A good read....
Donald Trump was inept — but his instincts weren’t wrong
The president was right to argue America’s democracy has become corrupted, writes Christopher Caldwell. Clearly he lacked the ability and appetite to fix it
Donald Trump at his inauguration: ‘You will never be ignored,’ he told his supporters
Donald Trump at his inauguration: ‘You will never be ignored,’ he told his supporters
JIM BOURG
Christopher Caldwell
Sunday January 17 2021, 12.01am, The Sunday Times
In early November, on the eve of the American elections, editorial pages and Democratic politicians backing Joe Biden sought to rally the country against Donald Trump, whom they called the “worst president ever”. At the time, it wasn’t even true. Trump was arguably not even the worst American president of the 21st century. Remember George W Bush, who started two wars, lost both and presided over the near-ruin of the global economy?
But Trump has managed to alter his historic legacy considerably since election day. On January 2 he made an hour-long phone call to Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, in which he intimated it might be “dangerous” and “a big risk” for Georgia officials to deny that Democrats had committed crimes in the election, and asked Raffensperger to tip the election to him by helping him “find 11,780 votes”.
That may be the most serious documented constitutional violation in the history of presidential elections — but the president was only getting warmed up. On January 6 he urged a mob he had summoned to the National Mall to march on the US Capitol. He didn’t tell them to sack it, but sack it they did, with the help of some poor police work, and sent the senators cowering into a secure room when they were supposed to be tallying the electoral votes that would show Trump the loser.
Trump didn’t tell the mob to sack the Capitol on January 6, but sack it they did
Trump didn’t tell the mob to sack the Capitol on January 6, but sack it they did
LEAH MILLIS
This may not have been the “insurrection” alleged in the impeachment charge quickly filed by Democrats, but the rioters were a threat to the safety of the senators at the moment when they were performing one of their most solemn duties.
One cannot really speak of Trump’s record as marred or besmirched by recent events because the people who will write his record are the very academics, journalists and high-tech “influencers” who oppose him most vehemently. For them, there’s no room for his reputation to get worse. It is the many Americans without any particular antipathy to Trump who have reassessed his character and drawn a stern lesson from it.
The lesson of Trump is that Americans have lately cared too much about ideology and too little about character. The Chicago Tribune opines that the storming of the Capitol was “only surprising if you weren’t paying attention”, as if the new year’s events vindicate the earlier attempts to remove Trump from office. That is only partly true. The early “Russiagate” inquiries, attempting to link Trump to both Julian Assange’s 2016 Democratic national committee email leaks and to Russian intelligence, had their origins in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, just as Trump claimed.
The Democrats’ first impeachment trial in 2019, over Trump’s attempts to gather dirt on Hunter Biden in Ukraine, was secretive and staged, and probably harmed the Democrats more than the Republicans. Nonetheless there really is a vindication for Trump’s foes in the events of recent weeks. If they were wrong on some of the details, they have been proved right in essence. Trump is more the man detractors warned against in 2016 and 2020 than the man his supporters hoped he would be.
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Security tightened around Capitol
Much more often than we are comfortable admitting, democracy places voters before calculated risks, including risks to democracy. Lincoln, Obama, Trump ... Americans often vote for people conspicuously short of the usual political experience for president, laying a bet that they will grow into statesmanship. Usually it works. Americans also vote for people who show signs of not caring about democratic niceties. Franklin Roosevelt concluded his first inaugural address saying he might ask Congress for “broad executive power” to make economic policy without it. Again, usually it works.
The public had to steel itself for Trump and his crew. The classicist Victor Davis Hanson likened him to a Sophoclean tragic hero, or a cowboy who blows into town to clean up the bad guys. Hanson rightly predicted — although he was a Trump supporter — that Trump’s presidency would end in his repudiation by a lot of the people who had thought it most necessary to rally to him. Trump’s enemies were often under the impression his supporters had been hoodwinked or inattentive, but no. The whole country saw the same Trump. They just differed in their risk assessments.
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Trump was elected for a reason. He spoke to a downwardly mobile, mostly white working class that had been forgotten by the elites raking in money from the global economy. By re-engaging these outcasts with the political system, he was able to win certain states that had suffered industrial decline: Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania. That turned politics upside down. The question was whether he was in any position to do anything for these people.
It turned out he was. Trump had shifted the economic playing field in non-elites’ favour. Policy-makers in both parties became more sceptical about free trade and more hostile to China. Incomes rose modestly for the lowest-paid workers, although this may have been due to minimum-wage laws passed in several states. These gains went unnoticed in print because the people who write about politics tend not to know many people who hang plasterboard and install air-conditioning systems.
Trump had laid an economic foundation for re-election that was much stronger than non–working-class people understood. Covid-19 washed these efforts away and delivered the economy back to the coastal investment bankers and internet moguls, exacerbating the inequality that Trump had come to office promising to fix. He was just unlucky.
There is another way to look at Trump’s election in 2016. Voters, not all of them poor, perceived American democracy as having been corrupted. Their perception was correct. Increasingly, regulators and judges were being empowered to overrule the things the public voted for, often making use of civil-rights laws.
The president spoke to a downwardly mobile, mostly white working class forgotten by the elites
The president spoke to a downwardly mobile, mostly white working class forgotten by the elites
MICHAEL REYNOLDS
Through a process that no one fully understood, second-rate professors now had veto power over what people could and could not say. Litigious “anti-racist” foundations had acquired the power to instruct businessmen on whom to hire, and women felt threatened by men, no matter what men did. Their ideas of efficiency and fairness were abstract and elitist. They spurned the culture of those white voters in the declining states. Hillary Clinton was a personification of these elites’ attitudes, their power, their competence.
The dynamic was similar to Brexit, another battle against a labyrinthine power structure that could be made to disappear and reappear and that sometimes worked through invisible pressures on non-governmental actors. Unseating America’s guardians of political correctness would have required either a capacity for sustained work or an aide with the brilliance of Dominic Cummings. Trump had neither. He didn’t know where the power was that was stymieing his every plan and he had no one to tell him.
Trump’s personnel policy was chaotic. When his lawyer Michael Cohen testified against him in the summer of 2018, the most alarming revelation concerned not Trump’s ethics but his judgment in entrusting his most treasured projects and secrets to such a low-life. His hiring of his son-in-law Jared Kushner as an all-purpose consigliere was the most brazen act of White House nepotism in memory. Trump had a way of exiling people of independent judgment, such as his early backer Steve Bannon.
For all the talk of “extremism” that accompanied Trump through four years, his largest problem was never so much extremism as incompetence. No national candidate had ever calumniated political correctness with such contempt, and yet no president had ever permitted political correctness to tighten its hold so much on the lives of citizens.
The intimidation and censorship of common people as sexists and racists grew under Trump. After the #MeToo movement, mandatory anti-sexism workshops proliferated. After last summer’s riots over the death of George Floyd, anti-racism slogans were painted over football fields. Scarcely had Americans figured out what “transphobic” meant before they discovered it was something they could be sued for being, after the 2020 decision in Bostock v Clayton County, Georgia (written by a Trump nominee to the Supreme Court). By the end of Trump’s term his tweets were being censored, and so were the Facebook accounts of supporters who even mentioned the slogan “Stop the steal”.
For all the recent talk of incitement, Trump got his enemies considerably more riled up than his friends. In this his presidency resembled the high point of the American comedy Paul Blart: Mall Cop. Held at bay by an armed robber, Blart succeeds in using the only weapon he has — a bottle of hot sauce, which he squirts into the assailant’s eyes. The man collapses into a chair, blinded, and over the 15 or so excruciating seconds that it takes him to recover his vision, Blart, urged on by his daughter, his girlfriend and other hostages, does ... nothing. The robber recovers and trains his gun back on everybody. “Probably should have capitalised on that,” Blart mutters.
The Capitol rioters threatened senators as they performed one of their most solemn duties
The Capitol rioters threatened senators as they performed one of their most solemn duties
DREW ANGERER
Trump didn’t have the skill to dismantle the power structures that were ruining his voters’ lives, but he did leave them feeling they’d never walk alone. (“Hear these words,” he said at the end of his inauguration address. “You will never be ignored again.”) The question is whether that will be enough to allow him to dominate the party in the future. Should he be convicted in an impeachment trial, he would probably be barred from politics for life, but such a conviction is unlikely.
Most analysts think it will be easy for him to keep his grip on the party. They are probably wrong. Trump will be seeking to avoid prosecutions by state justice departments that are well organised and in some cases vindictive. He will also be dealing with the chaotic state of his investments and properties, as activist investors have divested and clients have cancelled contracts. Among Republicans, Trump’s influence rests on the value of his endorsement and likelihood that he will be president again one day. Both are shrinking.
Trump may have given American populism its characteristic expression, but he didn’t unleash it and it won’t end with him. Many of the grievances that brought him into the political arena have, as we say, worsened. His Democratic tormentors have learnt little from their early debacles. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York congresswoman, complains about “white supremacist” colleagues in Congress; Zoe Lofgren, the California congresswoman, describes the Capitol marchers as “right-wing terrorists”. That leaves Republicans worried that, once Democrats are done with Trump, they will come for his rank and file. This diminishes the likelihood that Democrats will be able to win a conviction of Trump in the Senate in the coming weeks.
The global populist movement, as opposed to Trump’s American fans, may indeed suffer a setback in the coming months. A good relationship with the US remains an asset for any European head of state, and Trump’s departure makes it less likely that, say, Marine Le Pen or Marion Maréchal will have a friend in the White House in 2022. The same goes for Matteo Salvini, Viktor Orbán and others. In America, all the grievances that created populism remain. Trump was effective in rallying populists together but wholly incompetent in carrying out their programme. Even to his followers, his departure might be a liberation.
Christopher Caldwell is a contributing editor at the Claremont Review of Books and the author, most recently, of The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties (Simon & Schuster)
