Saving the Republic from Trump
Damage control must start now
Within days after the election, hints of the potential for endemic corruption in the Trump presidency were already percolating. There appear to be myriad ways in which Trump’s official actions could affect and be affected by the Trump Organization’s vast global web of economic interests. A vague promise to put his commercial holdings in a “blind trust” has largely evaporated in light of the sweeping entanglement of not only Trump’s family but Trump himself in his company’s operations.
“We have 100 days to stop Donald Trump from systemically corrupting our institutions,” wrote Matthew Yglesias in Vox. The problem that mainly concerns Yglesias is not the ordinary corruption of campaign finance and revolving door careerism but rather something more deeply pervasive. “We are used to corruption in which the rich buy political favor. What we need to learn to fear is corruption in which political favor becomes the primary driver of economic success.”
Even in this supposed transition period, Trump’s activities have commingled public with private interests. His daughter Ivanka promoted her own jewelry line in a “60 Minutes” television interview supposedly about her father’s presidency. She also has participated in conversations her father had with foreign officials. She and her siblings Eric and Donald Jr., who all have executive roles with the Trump Organization, as well as Ivanka’s husband Jared Kushner, have been involved in presidential transition planning and staffing decisions. Donald Trump reportedly asked U.K. politician Nigel Farage (leader of the Brexit vote) to oppose offshore wind farms that Trump feels mar the view from his Scotland golf course. Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte appointed Trump’s business partner in that country to be his government’s trade envoy to Washington. Meanwhile foreign officials have been booking the expensive rooms and suites in Trump’s new Washington hotel, evidently in hope of currying favor and access. And the Secret Service contingent guarding Trump and his family in New York plans to pay more than $1 million a year to rent a floor of the Trump Tower — that is, pay the rent to Trump.
Then there is the prospect of what the New York Times calls the “lawsuit presidency.” Trump recently paid $25 million to settle Trump University fraud suits. But there are at least 75 suits pending against Trump or his companies. Given Trump’s history of thousands of lawsuits over the past three decades, it’s virtually certain that more will be coming.
Some of this litigation could well involve the government. The new Trump International Hotel in Washington is leased from the General Services Administration, a federal agency Trump will soon oversee. The Trump company managing the hotel has filed a second suit (the first was dismissed) against the District of Columbia government to get the hotel’s property tax bill lowered. And as noted, Trump will be the Secret Service’s landlord in Trump Tower. Then there is the possibility of the Internal Revenue Service pursuing civil or criminal penalties resulting from its audit of Trump’s tax returns.
While many have been worrying about Trump’s possible conflicts of interest in office, columnist David Frum asserts that some of these activities are not just potential conflicts and not even just conflicting interests but already are in fact “abuses of power.”
The risk in this situation, says Yglesias, is not that Trump becomes a dictator but that “civil society simply withers and dies.”
But civil society has been declining for a long time, and in many places. Granted that Trump may seem to be an accelerant of civil decline, he is not its main cause, but rather one more symptom — albeit glaring.
The reality is that trust not only in government but in a spectrum of civil institutions has been declining for the past half century. And not just in the United States but worldwide. A recent Gallup poll showed that not only is the American people’s trust in political leaders at an historically low ebb, but their trust in their fellow citizens is too.
This widespread alienation may be a product of several factors. One is the growing power of modern communications to simultaneously expose uncomfortable realities, disseminate fake news (“truthiness”), and amplify dissonance. Then there is the disorienting power of technology that is fast changing how everything in the world works. Roiling the currents of change is the innate tendency of institutions to be self-promoting and self-protective, and thus increasingly obsolescent and dysfunctional. And the disrupting impact of all that is compounded by the correlation Lord Acton observed between corruption and scale: Corruption increases with size and concentration of power.
T o fix this mess, Yglesias focuses on the Senate’s authority to approve or reject presidential appointments to cabinet and many other offices. The Senate, he says, should only confirm those who demonstrate a high standard of independence and integrity: “We cannot allow personal loyalty to Donald Trump to be the decisive factor in staffing the executive branch.”
While Yglesias’ diagnosis is valid (if incomplete), his prescription is not so convincing. For one thing, Trump by now has added some adversaries to his proposed appointments and reportedly is considering others, including Democrats.
Rather, as George Will has often lamented, Congress over a long span has incrementally transferred much of its proper authority to the executive branch — particularly the unelected “fourth branch” that Will and others call the administrative state. Retiring Democratic leader Harry Reid embraced the so-called “nuclear option” and notably curtailed the ability of the Senate to use the filibuster to block unwanted appointments. And in 2009 Democrats set the stage for the present political debacle by using the parliamentary gimmick of reconciliation to enact the broadly unpopular Obamacare legislation with a simple majority, and without a single Republican vote much less cosponsor, literally in the dead of night.
Surveys and interviews indicate that many if not most Trump voters actually were counting on Congress to block many of Trump’s more insidious promises. They desperately hoped he would be made to focus on magically finding some way to restore lost middle class jobs. But for Congress to reclaim control over a rogue executive branch, it will require bipartisan cooperation that seems hard to achieve with the deeply fractured factions that now exist on Capitol Hill.
Yglesias is right that damage control efforts should begin now. The scrutiny of Trump’s nominees for cabinet and other offices is necessary but isn’t unusual. It commonly happens for any administration.
Rather, there is an immediate need to address the worldwide morass of opportunities that Trump’s business presents for self-dealing. That the Trump Foundation finally has admitted multiple instances of self-dealing underscores Frum’s claim that the hazard is not just potential but present.
Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD) is promoting a “sense of the Congress” resolution that Trump should (pretty please) put his business holdings in a blind trust, or something, to avoid foreign conflicts with the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution:
No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.
But the “rule of law” requires law, not just a suggestion box. And that particular constitutional provision does not preclude many other opportunities for Trump to use his public office to enrich himself and his family.
Rather, Congress should enact legislation before January 20, 2017 that would bind the president and vice president to the same kind of ethical standards that apply to all other government officials. As things stand now, the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 (enacted in the wake of the Watergate scandal) exempts the president and vice president from its requirements.
This was done because, at the time, it seemed that given the broad scope of presidential responsibilities, some of the president’s actions would overlap almost any personal financial or business interest the president had. But surely this can be managed in some practical way while still assuring that when there is clear, tangible evidence of self-dealing or what is called “pay for play” by the president or vice president, some penalty or sanction is imposed.
School children are told that no person in America is “above the law.” Congress needs to make it so. The White House should not be an ethics-free zone.
The assumption that congressional Republicans will resist any effort to effectively constrain Donald Trump from corrupting practices should be tested by real legislation. Trump has been continually critical of the Congress. On the other side, few GOP members tried to ride his coattails in the election and a number overtly objected to his candidacy. They can now act to insulate the country from his corrupting influences.
All members of Congress take an oath to support, protect, and defend the Constitution. There is no “lame duck” exemption from that obligation. Members who vote against applying basic ethics law to the president and vice president will then at least be accountable for the consequences.
Admittedly, it now seems likely that Congress will do nothing. What then? To the extent any comfort can be found in the prospects of the Trump era (or error), it may be less in policy tactics and more in underlying mathematical and sociological realities.
Only a quarter of U.S. voters voted for Trump. Hillary Clinton got some 3 million more votes than Donald Trump did — in fact, she received more votes than any losing candidate in American history.
Surveys and focus groups indicate that many (maybe most) of the minority who voted for Trump recognize that he is morally rancid and functionally unqualified. The swing voters who tilted the balance of the Electoral College were mostly in industrial communities that have been in decline for decades. Again, they voted for Trump in the desperate — but hardly confident — hope that he could deliver on his promise to restore jobs and middle class prosperity.
That theme is underscored by Nelson Schwartz’s penetrating report in the New York Times on a Carrier Corporation factory in Indianapolis that the company plans to move to Monterrey, Mexico — quite candidly to lower its labor costs — eliminating some 1,400 local jobs. During the campaign, Trump had often cited Carrier as an example of the kind of American job exporting he was going to reverse.
In late November, Trump announced that he made a deal with Carrier that would keep most of those jobs in Indiana. In early December, details of the deal were revealed: Indiana Governor Mike Pence — the Vice President-elect — had arranged for Carrier to receive $7 million in state tax incentives to keep the jobs in Indiana. Chuck Jones, president of the local United Steelworkers local 1999, learned from Carrier that only 730 of the production jobs would stay, and 550 of his members would still lose their jobs. When Trump visited on December 1 and publicly took credit for saving over 1,100 jobs, Jones was incensed and tweeted that “Trump lied his ass off.” Trump quickly responded by tweeting an attack on Jones’s competence and character.
Many of those (notably diverse) Carrier workers voted for Barack Obama in 2008, counting on his promise of “hope and change.” Disappointed with the results — statistics showing national progress in growth, jobs, and wages didn’t manifest much impact in their communities — many turned to Trump for yet another stab at “change,” yet not necessarily with much hope. Schwartz observes:
In interviews in recent days and in March, Trump voters here made clear that if he does not follow through on his promises, they are prepared to turn on him, just as they are seemingly punishing Democrats today for not delivering the hope and change voters sought from President Obama after he won as an outsider in 2008….
As president, however, Mr. Trump will face a tough balance. Tariffs and trade wars stand to hurt American workers who make products that are exported to Mexico or China. Few voters will be happy paying more for imported goods.
And regardless of who is in the Oval Office, manufacturers are seeing relentless pressure, from investors and rival companies, to automate, replacing workers with machines that do not break down or require health benefits and pension plans.
In fact, a week after Trump’s visit to Indianapolis, Carrier’s management explained that it would invest $16 million in that plant to eliminate many of the remaining jobs with automation. Greg Hayes, CEO of United Technologies, Carrier’s parent company, explained: “Is it as cheap as moving to Mexico with lower cost labor? No. But we will make that plant competitive just because we’ll make the capital investments there. But what that ultimately means is there will be fewer jobs.”
The marginal voters Schwartz described do not generally like or agree with Trump’s racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and bigotry. Their bet on Trump was basically pragmatic. They thought that, being independently wealthy, Trump “could not be bought.” And they hoped he could reverse their declining economic fortunes.
Trump is virtually certain to fail on both counts. As Yglesias, Frum, and others observe, rather than “draining the swamp” of corruption, Trump is already on track to fill it with his own venal sewage.
Meanwhile, economists across the spectrum have concluded that the numbers don’t add up for Trump’s extravagant economic plans, such as they are. If actually enacted, Trump’s policies likely would destroy millions of jobs and plunge the country into another recession. The Economist warns “… even if Mr Trump does not land America and the world in a serious new conflict or a global depression, his effect on the trajectory of global growth and development could be substantial and terrible.” The people most likely to suffer the consequences are the very ones who looked to Trump for salvation.
So Trump starts out broadly unpopular and poised to fail, egregiously. He will be unable to deliver most of what he promised. To the extent he does, the results may well be morbid. And if he pivots to a more normal, pragmatic mode of governance, he will disillusion his narrow base of voters…without necessarily winning many converts from the many cohorts he has offended.
Consider…
A top priority of Trump and the GOP is to “repeal and replace” Obamacare. Using the same reconciliation ploy the Democrats did to pass it, the GOP majority in the Senate very well could cripple the law financially. The result could be to drive up costs and deprive tens of millions of Americans of healthcare — it follows that thousands will die for lack of effective care. What the GOP cannot do is repeal the law without the votes of Senate Democrats, which it is not going to get.
Trump won big in coal country with the promise to bring back jobs in a dying industry. His energy policy, such as it is, emphasizes deregulation and removing barriers to natural gas fracking and coal production. But it is the abundant supply of cheap natural gas that has largely driven down the use of coal. The steadily declining cost of renewable energy options also has helped displace coal. Coal-burning power plants were closing down even before the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan was proposed and, stalled by litigation, it hasn’t even been implemented yet. “Clean coal” remains a theoretical goal not yet proven economically feasible. Trump may now be waffling on his view about climate change, but the fact is that the Supreme Court ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency is obligated to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. Trump cannot change that. As Time magazine explains, few if any jobs in the coal industry will be coming back:
Beyond the competition jobs in the coal industry have also disappeared in recent decades as a result of mechanization that began in the 1980s. Approximately 50,000 coal-related jobs have been lost between 2008 and 2012, according to a study from last year. Even if coal production increased, those jobs would not return.
Trump is already backing off “the Wall” across the Mexican border — the linchpin of his campaign. Cost estimates range from $25 billion to over $40 billion. Such estimates often turn out to be far less than the final tab. (Consider that Boston’s “big dig” highway project originally was supposed to be completed in 1998 at an estimated cost of $6 billion; it was finally finished in late 2007 at a total cost of $14.6 billion.) Trump claimed Mexico would pay for the wall, but the Mexican government has made clear it will not.
As for Trump’s threat to stop billions of dollars of remittances flowing to Mexico, experts view it as unlikely to be effective, but possibly counterproductive. “Not only would making procedures more onerous for day-to-day transactions do little to actually improve anti-money laundering or counter-terrorism financing compliance programs, but could harm those efforts by driving money movement away from routinely used secure channels to underground methods,” said Matt Chandler, a former deputy chief of staff in the Department of Homeland Security.
Security experts know Trump’s wall cannot work. “We are not buying ourselves any security, and fences are not going to stop drug smugglers and terrorists — they are more sophisticated,” says Princeton Prof. David Massey. “And they aren’t going to stop immigrants, really.” Moreover, because of acute environmental impacts, a border wall project would be tied up in regulatory combat and litigation for years. What fear triggered by Trump’s proposals has produced already though is a surge in illegal immigration (after a long decline) and in the flow of remittances out of the United States.
Deporting 11 million aliens? Not going to happen. The backlash against any aggressive attempt to do so will be disastrous. Alabama passed a harsh anti-immigrant law several years ago. It wound up costing the state economy some $11 billion and over $300 million in lost tax revenue. Agriculture was particularly hard hit. (Trump endorsed it as a model for the nation.) A think tank headed by former Congressional Budget Office director Douglas Holtz-Eakin estimated that it would cost from $100 billion to $300 billion and take 20 years to remove all undocumented immigrants living in the United States.
Trump’s secret plan to destroy ISIS? The Islamic State already is close to collapse. The existing strategy is working. Inept meddling by Trump could snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Charles Lister, a fellow of the Middle East Institute warns that Trump’s strategy would perfectly serve ISIS propaganda goals, increasing its popular acceptance.
And so it goes.
The doomed situation of Trumpism brings to mind a samizdat written by Soviet dissident Andrei Amalrik in the late 1960s when Nixon and Brezhnev were talking “detente.” It was later published in the West as a book with the prescient title Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984?
The gist of Amalrik’s argument was this… The hope in the West that the Soviet system could liberalize itself was in vain. Rather, it was bound to collapse under its own weight.
The system, Amalrik explained, was based on a kind of Faustian bargain. The public would accept the system’s oppression and corruption as long as it succeeded in steadily increasing their standard of living. But the Soviet economy was essentially extractive — it succeeded only by eating its seed corn, gradually degrading its productive capacity. In effect, Amalrik said the “numbers don’t add up”; the system would bankrupt itself. Since the public tolerated the system only for economic benefit, when that disappeared they would overthrow it. And that in fact is what happened. (Sadly, Russian society has not been able to secure its liberation, and has made another ill-fated Faustian bargain with Vladimir Putin.)
Like the erstwhile Soviet system (and Putin’s current kleptocracy), Trump’s economic strategy follows what the late David Broder dubbed a policy of “strength through exhaustion.”
Bankruptcy has been a feature of Trump’s business M.O. half a dozen times. It is not a path the country will enjoy — and other, less onerous paths are possible — but left undeterred it is an effective default that will end with Trumpism expunged.
Sadly, the nationalistic, nostalgic backlash embodied by Trump and his equivalents in other countries offers no sustainable solutions to their aggrieved followers. The happy days they seek to reclaim — which were not so happy in reality — declined for reasons which cannot be revoked, driven by forces that will not be deterred.
Trump and his ilk bear a scary resemblance to Captain Ahab, a charismatic leader who entranced his crew with promises of heroic adventure and rich rewards — to help him avenge his personal monster. We know how that journey ends.
Trump will fail. But the challenges of the 21st century go far beyond the morbidity of Trumpism.
The central dilemma is how to organize societies and economies in an era when human health and lifespans could be extended by decades and when human labor is largely replaced by cheaper, more reliable automatons. The epidemic failure of the established political classes around the world is that they so far have barely even begun to acknowledge this quandary, must less to offer any credible solutions. Demagogues like Trump rush to fill the leadership vacuum with toxic panaceas.
There is no more timely guidance for the political reformation needed to cope with today’s upheaval than this advice Abraham Lincoln delivered to Congress over a century and a half ago:
The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.
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Updated December 21, 2016. This article was republished in Pulse.
Also see my related article Is Trump Saving Our Democracy? in this publication.
Copyright 2016, Lewis J. Perelman.
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