Trumpocracy Read online

  One of the most honorable soldiers of his generation felt obliged to speak untruths to protect the United States’ global interests from the consequences of the president’s willfulness.

  When good men do bad things, they usually have good motives. McMaster, like many other national security experts and veterans, joined the Trump administration in the hope of protecting the country. Perhaps there was ambition mixed in, or some other lesser motive—we are all human—but they could fairly assure themselves that they dealt with the devil for the noblest of reasons.

  In the months after Trump’s surprise Electoral College victory, many conscientious people wrestled with the question “Should I take a job in the Trump administration?” A week after the election, Eliot Cohen—an anti-Trump Republican who had served at senior levels in past administrations—eloquently advised those facing this dilemma to answer yes.

  It seems to me that if they are sure that they would say yes out of a sense of duty rather than mere careerism; if they are realistic in understanding that in this enterprise they will be the horse, not the jockey; if they accept that they will enter an administration likely to be torn by infighting and bureaucratic skullduggery, they should say yes. Yes, with two conditions, however: that they keep a signed but undated letter of resignation in their desk office (as I did when I was in government), and that they not recant a word of what they have said thus far. Public service means making accommodations, but everyone needs to understand that there is a point where crossing a line, even an arbitrary line, means, as Sir Thomas More says in A Man for All Seasons, letting go without hope of ever finding yourself again.

  It goes without saying that friends in military, diplomatic, or intelligence service—the career people who keep our country strong and safe—should continue to do their jobs. If anything, having professionals serve who remember that their oath is to support and defend the Constitution—and not to truckle to an individual or his clique—will be more important than ever.36

  Scarcely a week later, Cohen changed his mind.

  My about-face began with a discreet request to me from a friend in Trumpworld to provide names—unsullied by having signed the two anti-Trump foreign policy letters—of those who might be willing to serve. My friend and I had agreed to disagree a while back about my taking an uncompromising anti-Trump stand; now, he wanted assistance and I willingly complied.

  After an exchange about a senior figure who would not submit a résumé but would listen if contacted, an email exchange ensued that I found astonishing. My friend was seething with anger directed at those of us who had opposed Donald Trump—even those who stood ready to help steer good people to an administration that understandably wanted nothing to do with the likes of me, someone who had been out front in opposing Trump since the beginning.

  The problem, as Cohen now perceived it, was less Trump himself than the “mini-Trumps” with whom Trump surrounded himself.

  One bad boss can be endured. A gaggle of them will poison all decision-making. They will turn on each other. No band of brothers this: rather the permanent campaign as waged by triumphalist rabble-rousers and demagogues, abetted by people out of their depth and unfit for the jobs they will hold, gripped by grievance, resentment and lurking insecurity. Their mistakes—because there will be mistakes—will be exceptional.

  Nemesis pursues and punishes all administrations, but this one will get a double dose. Until it can acquire some measure of humility about what it knows, and a degree of magnanimity to those who have opposed it, it will smash into crises and failures. With the disarray of its transition team, in a way, it already has.37

  Deals with the devil seldom end as good bargains, and so it has been for all who signed the Mephistophelean pact with Donald Trump. Rather than constraining Trump, they have been, if not outright corrupted by him, at least tainted by him. McMaster’s lie in Taormina was an eminently pardonable one, but a lie it remained. Those less exquisitely honorable than McMaster—and serving in less indispensable roles—found themselves called on to abase themselves much deeper. Trump’s communications director Anthony Scaramucci inaugurated his brief moment in the national spotlight with an outburst of grotesque flattery.

  I’ve seen this guy throw a dead spiral through a tire. I’ve seen him at Madison Square Garden with a topcoat on. He’s standing in the key and he’s hitting foul shots and swishing them, okay? He sinks three-foot putts.38

  (The official White House transcript improved the compliment by amending “three-foot putts” to “30-foot putts.”39)

  Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin recited the same cringing script in a March public forum with Axios’s Mike Allen: “This guy’s got more stamina than anybody I’ve ever met,” Mnuchin said of Trump. “I mean, I thought I was in good shape. . . . I mean, it’s unbelievable. He’s constantly doing things.” Asked how that was possible, given Trump’s bad diet and abhorrence of exercise, Mnuchin answered perfectly straight-faced, “He’s got perfect genes. He has incredible energy, and he’s unbelievably healthy.”40

  It was behaviors like this that I foresaw when I delivered my own answer to Eliot Cohen’s question in January 2017.

  Good people can do the right thing even under pressure. But be aware: The pressure to do the wrong thing can be intense—and the closer one approaches to the center of presidential power and prestige, the more intense the pressure becomes. It’s easy to imagine that you’d emulate Walters [the IRS director who refused to release political opponents’ tax returns to the Nixon White House] when reading the book he wrote four decades after the fact. But in the moment? In the Oval Office? Face to face with the president of the United States?

  So maybe the very first thing to consider, if the invitation comes, is this: How well do you know yourself? How sure are you that you indeed would say no?

  And then humbly consider this second troubling question: If the Trump administration were as convinced as you are that you would do the right thing—would they have asked you in the first place?41

  One thing was clear: everyone who entered the Trump administration for nonselfish motives would sooner or later find himself or herself betrayed by a president who demanded loyalty in its most servile form, but who never returned it.

  Trump equally betrayed those who had believed his campaign promises and election pledges. Isolationists and anti-interventionists had lauded Trump as the candidate who would stay clear of the Syrian Civil War and wind down America’s overseas commitments. In the words of the venture capitalist Peter Thiel, one of Trump’s few high-profile supporters from the technology industry:

  Trump’s agenda is about making America a normal country. A normal country doesn’t have a half-trillion dollar trade deficit. A normal country doesn’t fight five simultaneous undeclared wars. In a normal country, the government actually does its job.42

  Instead, Trump plunged deeper into the Syria conflict than Barack Obama had ever dared, firing cruise missiles at Syrian government airfields and shooting down Syrian government aircraft. Trump escalated the tempo of violence in Yemen and approved a surge of additional troops to Afghanistan. Trump mused aloud about military intervention in Venezuela and did not halt the US military buildup in Poland and Romania. He threatened preemptive war upon North Korea and edged toward military confrontation against Iran.

  Tough on terror? Trump promised to “bomb the shit out of [ISIS]”—and, less colloquially, to deliver a plan within thirty days of taking office to finish the terror group once and for all.43 The plan was never presented. Instead, the US military continues to execute Obama-era plans against ISIS in Iraq, capturing Mosul on exactly the timetable Trump had once derided as too slow and “so dumb.”44 Trump’s distinctive change to US counterterrorism policy has been to mock terrorism’s victims. After the murder of a French police officer in Paris on April 20, 2017, Trump chortled on Twitter that the attack would likely help his French cognate, Marine Le Pen.45 It didn’t. In May, Trump got into a Twitter feud with Sadiq Khan, the may
or of London, hours after an ISIS-inspired terror attack that killed seven and wounded forty-eight.46 (Some British observers attribute Labour’s electoral surge in London in the 2017 UK general election to Trump’s obnoxious comments four days before the vote.)

  Compel allies to contribute more to their defense? Days before the 2017 South Korean presidential election, Trump reneged on his own deal to install missile defenses in the peninsula, demanding an additional $1 billion from Seoul toward the system’s costs.47 He threatened to rip up the US–South Korea Free Trade Agreement in an interview given only a week before the election. Trump’s ill-timed words helped elect the more soft-line candidate, who promptly disregarded Trump’s policy and sought negotiated agreements with North Korea.48

  Strong advocates for Israel choked back their revulsion against the Trump campaign’s appeals to anti-Semitism in order to support a candidate who pledged to move the US embassy to Jerusalem and abrogate Barack Obama’s Iran deal. Within weeks of taking office, Trump defaulted on both commitments.49

  The most famous and electorally important of Trump’s campaign pledges was his vow to “build the wall and make Mexico pay for it.” There will be no wall, and Mexico will pay for nothing. The first budget proposed by the supposed great builder-president allowed for nothing but some prototype extensions to existing fencing near San Diego. As of midsummer 2017, no work had begun.50

  Of all the Fausts to Trump’s Mephistopheles, none paid higher prices—and received less in return—than Trump’s supposed partisan allies in Congress.

  The unexpected 2016 Electoral College result offered Republicans an opportunity they had experienced only once since the Great Depression: united control of all the elected branches of the federal government. That previous opportunity, many Republicans felt, had been squandered by the George W. Bush administration. The Iraq War had consumed the administration’s energy and political credit. Its most enduring domestic policy legacy was a deviation from orthodoxy: the prescription drug benefit, which by 2016 was adding almost $100 billion per year to the cost of Medicare. Conservatives took no more joy in Bush’s signature education reform, No Child Left Behind. His temporary tax cuts had mostly lapsed since 2013. In retrospect, the years before the loss of Congress in November 2006 looked to conservatives at best like a series of unprincipled improvisations, at worst an active sellout. Even Jeb Bush felt obliged to criticize George W. Bush’s record. Asked in New Hampshire in May 2015 about differences between the two, the younger Bush answered, “I think that in Washington during my brother’s time, Republicans spent too much money. I think he could have used the veto power—he didn’t have line-item veto power, but he could have brought budget discipline to Washington, DC. That seems kind of quaint right now given the fact that after he left, budget deficits and spending just like lit up astronomically. But having constraints on spending across the board during his time would have been a good thing.”51

  Republicans resolved not to waste the opportunity if it ever recurred. They would cut taxes and spending, roll back regulations, undo Obama-era programs. All that was required from the next Republican president, the antitax crusader Grover Norquist jested, was enough working digits to sign their bills into law.52

  But when that wish was finally granted, it was incarnated in the weird form of Donald Trump. Unlike the automaton president of Norquist’s dreams, Trump very much had a mind of his own: a mind uninterested in, and in fact barely cognizant of, the hyperideological program of his party. What Trump did care about was personal wealth, power, and domination.

  “Paul Ryan, I don’t know him well,” said candidate Trump at a press conference after his streak of Super Tuesday wins on March 1, 2016, “but I’m sure I’m going to get along great with him. And if I don’t, he’s going to have to pay a big price.”53 Trump attempted to exact that price in August of that election year. Paul Ryan faced a primary challenge that month from a Trump wannabe: a wealthy Wisconsin businessman with provocative views on trade, immigration, and minority groups. That challenger, Paul Nehlen, publicly flattered Trump—even backing him in his bizarre dispute with the family of the fallen war hero Humayun Khan. Trump thanked and praised Nehlen for his “good campaign.” Trump for weeks refused to endorse Ryan, even mockingly using the same language (“I’m just not quite there yet”) Ryan had previously used about him.54 Trump eventually reversed course, as it became evident that Nehlen would lose (ultimately by a margin of 68 points). Three days before the primary, Trump leaped to the side of the certain winner.

  Trump never did extract from Ryan the formal surrender he craved. Yet Trump had discerned that the balance of power between the two men favored Trump, not Ryan. Normal presidents arrive in Washington with an ambitious policy agenda they seek to enact through Congress. They propose; Congress disposes. Trump had no such agenda, but Republicans in Congress did: a big, ambitious, and radical agenda. They wanted to undo the health care changes of the Obama years and outright reverse them, to slow the projected growth of Medicare and Medicaid. They wanted to rewrite the corporate tax code, overturn Obama-era rules on greenhouse gases, and return trillions of dollars of redistributed income. They wanted to federalize gun policy, compelling states like California and Illinois to accept within their own borders the concealed-carry permits issued by more permissive states. They wished to bestow regulatory favors on favored industries and firms.

  All those actions and many others would require the signature of a president who neither understood nor cared about most of them. What he needed in return from Congress was not action, but inaction: inaction on ethics, inaction on disclosures, and above all inaction on allegations that Russia manipulated the election to help him—and them.

  We’ll protect your business if you sign our bills. That was the transaction congressional leaders offered Trump. They failed to appreciate until too late that Trump, not they, had the stronger hand in this bargaining.

  Two perverse factors strengthened Trump against the congressional Republicans.

  The first factor was the stark unpopularity of much of what the congressional Republican leadership wished to do. Speaker Ryan, a true believer, would willingly hazard his political career to finish off Obamacare once and for all. But Ryan could not trust Donald Trump to do the same. At the first affront to his ego, Trump might defect, as he did on debt-ceiling negotiations in September 2017. Trump betrayed the Republican demand for a twelve-month extension in favor of the Pelosi-Schumer offer of three months’ reportedly because he was peeved at that moment with Republican congressional leaders. Or as when he reversed his position on deferred action for young illegal aliens reportedly to punish his attorney general for failing to protect him against the appointment of a special counsel. Congressional Republicans dared not impose any restraint or even oversight on Trump lest he wreck all their plans out of peevish spite or simple loss of interest.

  The second unlikely factor enhancing Trump’s power over Congress was Trump’s own unpopularity. In June 2010, the Gallup organization reviewed all the House elections since World War II. Gallup found that when a president polls above 50 percent approval, his party loses an average of thirteen seats in midterm elections, but thirty-seven seats when he polls below 50 percent. (Adding the two Obama midterms of 2010 and 2014, losses of sixty-three and thirteen respectively, does not change the math.)55 With Trump polling below 40 percent through his first months in office and a margin of only twenty-three seats, House Republicans had to assume that their majority might not have long to last. That made it all the more urgent to get Trump’s signature on laws fast—and to protect Trump from damaging investigations that might push his popularity deeper into the danger zone. The one postwar president to poll below 35 percent during a midterm election—Harry Truman in 1946—suffered the staggering loss of fifty-five seats.

  The worse Trump behaved, the more frantically congressional Republicans worked to protect him.

  The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee entangled himself in a biza
rre sequence of misconduct and untruths in an effort to sabotage the investigation of Trump’s Russia connections.

  Republican leaders in Congress kept silent when Trump’s designated attorney general, Jeff Sessions, testified inaccurately about his Russia connections during his confirmation hearing—and silent again as it emerged that Trump’s son-in-law and most powerful aide, Jared Kushner, had lied about his Russia contacts on his application form for a security clearance.

  Congressional committees that exhaustively investigated the deaths of US personnel at the Benghazi consulate in 2012, and the Internal Revenue Service’s scrutiny of the tax-exempt status of conservative groups that strayed too close to electoral politics, yawned away the ethical infractions of the Trump White House. “I think the people who voted for Donald Trump went into it with eyes wide open,” Jason Chaffetz, the chair of the House Oversight Committee, told my Atlantic colleague McKay Coppins in March 2017. “Everybody knew he was rich, everybody knew he had lots of different entanglements. . . . These other little intrigues about a wealthy family making money is a bit of a sideshow.”56

  “He’s a businessman, not a politician,” said Mike Pence in October 2016, defending Donald Trump after the New York Times published a 1995 tax return in which Trump took a nearly $1 billion deduction for losing other people’s money.57

  “He’s learning the job,” said Senate Majority Leader McConnell to Newsmax TV in April 2017, assuring viewers that Trump had come to appreciate NATO—six weeks before the NATO summit at which Trump demonstrated he had not.58

  “The president’s new at this. He’s new to government.” That was Paul Ryan’s excuse for Trump’s attempt to pressure the FBI into halting its investigation into the Russia matter.59

  “It does no good for me to comment on his Twitter behaviors,” said Utah senator Mike Lee on the morning of Trump’s “body slam CNN” tweet, a video originating from a racist and anti-Semitic account that showed an image of Trump wrestling and punching a man with a CNN logo in place of a head.60