Published on Portside (https://portside.org/)
Trump’s New
(Non-Democratic) Normal
John
Feffer
September
23, 2018
Tom
Dispatch
During a lifetime
of make-believe, Donald Trump has never pretended to be a conventional
politician. When he finally decided to make a serious bid for office,
he built his presidential aspirations on the flimsiest of
foundations: a wild conspiracy theory about Barack Obama’s birthplace. His
leadership bona fides were equally laughable, having presided
over bankrupt casinos and failed real-estate projects,
fabricated the persona of a lady-killer, and created a reality TV show about a
tin-pot entrepreneur.
It wasn’t
difficult to predict how all this would end up politically. Plenty
of oddballs had run for president, from Jello Biafra to Roseanne
Barr, and gotten nowhere. The guardrails of American democracy were set up to
prevent just such outsiders from making it anywhere near the Oval Office.
Donald Trump’s three presidential qualifications — money, name recognition, and
unbounded arrogance — were obviously not enough to overcome his lack of sway
with party bosses. Seasoned politicians and backroom operators, the putative
“adults in the room,” had spent years ridiculing the blowhard with the bad hair
banging on the door and demanding red-carpet treatment.
And then, of course,
he won. In the 2016 presidential election, the guardrails of democracy
collapsed. The Electoral College, designed to weed out all those with what
Alexander Hamilton had once called “talents for low intrigue and the
little arts of popularity,” delivered a victory to a candidate who had talents
for little else. As Jeff Greenfield wrote at Politico immediately
after the elections,
“The blunt fact is
that many of the guardrails that were supposed to protect the world’s oldest
functioning democracy have been shown to be perilously weak, as vulnerable to
assault as the Maginot Line was in the face of the German army some 75 years
ago.”
In the wake of The
Donald’s upset victory, journalists and pundits hastened to recommend a slate
of advisers who could inject some gravitas into the new administration and
restore an approximation of that Maginot Line. Under counsel from such
grey eminences as former national security advisors Henry Kissinger and
Condoleezza Rice, the new president brought a bevy of such “adults” into his
administration, including ExxonMobil oil executive Rex Tillerson as secretary
of state and active duty Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster as national security
advisor. Two “adults,” Republican Party grandee Reince Priebus and retired
Marine Corps General John Kelly, have similarly tried, as White House chiefs of
staff, to manage Trump. Recently, a New York Times op-ed written
by an anonymous “senior administration official” suggested that a “steady
state” of “adults in the room” has been covertly ensuring that President Trump
doesn’t blow up the country or the world.
In response,
President Trump has done his best to fire or at least ignore all such adult
supervisors. After the departures of Tillerson, McMaster, and economic adviser
Gary Cohn, the New Republic lamented that Trump was
“systematically removing the guardrails in his cabinet” (which proved no more
effective than the electoral ones). In fact, after the latest
“crazytown” revelations in the bestselling new book by veteran Washington
Post journalist Bob Woodward, perhaps it’s time to retire those creaky
metaphors of American politics. No more “guardrails,” no more “adults.” They
represent thinking that has proven woefully inadequate for understanding Donald
Trump’s rise to power or the America of this moment.
Forget Donald
Trump for a second and just think to yourself: Who’s responsible for the last
17 years of never-ending American wars that have convulsed the planet? Babies?
Teenagers? Grown men acting like babies? Let’s face it: perfectly sober adults,
including the man who left ExxonMobil to become secretary of state, have long
seemed intent on ensuring the flooding, burning, and general destruction of
this planet. And don’t forget that the adults in the Republican Party, backed
by their deep-pocket funders, were responsible for getting Donald Trump over
the hump and into the Oval Office. Ultimately they, and not the policy-ignorant
president, are to blame for the devastation that followed.
As for those
guardrails, they represent, at best, the most imperfect of metaphors. Despite
all the actual guardrails on American highways, traffic fatalities have
risen to more than 40,000 a year and cars are now the top
killers of Americans between the ages of 15 and 24. Guardrails may prevent
the occasional drunk from driving into a ravine, but they obviously don’t stop
a significant portion of the population from committing autocide.
The truth is:
those guardrails of democracy were faulty long before Trump came along and some
of the adults in the room are scarier than the squalling infant. Such
metaphors, in fact, make it increasingly difficult to see what Trump and his
babysitters are really doing: not just destroying a culture of civility or
undoing the accomplishments of the Obama administration but attacking the very
pillars of democracy.
Moving the
Guardrails
Donald
Trump, The Washington Post concluded a year after his
election, had broken through “the guardrails of presidential
behavior.”
Given the sheer
number of lies he’s spewed in his tenure in office — more than eight
mistruths a day and rising — the Post’s conclusion seems
incontrovertible. However, when it comes to wrongdoing, Trump has plenty
of presidential precedents, from the high crimes and misdemeanors of
Richard Nixon to the torture policies of George W. Bush. Trump is as crude as
Lyndon Baines Johnson, as ill prepared as Ronald Reagan, as sexually predatory
as Bill Clinton. All of these presidents prepared the American public for a
leader who, like some super villain in a comic strip, would combine the worst
qualities of his predecessors in one explosive package.
Trump broke
through no guardrails (a feature of highway safety that he
once disparaged in a Wall Street Journal interview
as the “worst crap”). Rather, generations of politicians and operatives
incrementally moved them to such a degree that his behavior became acceptable
to enough Americans to elect him.
Admittedly, his
actions are now breaking new ground. He’s elevated family members — daughter
Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner — to senior policy positions, while
ensuring that his business empire profits from his presidency in
unprecedented ways. Still, to understand the more lasting impact of the Trump
administration requires a look at how his crew is transforming the underlying
structures of American democracy, whether it’s the influence of money on
politics, the hijacking of the judiciary, or the undermining of media
watchdogs.
Trump grabs the
daily headlines with his loose tweets and outrageous acts. The savvy operators
and implementers lurking in his shadow use the cover of scandal to move those
guardrails in a big league fashion. The defenders of today’s Maginot
Line will wake up some morning to discover that the enemy never had to storm the
battlements. They just uprooted the fortifications and shoved them out of the
way.
Boosting the Rich
Many democratic
countries wouldn’t tolerate the way the rich and corporations call the shots in
American elections. To win a House seat, for example, now costs, on
average, $1.5 million; a Senate seat, nearly $20 million. By contrast, in
Canada, where neither corporations nor unions can make campaign contributions
and individuals are restricted to a very modest $1,500 cap on party
donations, a typical campaign for parliament costs in the tens of
thousands of dollars and nearly half of the biggest spenders lose.
In 2010, the
situation in the United States became incomparably worse when the Supreme Court
decided, in the Citizens United case, that campaign contributions
are constitutionally protected free speech. Super PACs can now spend unlimited
amounts of money on elections, giving rich individuals unparalleled
impact and a way to cover their tracks through “dark money” contributions.
Former president Jimmy Carter has accurately labeled that decision
“legalized bribery.”
Meanwhile, money
has come to play a remarkable role in policymaking, too. Where other countries
struggle to expunge bribery and corruption from their political systems, the
United States has simply institutionalized it under the rubric of lobbying. As
Michael Maiello wrote in Forbes back in 2009:
“[I]n an open
society like the U.S., our brightest minds are unable to draw meaningful
distinctions between handing someone an envelope full of cash and flooding a
senator’s campaign war chest, except to point out that lobbying is far more
effective. A briber wants to circumvent the law. A lobbyist wants to change
it.”
Trump famously
declared his independence from donors and lobbyists. He told the Koch
brothers, for instance, that he didn’t “need their money or bad ideas.” In the
end, however, he would prove just as beholden to big donors as any conventional
politician. He rode to power with the backing of casino magnate Sheldon
Adelson, Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus, World Wrestling Entertainment
co-founder Linda McMahon, hedge fund operator Robert Mercer, and philanthropist
Betsy DeVos.
After the election, he immediately rewarded McMahon and
DeVos with administration positions, then pushed through a tax reform bill that
was a bonanza for his billionaire buddies and transformed Middle East
policy to reflect the demands of Adelson, Marcus, and Mercer. And though he
promised to clean out the Washington swamp, his appointees have been embroiled
in one scandal after another.
The Trump team is
also making structural changes to restrict the ways that ordinary citizens can,
in the future, challenge such a plutocratic form of government. Building on
successful Republican Party efforts in, for instance, Florida leading up
to the 2000 presidential election, the Trump administration is going all
out to suppress the electoral participation of minorities and the poor. New
voter ID laws helped him win key states like Wisconsin, so no
surprise that he wants to make such a voter ID system a nationwide
one.
Leading up to the
midterms, the Republican Party has also been rushing to purge voter
rolls and put in place racial gerrymandering, even using the
Americans with Disabilities Act as an excuse to close polling places in
rural Georgia to tamp down the African-American vote. In a team effort by the
Justice Department and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the president has
also directed federal agencies to gather voting records in areas of
North Carolina with large Latino populations in order to keep likely Democratic
Party voters away from the polls.
In this way, Trump
is working to return America to its glory days — when only well-off white men
had the right to vote.
Tilting the Courts
Trump controls (if
that’s the term for it) the White House; the Republicans, in part through voter
suppression and gerrymandering, control Congress. But pollsters predict that
the Democrats are likely to win back at least the House in the coming midterm
elections and the 2020 presidential election is clearly still up for grabs. So,
in its quest to move the political guardrails more permanently, the Trump
administration has focused on the third branch of government: the courts.
There, it can not only neuter one of the most powerful checks on Trump’s 1%
agenda, but have an impact that will last for decades.
With the Supreme
Court, the Republicans in Congress proved both lucky and strategic. President
Trump was immediately able to fill a vacancy, thanks to the Republican Party’s
successful Hail Mary decision to block Merrick Garland’s nomination
in the waning months of the Obama administration. Then, by nominating Neil
Gorsuch to fill the vacancy created by Antonin Scalia’s death, the Trump team
began to make a play for the retirement of swing-voting justice
Anthony Kennedy. Gorsuch had clerked for Kennedy and so had the two key
candidates (Brett Kavanaugh and Raymond Kethledge) that Trump fingered for his
seat, should it become vacant. The president then played up his business
relationship with Kennedy’s banker son, while Ivanka worked her
charms on the judge over lunch. Administration officials swore that they
would honor Kennedy’s legacy, as long as he resigned quickly enough to
squeeze in another confirmation before those midterms threatened Republican
majorities in Congress.
Meanwhile, the
Trump team barreled along making judicial appointments to the lower courts at a
time when it could barely be bothered to fill key positions in the
State Department. The new president came into office
with 105 unfilled judicial vacancies, a legacy of Republican
congressional foot-dragging during the Obama years. While conservative
allies supplied him with a wish list of judicial ideologues, Trump acted
with all deliberate haste by appointing 22 appeals court judges and
20 district judges (all lifetime positions). These new judges — in the 12
federal judicial circuits with regional jurisdiction — have already made
their mark in cases involving campaign finance, presidential authority,
and abortion, among other issues. “After just 18 months, Trump has ‘flipped’
two circuits — the Sixth and Seventh — from what Trump’s supporters in the
conservative legal movement consider ‘liberal’ to more properly conservative,” writes Jason
Zengerle in the New York Times Magazine, pointing out that
other circuits are also now nearing the tipping point.
This judicial
transformation extends to federal agencies. Administrative law judges are
basically civil servants who handle a varied caseload from Social Security
benefit claims to regulatory enforcement. After making a broad interpretation
of a recent Supreme Court decision, the Trump administration is now
transforming these 1,900 judges into the equivalent of political
appointees. It also argues that it can fire judges and hire new ones
to pack such administrative courts, which will then help push a Republican
anti-regulatory revolution from within.
At one point,
Donald Trump casually remarked that he thought the United States
should try out the Chinese system of “president for life.” While that’s not
likely to happen any time soon, with his judges for life, the president is
institutionalizing the 1% ideology of the adults in that room of his before the
voters can kick him out of office.
Sidestepping the
Watchdogs
After a lifetime
using the media to build his brand, Donald Trump is now systematically trying
to blow up one of the cornerstones of American democracy. He has
called the press the “enemy of the American people,” repeatedly labeled
reputable media outlets as “fake news,” and legitimized far-right sources
by parroting their claims.
Trump didn’t
create such a climate. The rise of Fox News, the spread of websites like Infowars,
and the persistent popularity of right-wing radio shock jocks have all
contributed to the demonization of the “liberal” media. As a result, for a
significant number of Americans, trying to gather facts — as opposed to
expressing opinions at top volume — has become a suspect occupation. According
to the 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer, when it comes to the general
population, trust in the media has dropped five points since 2017 and an
astounding 22 points for the “informed public” (defined as college-educated and
in the top 25% of household income).
The mainstream
media have long aspired to serve a watchdog role. Reporters are supposed to
fact-check the powerful, sniff out corruption, and peel away government
propaganda to expose the hidden histories behind it. Granted, journalists have
blind spots and the economically powerful often don’t receive the sort of
scrutiny that the politically powerful do, but media operations with budgets
for investigative journalists and fact-checkers are an integral part of any
democratic society.
Donald Trump
hasn’t just disparaged the mainstream media, he’s done an end run around it. He
feels little need to hold press conferences — only one in his first year of
office (compared to Obama’s 11) — because he communicates with the America
he wants to reach directly through his Twitter account. The news media then
have to play catch-up reporting on his tweets.
In doing so, he
creates the appearance of candor, since he speaks his mind without PR
specialists getting in the way — but not to the entire American population. Typically,
he avoids making speeches in blue states (places that his
administration’s policies are deliberately crafted to harm). His
strategy is to preach to the choir 24/7 in a communications universe free of
the mainstream media.
When it comes to reporters, the president’s supporters
follow his lead and pay them little attention. Indeed, 72% of
Republicans trust Trump over the media and nearly half believe that
“the president should have the authority to close news outlets engaged in bad
behavior.” His attacks on the media, deliberately designed to distract
attention from his various scandals, are undermining the entire institution.
In effect, Trump
has cultivated a constituency that lies outside the democratic conversation,
building on the 22% of Americans who believe autocracy to be superior
to democracy and the slightly larger percentage who would support a
military coup to combat crime or corruption. Independent media wouldn’t last
long in either scenario.
The New Normal
The most dangerous
part of Trump’s onslaught on democracy is the cynicism it’s likely to generate,
which will only reinforce the goals of the Trumpistas if a significant chunk of
the 99% decide that voting isn’t worth it, politics is a game best avoided, and
Twitter is superior to a newspaper. Democracy doesn’t just die in darkness. It
can die of indifference — not with a bang or a whimper, that is, but with a
yawn.
Of course, there’s
nothing like a famously corrupt politician to reinvigorate civic action. In the
aftermath of the Watergate scandals, a new wave of reformers won places in
Congress, immediately launching investigations into covert operations,
establishing new rules for campaign finance, and attempting
to rein in the power of the presidency through measures like the War
Powers Act. In other words, after the scandals of the early 1970s, reformers
surveyed the wreckage of the political landscape and attempted to repair the
infrastructure of American democracy. At best, they offered quick fixes, while
during the Reagan years that followed, the putative adults in the room returned
to their favorite activity: moving the guardrails to favor the wealthy and the
powerful.
After the midterms
in November, new voices like Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib will be in Congress and there
will undoubtedly be renewed energy to stop, if not roll back, Trumpism. All
those whom the president has insulted — and it’s an ever-lengthening list — may
join hands in an effort to break the vicious circle of ignorance, apathy, and
anger Trump has encouraged. This will be no easy task. But it would be poetic
justice if what’s left of the mechanisms of democracy — voting, the courts, and
the press — can still be used to defeat a potential autocrat, his family, and
all the putative adults he’s brought into the room to implement his profoundly
anti-democratic program. The question is: Will it already be too late?
John Feffer,
a TomDispatch regular, is the author of the dystopian
novel Splinterlands (a Dispatch Books original) and the director
of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. His
latest book is Aftershock: A Journey into Eastern Europe’s Broken Dreams.
This November, Frostlands, book two of his Splinterlands series, will be
published by Haymarket Books.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and
join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, Beverly
Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Storyand Tom Engelhardt’s A
Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the
American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John
Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II,
and John Feffer’s dystopian novel Splinterlands.
Copyright
2018 John Feffer. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission from TomDispatch.
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