WikiLeaks had received the Democratic emails not from Russian intelligence (as the CIA, FBI, NSA, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence had assessed), but from a disgruntled DNC staffer, Seth Rich, who was subsequently murdered, most likely (it was heavily insinuated) at the behest of important people in the Democratic Party.39 Fox’s on-air talent abased themselves to argue that even proven collusion by the Trump campaign with Russian intelligence would be—at worst—“alarming and highly inappropriate.”40

  The steady flow of “alternative facts” from Fox News’ hosts (to borrow the useful phrase of Trump’s aide Kellyanne Conway41) would impose serious costs on the network’s business. In May 2017, Fox would fall to third place among cable networks for the most desired viewing audience in weekday prime time, adults aged twenty-five to fifty-four.42 Fox remained the largest cable network overall, but its eyeballs increasingly lacked spending power, threatening its future profitability. While the core Fox audience watches to have its prejudices ratified, many occasional Fox viewers have become impatient with a news network that distorts, misrepresents, and oftentimes outright ignores the country’s most exciting domestic news story.

  The predicament of Fox illustrates the larger crisis of conservatism in the Trump era. Gullibly or cynically, resentfully or opportunistically, for lack of better information or for lack of a better alternative, a great party has slowly united to elevate one man into a position of almost absolute power over itself.

  Many who submitted to Trump perceived perfectly clearly what they were submitting to:

  The big donors knew their money would be misappropriated.

  Congressional leaders foresaw that Trump would behave outrageously and erratically.

  Trump’s apologists in the media world recognized his lack of principle.

  They decided in favor of him anyway—expecting (or at least pathetically hoping!) that some larger good would come of it.

  The Republican rank and file, however, acted on emotion, not calculus. On the night of August 25, 2017, President Trump used the cover of Hurricane Harvey to pardon Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio. In July, Arpaio had been convicted of criminal contempt of court for defying a 2011 order to cease traffic patrols that profiled Hispanic drivers in his Arizona county. Through the Obama years, conservatives had reinvented themselves as “constitutionalists”: upholders of law against arbitrary executive power. Ted Cruz even wrote the foreword to a book accusing the Obama administration of unprecedented lawlessness.43 But that was then. The Arpaio pardon generated paroxysms of enthusiasm in the conservative base. A popular columnist for the conservative site Townhall.com tweeted to his 115,000 followers a pithy explanation of the justification for the about-face on arbitrary executive power:

  The main reason for President Trump to pardon Sheriff Joe was fuck you, le
ftists. The new rules, bitches.

  followed by a smiling sunglasses-wearing emoji symbol.44 He made a cogent point too. By August 2017, what was left of the philosophy formerly known as conservatism beyond “fuck you, leftists”?

  President Trump may not have had policy ideas in the conventional sense. But he had a sure grasp of the emotions that impelled the Republican voting base—and how those emotions could be manipulated to empower himself and enrich his family. In 1960, a quip circulated that the Kennedy family arrived in power like the Borgias descending on some respectable Italian town. The joke did not quite work, because it did not quite apply. The Kennedys’ many faults were joined to an undeniable grace and generosity of spirit, to authentic public service and a large vision of America. Not so for the Trump family. They came to loot. If rules stood in their way, the rules could go smash.

  Chapter 4

  Plunder

  Not to injure anybody’s national pride, but even before the Trump presidency, the United States ranked a not exactly reassuring eighteenth on Transparency International’s corruption index, behind Hong Kong and Belgium.1

  In modern times, however, governmental corruption in the United States has been a problem associated much more with states and localities than with the federal government, and within the federal government, with Congress more than the executive branch. In response to the Watergate scandal, Americans amended their laws and raised their expectations.

  Newt Gingrich surrendered a quite legal book deal in 1994 because of public criticism that a multimillion-dollar advance to a newly elected Speaker of the House looked too much like a gift from a wealthy supporter.2 Former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle stepped away from his nomination as secretary of Health and Human Services in 2009 because he had not paid taxes on the use of a car and driver in his business career in the mid-2000s.3 Candidates and presidents since Gerald Ford have followed the practice initiated by George Romney in 1968 and published their tax returns.