Surviving Trump?

So how are we to resolve the contradictory opinions about the Trump administration? Is President Trump something our Founders never anticipated, an existential threat to our democratic institutions? Or is he just another more or less typical Republican president? Or, finally, is the administration totally ineffectual, with a White House in chaos and perhaps the weakest legislative accomplishments in the past 50 years? Which is it?

Well, the answer is, in some respects, “all of the above.” In many ways, the legislative agenda of tax cuts focused on the rich; massive increases in the federal deficit and debt; threats to make serious cuts in Medicare, Social Security, and other federal social programs; privatization; backing away from climate change and civil rights; and deregulation is just an extreme version of the GOP political agenda that has evolved over the 35 years since Reagan’s inauguration.

In other ways, President Trump is presiding over the most ineffectual administration we have ever seen. There is no policy process in the increasingly chaotic White House; hundreds of appointed positions remain vacant; the much ballyhooed “infrastructure” initiative is dead in the water, as is, apparently, immigration reform; and the government is lurching from one short term extension of spending authority to the next.

Despite these thoughts, I’m going to argue that in three ways, the Trump administration represents something unique and dangerous. Our civil institutions may or may not be up to the challenge, but the effects of this presidency will be negative and long-lasting. We all need to be alert to these dangers.

First, the president and his people have repeatedly attacked the credibility of the media, the judiciary, the FBI, the intelligence community, and many other institutions of our democracy. The Republican congressional leadership was the first institution to fail completely, abdicating its essential role to provide checks and balances. Our judiciary is also being transformed in ways that will affect us for decades. The identification of judicial nominees has been turned over to a fringe conservative organization, the Federalist Society, which has replaced the traditional search for the most highly qualified jurist who shared the general political philosophy of the president with a search for ideological purity. Now, people who are rated “unqualified” by the American Bar Association are gaining lifetime appointments to the courts. These young and highly ideological Trump appointees will affect the basic outlines of our government and political process for 40 years or more.

Departments such as State, Education, HUD, Interior, and the EPA have been facing the challenge of surviving agency heads who are fundamentally hostile to the agency’s mission. Widespread efforts have been reported to purge civil service employees who have done research on unpopular topics or voiced views unsupportive of the Trump administration ideology.

Perhaps the most extreme assault on the workings of our government happened in the Justice Department, where the president conducted a months-long vendetta against a single civil servant and in the end the Attorney General followed an extraordinary process to fire this individual before the charges against him had even been published. Although “pointy headed federal bureaucrats” have long been a popular target, we depend on this professional workforce for law enforcement, protection from terrorists, research on diseases, national defense, and many other essential services. In many agencies, this workforce is in tatters and will take decades to rebuild.

Second, the concept of the “public good” is under attack. Concepts such as universal public education and public lands for the use and enjoyment of the public date back 150 or more years while the idea of public funding of “good roads” is a more recent construct. FDR (Social Security) and LBJ (Medicare and Medicaid) brought us the idea of “retirement with dignity” and the elimination of elderly poverty. Trump’s budgets have called for steep cuts in social programs. The VA, roads, parks, and entitlement programs are all facing the threats of severe cuts and/or privatization.

Finally, the Trump administration has virtually walked away from the post-World War II world order (NATO and other Regional alliances, free trade, promotion of democracy, crisis mediation through the UN, etc.) that has guaranteed peace and economic growth under US leadership. Trump’s attacks on democratic leaders such as Theresa May and Angela Merkel, his support for autocrats, his appetite for confrontation, the implementation of tariffs, and the virtual dismantlement of the diplomatic corps has caused our allies to question our dependability and has made the world a more unstable and dangerous place. Restoring trust may be the work of decades and once abandoned, our leadership in international economic and political matters may be impossible to restore.

We have also learned that the president has refused to order his intelligence agencies to take any steps to defend our elections system from the Russian interference that we know is coming. He cannot unambiguously denounce Russian political assassinations in the capital city of our oldest ally or a violent protest by white nationalists. The country is deeply divided and the president’s behavior is promoting further divisiveness. We all need to be prepared to defend the institutions of our democracy because it doesn’t look like either our president or our Republican congressional leadership intends to.

Leon Reed is a member of Gettysburg Democracy for America.