Trumpocracy Read online

  Trump’s claims to have divested his businesses proved equally empty. Trump’s sons acknowledged that they regularly reported to him on the family companies’ revenues and operations.37 Even after the supposed “separation” within the Trump family, the two sons often attended White House functions and Republican strategy sessions.38 They acted as White House surrogates on TV and in social media, and posted photographs of themselves from within the White House precincts.39 (Tangling the lines even more tightly, Eric Trump’s wife, Lara, would take a job in May 2017 with a vendor to Trump’s 2020 reelection effort.40 She also hosted Trump campaign Facebook video spots.) Trump promised to donate all foreign profits earned by the Trump Organization to charity. But as of midyear 2017, his company had made no effort even to identify such profits, much less disgorge them.41

  Federal conflict-of-interest statutes exempt the president and vice president from many of their strictures, partly for separation-of-powers reasons, partly for pragmatic reasons. A president’s scope of authority is so vast there is almost nothing he or she could do that could not affect his or her own economic interests in some way. Even so basic a decision as proposing a budget deficit or surplus could affect the relative values of stocks versus bonds.

  But these exemptions do not constitute a blank ethical check for the president. Since modern conflict-of-interest rules took form in the 1970s, presidents have volunteered near-total financial disclosure, including the publication of their tax returns. All the world can see what they have, what they earn, and what they owe, and can judge accordingly whether the president has behaved ethically or not.

  Trump and Kushner—and indeed even some in his cabinet—have disregarded and defied the post-Watergate norm. Trump has told one untenable story after another about why he cannot publish his returns, finally abandoning the pretense altogether postelection, saying, “The only one that cares about my tax returns are the reporters.”42 Trump’s aide Kellyanne Conway scolded journalists who continued to ask. “We litigated this all through the election. People didn’t care.”43

  The disclosures required of the president by law do not convey much, because they apply only to Trump personally, not to the “upstream” corporate entities through which Trump receives his income and owes his debts.

  For example, the Trump family is a part owner of a building on the Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan that carries a $950 million mortgage to the Bank of China.44 That upstream debt weighs on Trump’s income, but it need not be disclosed on a federal form. In August 2016, a New York Times investigation suggested that Trump owed at least $650 million, twice as much as his campaign disclosure forms acknowledged.45 Trump’s biographer Timothy L. O’Brien of Bloomberg View estimated to NPR early in 2017 that Trump owes in excess of $1 billion to about 150 different financial institutions, vastly more than the $310 million indicated on the first disclosure he filed as president.46

  Trump’s son-in-law and daughter also omitted enormous holdings and liabilities from their financial disclosure forms: their art collection, important investments, and exposure to as much as $1 billion in personal and corporate debt.47

  Trump has successfully rolled back—and then some!—the ethical rules that have accreted around the presidency since Watergate. Tax disclosure refused for the first time since Gerald Ford. Conflict-of-interest rules ignored for the first time since Richard Nixon. Running a business corporation while in office for the first time since Lyndon Johnson. The first appointment of a relative to a senior government position since John F. Kennedy named his brother Robert attorney general. The first appointment of a presidential son or daughter to a senior White House position since Franklin Roosevelt’s son James. The first use of presidential patronage to enrich the president’s family since Ulysses S. Grant.48 The first acceptance of substantial foreign cash flows by the president in American history. The first subordination of US foreign policy to the president’s business interests in American history. The most lavish spending on the person of a president in American history.

  Beyond all the many and grave evils of corruption at the top of government is the near impossibility of confining corruption within one office. Early in July 2017, the chief corporate oversight official in the Department of Justice posted a comment on her LinkedIn page explaining her recent resignation:

  Trying to hold companies to standards that our current administration is not living up to was creating a cognitive dissonance that I could not overcome. To sit across the table from companies and question how committed they were to ethics and compliance felt not only hypocritical, but very much like shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. Even as I engaged in those questioning and evaluations, on my mind were the numerous lawsuits pending against the President of the United States for everything from violations of the Constitution to conflict of interest, the ongoing investigations of potentially treasonous conducts, and the investigators and prosecutors fired for their pursuits of principles and facts. Those are conducts I would not tolerate seeing in a company, yet I worked under an administration that engaged in exactly those conduct. I wanted no more part in it.49

  But while resignations in disgust are one possible response to Trumpocracy, so too is the attitude “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”

  Trump is one by one disabling the federal government’s inhibitions against corruption. On March 10, 2017, Trump fired the forty-six US attorneys who had not resigned when the administration turned over. (Congress has established ninety-three US attorney positions in total.) This was more or less normal practice for a new administration. What happened next was not.

  Trump left the US attorneys’ jobs vacant for months. A legal expert explained the consequences to the New York Daily News:

  While the U.S. Attorney offices will move forward without heads in place with uncontroversial cases, like ordinary fraud and white collar crimes, there are a whole bunch of crimes that, under DOJ procedures, require approval coordination between DOJ headquarters and actual Senate-confirmed U.S. Attorneys. Public corruption and international terrorism need to be coordinated with main Justice. If you don’t get people in these roles, where they’re supposed to be working with prosecutors on the ground, it could really slow down high profile criminal investigations.50

  Trump did at last begin to send names forward for US attorney posts in July 2017. As he did so, it became obvious why the search for replacements had taken so long. Trump was seeking personal loyalists. Trump, normally indifferent to mid-level personnel, actually met in person with a candidate for US attorney for the District of Columbia, the US attorney with potential criminal jurisdiction over his staff and himself. In the words of CNN’s Laura Jarrett, such a meeting “some former Justice Department and White House sources say sharply departs from past practice and more generally is at odds with the understood custom of insulating U.S. attorneys from political influence.”51

  Donald Trump never accepted the concept that the law should be insulated from politics. He repeatedly publicly demanded that his attorney general initiate criminal proceedings against his former opponent, Hillary Clinton.52 His eleven-day communications director, Anthony “the Mooch” Scaramucci, bizarrely tweeted a demand on July 27, 2017, that the FBI investigate the “leak” of his financial disclosure forms.53 Scaramucci hastily deleted the tweet after it was pointed out to him that (a) the forms were public documents, and (b) it is a serious crime for a White House staffer to attempt to order the FBI to investigate anyone. Where would the Mooch get the notion that a White House staffer could initiate such an investigation? From his boss, of course, who insisted in a July 2017 interview with Peter Baker, Maggie Haberman, and Michael Schmidt of the New York Times that the director of the FBI should report personally to the president:

  And when Nixon came along [inaudible] was pretty brutal, and out of courtesy, the F.B.I. started reporting to the Department of Justice. But there was nothing official, there was nothing from Congress. There was nothing—anything. But the F.B.I. person re
ally reports directly to the president of the United States, which is interesting. You know, which is interesting. And I think we’re going to have a great new F.B.I. director.54

  Power creates temptations, and that is true even for the smallest increments of power: the power of the building inspector, of the customs official, of the cop at the traffic stop. It took a lot of work by a lot of people over a long time to build even America’s highly imperfect standards of public integrity. Undoing that work would be a far easier task. Corruption is the resting state of public affairs; integrity a painstaking, unceasing struggle against cultural inertia and political gravity.

  Nepotism fits naturally within authoritarian governments, poorly within republics and democracies. Shortly after entering the presidency for the first time, George Washington laid down a definitive rule against it: “I would not be in the remotest degree influenced, in making nominations, by motives arising from the ties of amity or blood.”55 Trump assigned his dubiously competent son-in-law a chair at the principals’ committee of the National Security Council, the innermost ring of American power. Among Kushner’s duties: reorganizing the federal government, winning the war against ISIS, and negotiating Israeli-Palestinian peace. Kushner also took it upon himself to attempt to create a clandestine back channel to the Russian leadership, using the facilities of the Russian embassy to elude detection by US security services.

  On President Trump’s visit to Israel in May 2017, the president brought Jared Kushner into his meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—leaving his national security adviser, H. R. McMaster, waiting outside the door of his suite in the King David Hotel, according to the gossipy but usually reliable Kafe Knesset (an account uncontradicted by the Trump White House).56 It was on Kushner’s advice too that Trump abruptly reversed his position on legal status for young illegal aliens, without prior notice to either the attorney general or the White House chief of staff.

  At the G20 summit in Hamburg, Trump invited his daughter Ivanka to fill his chair when he exited the room. The theory of American government is that official role, not blood relationship, determines who does what. If the president dies in office, he is succeeded by the vice president, not the first lady. There is no such role as “first daughter,” despite Ivanka Trump’s sometime use of that title. Yet at Hamburg, Ivanka posed with her father in group photographs with the chancellor of Germany, the prime minister of Canada, and other leaders—none of them joined by spouses or children.57

  On the first day of his new administration, President Trump sought and got from his Justice Department an interpretation of the 1967 anti-nepotism law that allowed him to bring his daughter and son-in-law aboard. It held that the 1967 law applied only to members of “executive agencies”—and that the White House staff did not count as such. The DOJ’s opinion acknowledged that this permission represented a new interpretation of the law, but it argued that under the circumstances innovation was warranted. Was it not better to bring informal advisers into the government, where they would be subject to conflict-of-interest rules and other federal ethics laws?58

  The deputy assistant attorney general who wrote that opinion soon proved sadly naive in his expectations. The Kushners accepted the prestige, power, and perks of the White House, but not its ethical obligations. It was just as Thomas Jefferson had warned after leaving the presidency, a bookend to Washington’s injunction against nepotism two decades earlier:

  Towards acquiring the confidence of the people the very first measure is to satisfy them of [the president’s] disinterestedness, & that he is directing their affairs with a single eye toward their good, & not to build up fortunes for himself & family: & especially that the officers appointed to transact their business, are appointed because they are the fittest men, not because they are his relations.59

  The satisfying assurance that the president is appointing the fittest individuals—and not seeking “to build up fortunes for himself and his family”—is precisely what is most lacking under Trumpocracy.

  Chapter 5

  Betrayals

  Trump’s former press secretary Sean Spicer took his Catholicism seriously. So when the attendance list for President Trump’s May 2017 meeting with Pope Francis was released, reporters were startled to see Spicer’s name missing. First Lady Melania Trump would attend, as would Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. The secretary of state would join, as would the national security adviser. Then the list took a detour down the protocol hierarchy. Trump’s communications adviser Hope Hicks made the list. So did his bodyguard and factotum Keith Schiller. So did Dan Scavino, Trump’s social media manager, famous for retweeting alt-right memes (sometimes with a sharp anti-Semitic edge). No Spicer.

  Even the White House press corps, its members frequent targets of Spicer’s rages and victims of his manifold untruths, felt a pang of sympathy for their tormentor. “That planners of this trip couldn’t or wouldn’t get @seanspicer into the Vatican speaks to a small-mindedness I find incredibly depressing,” tweeted the New York Times’ Glenn Thrush.1 His colleague Maggie Haberman agreed: “This seems needlessly harsh—when else is Spicer likely to meet the Pope, and it mattered to him?”2

  Anyone who follows President Trump’s Twitter feed has perceived Trump’s unstable temperament: his self-pity, his tantrums, his blame shifting. The reporters who cover him struggle to convey the ritual humiliations he inflicts, the rancor he incites. “He’s the meanest man I’ve ever met,” a reporter who traveled on the Trump campaign remarked to me in the spring of 2017. Trump has created a snake pit working environment, seething with hatreds and perforated by mutually vindictive leaks. He extracts groveling flattery in public and private, but never requites even the most abject loyalty.

  To work for Donald Trump, you must ready yourself to lie and lie. Remember Trump’s doctor Harold Bornstein? In August 2016, Bornstein put his signature to a medical assessment that Donald Trump’s health was “astonishingly excellent.” The assessment concluded, “If elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”3 In fact, Donald Trump would become the oldest man to enter the presidency, and most likely the third most obese, after William Howard Taft and Grover Cleveland.

  Those who work for and with Trump must accept that he reserves the right to embarrass or denigrate them at any moment for any reason, or for no reason at all, just impulsive whim. Here’s one of dozens of examples, chosen because it involved the aide Trump has praised more volubly and publicly than any other, Kellyanne Conway.

  There is no den she will not go into. When my men are petrified to go on a certain network I say, “Kellyanne, will you go?” Then she gets on and she just destroys them. So anyway, thank you, baby. Thank you. Thank you. Be careful.4

  Trump thrust upon this lavishly praised aide the duty to appear on CNN on the day of the firing of FBI director James Comey to deny the obvious. She said,

  This has nothing to do with Russia. Somebody must be getting fifty dollars every time [Russia] is said on TV. . . . [This] has everything to do with whether the current FBI director has the president’s confidence and can faithfully execute his duties.5

  Two days later, of course, President Trump would himself appear on NBC with Lester Holt and acknowledge that the firing was driven by his exasperation at Comey’s refusal to exonerate him of “the Russia thing.”

  And in fact when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said “You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.”6

  Conway—and the rest of the Trump talkers—were abandoned to make the best they could of that, as of so many things. In one mad Twitter moment, Trump actually formally alerted the whole country not to rely on those who spoke for him. “As a very active President with lots of things happening, it is not possible for my surrogates to stand at podium with perfect accuracy!”7

  Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence
, has been obliged to deliver untruth after untruth on Donald Trump’s behalf. On January 15, 2017, Pence confronted a carefully phrased question from CBS’s John Dickerson on Face the Nation.

  Dickerson asked, “Did any adviser or anybody in the Trump campaign have any contact with the Russians who were trying to meddle in the election?”

  Pence replied:

  Of course not. And I think to suggest that is to give credence to some of these bizarre rumors that have swirled around the candidacy and—the fact that a few news organizations, not this one, actually trafficked in a memo that was produced as opposition research and associated that with intelligence efforts I think could only be attributed to media bias. And I said this week at the press conference, the American people are tired of it.8

  At the time Pence spoke, the flagrant falseness of those words was known to President Trump himself, to the president’s son, to the president’s son-in-law, to the president’s former campaign manager, and (it seems likely) to the president’s newly designated chief of staff. Yet nobody set the poor vice president straight—and the highly forgiving vice president seems not to have objected at all to being left in the dark in this way.

  During the Russia inquiry, the country got to know Trump’s so-called legal adviser Jay Sekulow. Sekulow ran a pair of nonprofit Christian advocacy groups from which he directed some tens of millions of dollars to himself, his family, and their businesses. Between 2011 and 2015, Sekulow collected $230 million in charitable donations, the Washington Post reported in June 2017.

  Through a complex arrangement involving [the two charities], $5.5 million was paid directly to Sekulow and five family members in salary or other compensation, tax records covering those years show. Another $7.5 million went to businesses owned by Sekulow and his sister-in-law for producing and consulting on TV, movie and radio shows, including his weekday program, “Jay Sekulow Live!” And $21 million went to a small law firm co-owned by Sekulow, records show.