Horsemen of the Trumpocalypse
John Nichols
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 by John Nichols
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This book is dedicated to my mother, Mary Kathryn Nichols, and her friends in Burlington, Wisconsin, in the heart of Paul Ryan’s congressional district. They live in the hometown of a great Wisconsin progressive, Ed Garvey, and they delight in the resistance.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
A Note on How to Use This Book
Betsy DeVos and the Malice Domestic: An Introduction to the Trumpocalypse
PART 1
WICKED MESSENGERS
1 The Investors: Robert and Rebekah Mercer
2 The Jacksonian Democrat: Stephen Bannon, White House Senior Strategist
3 The Spinster: Kellyanne Conway, White House Counselor
4 He Who Will Not Be Questioned: Stephen Miller, Senior Advisor to the President
5 The Jihad-Whisperer with the Anti-Semitism Badge: Sebastian Gorka, Deputy Assistant to the President
6 The Leopard That Did Not Change His Spots: Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, Attorney General of the United States
7 The Lawman Who Forgot Which Side He Was On: Rod Rosenstein, Deputy Attorney General
8 “The King of Voter Suppression”: Kris Kobach, Vice Chair of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity
PART 2.
GENERALS AND CEOs SEARCHING FOR MONSTERS TO DESTROY
9 The “Mad Dog”: General James Mattis (ret.), Secretary of Defense
10 The Deputy Secretary for Boeing: Patrick Shanahan, Deputy Secretary of Defense Designee
11 Director of the Office of the Military-Industrial Complex: Mick Mulvaney, Director of the Office of Management and Budget
12 The Absolutist: Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster, National Security Advisor
13 The Koch Brother: Mike Pompeo, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency
14 The U.S. Ambassador to the American Anti-Choice Movement: Nikki Haley, U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations
15 “Part and Parcel of an Organized Army of Hatred”: David Friedman, U.S. Ambassador to Israel
16 With the Russians, Too?: Wilbur Ross, Secretary of Commerce
17 The Fossil-Fuel-Powered Dollar Diplomat: Rex Tillerson, Secretary of State
PART 3.
THE HACKS
18 Secretariat Stumbling: Reince Priebus, White House Chief of Staff
19 Spicerfacts: Sean Spicer, White House Press Secretary
20 The Trumplican: Omarosa Manigault, Assistant to the President
21 The Hypocrite Who Made His Party of Lincoln the Party of Trump: Mitch McConnell, Senate Majority Leader
22 Party Boy: Paul Ryan, Speaker of the House
23 Complicit: Ivanka Trump, First Daughter, and Jared Kushner, First Son-in-Law
24 The Secretary of Trump Is Always Right: John Kelly, Secretary of Homeland Security
25 The Captain of the Wrecking Crew: Alexander Acosta, Labor Secretary
26 Putt-Head: Andrew Giuliani, Associate Director for the Office of Public Liaison
27 The Product of a Judicial Coup: Neil Gorsuch, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court
28 Donald Trump’s Very Own Milhous: Mike Pence, Vice President of the United States
PART 4.
PRIVATEERS
29 “I’ve Got a Bridge to Sell You”: Elaine Chao, Secretary of Transportation
30 The Kingfish of the Quagmire: Tom Price, Secretary of Health and Human Services
31 The Health Care Profiteer: Seema Verma, Administrator, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services
32 The Investor Who Got a High Return: Betsy DeVos, Secretary of Education
33 Mr. Secrets and Lies: Scott Pruitt, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator
34 Pristine Wilderness for Sale, Lease or Hire: Ryan Zinke, Secretary of the Interior
35 Mars Incorporated: Newt Gingrich and Robert Walker, Trump Space Advisors
36 The Secretary of Gentrification: Dr. Ben Carson, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development
37 The Oopsing of Nuclear Waste Disposal: Rick Perry, Secretary of Energy
38 The Secretary of Corporate Agribusiness: Sonny Perdue, Secretary of Agriculture
39 The Weed Whacker: Ajit Pai, Federal Communications Commission Chairman
40 The Foreclosure King: Steven Mnuchin, Secretary of the Treasury
41 The Fox Guarding the Henhouse: Jay Clayton, Chairman, Securities and Exchange Commission
42 Swimming in the Government Sachs Swamp: Gary Cohn, Director of the National Economic Council
Afterword: Averting the Trumpocalypse
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Source Notes
Index
A Note on How to Use This Book
On January 20, 2017, Donald Trump the man became Donald Trump the presidency. This is a book on how to understand that presidency. It begins with a concept of governing that some in the chattering classes will struggle with, as their obsession with personalities often precludes them from discussing consequential matters. Presidents can often be inconsequential—or foolish, or erratic, or incomprehensible. But presidencies are never any of those things. They are powerful, overarching, definitional. They shape more than policies; they shape our sense of what the United States can be. Jefferson’s presidency made America more expansive than even the most adventurous former colonists had dared to attempt, Lincoln’s made America freer than all but the most courageous of the founders dared imagine, Franklin Roosevelt’s made America fairer than Wall Street had ever been willing to permit, John Kennedy’s made a mature nation young again. And Donald Trump’s presidency will make America something different than it has ever been—something darker if his autocratic agendas prevail, something brighter if the resistance to those agendas coalesces into the welcoming, humane and aspirational America that Langston Hughes promised it could be.
The test of the Trump era is this: Will these United States go backward on a “Make America Great Again” journey that has everything to do with the word “again” and nothing to do with greatne
ss? Or will they go forward with an honest and unencumbered recognition of the environmental, social and economic challenges of our time, and a bold and brave faith in our ability to meet them with the genius of science, the strength of humanity, the connectivity and liberating power of real democracy?
With his actions and his appointments, Trump has made it clear that he chooses to go backward. He intends for his to be the “again” presidency.
But it will not be Trump who makes the next America happen, just as it was not Jefferson or Lincoln or Roosevelt or Kennedy. Presidents can be exceptional men or awful men, and soon presidents will be women. But there is not enough greatness or horror in any man or woman to turn the page of a vast nation. This is why the intricate webs of individuals and policies and movements that make and unmake presidencies matter more than presidents.
Pundits may choose to focus on presidents. Citizens cannot afford that luxury. When a moment raises questions of liberty versus autocracy, prosperity versus poverty, war versus peace, life versus death, citizens must tune out the gossip of campaigning and tune in on the essential issues of governing. This is only possible if they consider the whole of a presidency. Only an understanding of the whole of a presidency will allow them to determine whether to embrace or resist the possibility of an administration.
This is the essential leap—the one that took America from reverence for FDR to an embrace of a “New Deal,” the one that extended from “all the way with LBJ” to a war on poverty and Medicare and Medicaid.
The men and women Trump chooses to surround himself with, and to empower, will determine the America that will emerge from his presidency. They will shape and implement the policies of this presidency. They will check and balance Trump’s excesses, or they will steer this inexperienced and impulsive man toward precipices from which neither he, nor this nation, nor this world, can turn back. They will temper or incite Trump, fuel or still the cauldrons of racial and ethnic hatred and division. They will counsel against overreactions or they will make those overreactions inevitable, and incomprehensibly destructive.
But, for the most part, they will operate in the darkness of a media age when the major newspapers, broadcast networks and digital platforms are so absorbed with the pursuit of ratings and clicks that they refuse to put the spotlight on anyone but a “strongman” president.
Because the office of president has always been infused with a measure of majesty, and because it is afforded far more power than is enjoyed by the ceremonial presidents of most other lands, people in the United States and around the world have always struggled with the concept of an executive branch. They are attracted to the notion of an individualized, virtually monarchical executive—a soldier king making every decision, commanding every army, doling out every favor, collecting every emolument.
George Washington, the revolutionary commander whose countrymen encouraged him to serve as a king, struggled mightily to discourage such thinking. He accepted a system of checks and balances, distributed power to others and surrendered the mantle of authority willingly at the end of a second four-year term. With his democratically inclined secretary of state, Jefferson, he discouraged notions of an imperial presidency and counseled Americans to recognize themselves as sovereigns and their presidents as servants. In the early days of their republican experiment, Washington and Jefferson and their compatriots realized their visions with presidencies so small that they could be loaded up in stagecoaches and moved from city to city as the country sorted out the question of where it would locate its capitol. When it was decided that the District of Columbia would be the nation’s center of government, the infrastructure of that government was so limited that Jefferson lodged in a rooming house on the night before his inauguration, walked on his own through muddy streets to the swearing-in ceremony, delivered a short unifying address and scrambled back to the rooming house in time for dinner.
Washington was an imperfect, yet serious man. Jefferson was an imperfect, yet visionary man. Trump is an imperfect man who is neither serious nor visionary.
“Only those Americans with no knowledge or who are self-deluded celebrate the start of the presidency of Donald John Trump, the most unqualified man ever to be elected to our highest office,” wrote former White House counsel John Dean, our great philosopher of presidencies gone right and wrong, on the day of Trump’s inauguration. “To wit: There is no evidence anywhere that Donald Trump has even a good newspaper or television news knowledge of the American presidency; nor is there any evidence he has ever read a single autobiography or biography of any of his forty-four predecessors in our highest elected office. To the contrary, the evidence suggests he does not have sufficient concentration power to read a book, or even listen to an audio edition, not to mention receive an exhaustive briefing of the duties of his job.”
With the exponential growth of the presidency in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the recognizable and defined executive branch of old has been transformed into something altogether foreign and exotic: an elaborate construct that historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. began to identify the better part of a half century ago as the “imperial presidency.” Constantly expanding, constantly extending itself, the presidency has become a labyrinth of intrigue and conflict, where even appointees who believe they are doing the bidding of the commander in chief may unwittingly take the nation in directions that the president did not intend. And it becomes a place where ideologues and con artists can, quite wittingly, launch initiatives about which the president knows little or nothing. That is more likely in the presidency of a Donald Trump than in those of his predecessors because Trump has the worst possible “experience” for the managing of a presidency: that of a reality TV–show star who has for decades played the role of a business executive. Corporate CEOs rarely if ever make a smooth transition from the private sphere to the public sphere; as the two most well-trained and experienced business executives ever to share the title of president, frequently failed oil executive George W. Bush and epically failed crony capitalist Dick Cheney, proved when they steered the United States into undeclared and disastrous wars and the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression. But at least Bush and Cheney had familial and personal experience as governmental hangers-on. Trump has no such experience. He is, like the catastrophe that was Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, a dilettante whose business career has never been much more than bad theater and whose governing experience is that of a grifter.
Berlusconi governed Italy from “the gut” as Trump says he will America. But Berlusconi governed in coalition, surrounded by a motley crew of partisans and ideologues and compromised souls who were at his service and at their own. The same is true of Trump. This book groups the Trump circle into rough categories: ideological messengers, political hacks, military-industrial complex generals and dollar diplomats, and privateers and corporatists. Savvy readers will note that some of our subjects, like Steve Bannon or Sean Spicer, could have a place in more than one category. Savvier readers still will recognize that when a book is written at the opening of a presidency, some who were empowered initially will be disempowered eventually. Some who were on the scene at the start will disappear before the finish. Some who were nowhere near the corridors of power will suddenly appear in them. The full story of a presidency cannot be told until after it is finished. But a presidency can be understood, if explorers have a field guide. This book can be understood and embraced as such. More attention is paid to some lesser-known figures than to the celebrities among the newly empowered; that is because, ultimately, this book is more about power than personalities. There is a great deal of history in this book because history provides perspective, and perspective is what we need most of all in a moment so chaotic as this. And there is humor, because humor is required in a moment so daunting as this.
There is, as well, hope because this book is written in a period of resistance to an imperial and imperiling presidency. It proposes to strengthen that resistance b
y providing insight into the whole of the Trump enterprise. That fuller view, which extends beyond a president to examine a presidency, is essential. It is the wellspring of the popular authority that in a democratic republic can still check and balance the governing leviathan. James Madison, our imperfect and fretful, yet often visionary fourth president, was right in his prescription for America: “a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”
—John Nichols, June 2017
Betsy DeVos and the Malice Domestic
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE TRUMPOCALYPSE
“Malice domestic” from time to time will come to you in the shape of those who would raise false issues, pervert facts, preach the gospel of hate, and minimize the importance of public action to secure human rights or spiritual ideals. There are those today who would sow these seeds, but your answer to them is in the possession of the plain facts of our present condition.
—PRESIDENT FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT, 1935
Even in America’s post-truth moments, even in our ages of “alternative facts” and deliberate deception, the truth comes out. This is the eternal certainty, the promise across time that has sustained us in circumstances so dark as these. Franklin Roosevelt did not invent the notion of “malice domestic.” He borrowed it from William Shakespeare, who recalled an ancient malice, and warned of those who might initially cloak their evil intentions in order to obtain authority over great nations. They might get away with it initially, but the damned spot is never washed away. As the wisdom tradition of the proverb writers assures us: “Their malice may be concealed by deception, but their wickedness will be exposed in the assembly.” So it was that, in the transition period from the America that was to the America of Donald Trump, Betsy DeVos was exposed not just as an unsettling example of the “malice domestic” as it manifests itself in our times but as the very embodiment of the fraud perpetrated by a “billionaire populist” as he built an administration of greedheads and grifters, climate-change deniers and fake-news presenters, white nationalists and religious zealots, full-on neocons and blank-stare ideologues.
