The release of sections of Bob Woodward’s new book Fear, based on hundreds of hours of interviews with Trump Administration officials, followed almost before anyone could take a deep breath by the New York Times’ Anonymous op-ed entitled “The Quiet Resistance Inside the Trump Administration,” describes a systematic derangement of normal American politics that seems to be without precedent. People everywhere, here and abroad, claim to be shocked and surprised.
Yes, well, it is hard even for many well educated Americans to wrap their heads around all this. Many of the comments Woodward attributes to a range of senior officials are truly breathtaking in their frankness. And Woodward, having been there for Watergate and beyond, is credible to the vast majority of Americans in ways that adversary culture gadflies like Seymour Hersh and Michael Moore—the Oliver Stones of American journalism—are not. So it’s not so easy to shove this stuff under a mental rug. Once you’ve read these remarks you can’t unread them. They are unusually sticky.
But for me, expressions of surprise and proclamations of the unprecedented trigger yet another Niagara Falls moment welling up from deep in my gut: Slowly I turn, step by step, inch by inch. . .
Why? My dislike of sanctimonious ignorance, mainly. America, even amid the West generally, is supposed to be different—exceptional even. We are always telling themselves, and any others who will listen, that we boast the world’s oldest democratic constitution. The United States epitomizes rule of law, not rule of men, and, in that sense, it is the ultra-modern state as Max Weber famously described the differences between charismatic, traditional, and institutional authority.
So we in the United States cannot have what historians of Asia have referred to as the “bad emperor” problem—top-heavy, highly personalistic political cultures whose entire orientation can turn on a penny, for better or more often for worse, when the old ruler passes from the scene and a maverick with aspirations far outrunning experience takes over. So old and pervasive in history is the bad emperor problem that it even makes cameo appearances in the Hebrew Bible, the best known being from Exodus: “. . . and there arose in Egypt a pharaoh who knew not Joseph.” (Everyone knows what happened next.) Even with a presidential as opposed to a parliamentary democracy, the U.S. political order is immune to such shocks.
Or so we used to think, and on that basis proceeded to lecture others—Arabs especially, especially after 9/11—that they should strive to be more like us. We always misunderstood the reasons for our institutional differences, and wildly underestimated the difficulties of change in what was, to be frank, an unwitting, unacknowledged faith-based (if secularized) orientation to the topic. But now little seems to remain from the anxious triumphalism of that time, little of the American “model” to commend itself to others. And after the 2008-09 financial meltdown, a good deal of which can be traced to the intrusion of highly normal corruption patterns into institutions thought to have been made safe from them, the economic aspect of the model is little less appealing than the political one.
Indeed, many foreign observers, especially those living in countries that are not liberal democracies—those who in typical American self-absorbed fashion we rarely if ever even think about at times like these—are doubtless enjoying the spectacle. Some may not see what the big deal is: rife incompetence in high places aided and abetted by conspiratorial mentalities in low places; treachery, insubordination, and even treason within inner circles; plotting and scheming in the military-intelligence sector of the sort that rhymes with the word “coup”—so what’s new? The thought that America is really not so exceptional, except perhaps in its penchant for condescension, has to be sweet for many who have been the target of our lecturing and hectoring over the years.
We feel it here, too. As I’ve noted before, we have now elected two Presidents in a row, from very different slices of the electorate, that have not avowed American exceptionalism as all their predecessors did. The difference between Obama and Trump in this regard is mainly one of tone: Obama was demure, respectful, and knowledgeable if disenchanted, while Trump is arrogant, dismissive, and ignorant as the summer day is long. But take them together and the shine seems to have come off the exceptionalist apple in a big way. We seem to have arrived at a new, non-exceptionalist, normal. One doesn’t have a “resistance within” in the old exceptionalist normal. To be surprised at the existence of one is to cling to the hope of exceptionalism—good work if you can get it, I suppose.
The truth is that disconcerting, perilous, and out-of-the-ordinary events of several different sorts have pockmarked U.S. political life from the beginning. The self-congratulatory myth of our own exceptionalism has its benign uses, to be sure—and every healthy polity needs such myths. But we’re fools to take such antiseptic pabulum too seriously, not least because they create shock and surprise where there should not be shock or surprise.
First consider briefly a few structural deformities that were with us from the outset. The Framers—wide-eyed idealists that many of them were—managed to ignore the whole business of parties, despite Madison’s discussion of “factions” in The Federalist (No. 10); the Constitution doesn’t mention them at all. And that is partly why the original constitutional structure, wherein the second-place finisher in the election for President automatically became Vice President despite their likely political enmity, had urgently to be changed once the hyper-partisan era of the Alien and Sedition Acts (passed in 1798) came upon us. That was accomplished though the 12th Amendment, ratified in 1804. We usually don’t teach K-12 students this—too complicated, and maybe too embarrassing, perhaps?
Until the Civil War, too, because of the “three-fifths” clause, slave states had an artificially large share of the Electoral College. Three-fifths of the slave population counted in the census numbers but no slaves voted or were in any meaningful way citizens, thus also giving Southern states about a third more congressman than Northern states before the Civil War than political reality would have dictated. (We seem not to teach this either.)
Second have been gran-mal political shenanigans. For perhaps the best example, but not the only one, note that the Tilden-Hayes election of 1876 ended with the winner (Tilden) not becoming President. That was thanks to a backroom deal that ended post-Civil War Reconstruction and allowed the institutionalization of segregation in the Old Confederacy in return for Republicans maintaining control of the White House. The deal voided for most practical purposes the Civil War amendments to the Constitution (the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments), and amounted to a quiet confession that Reconstruction had failed. (We definitely don’t teach this, because it would cast doubt on the crypto-religious interpretation of the war that enables us to make some sense of its massive slaughter.) As such it was only the first American nation-building fantasy following a military occupation: You can’t rapidly change people’s minds and institutions at the point of the bayonet, unless the people themselves want to change.
Now, third, let’s skip to a more modern vignette, one closer to the news of the day about the resistance within. Donald Trump is not the first President whose staff has countermanded his direct orders, or hid papers from him so he could not sign them. At the very beginning of the Reagan Administration in January 1981 several new members of the infant Administration did not have proper security clearances yet, so two holdovers from the Carter Administration—not political appointees, but Foreign Service officers—were asked by the first National Security Advisor to President Reagan, Richard Allen, to take official notes at the Administration’s first two NSC meetings. The main issues for both meetings were the Soviet threat to Poland, Poland’s debt crisis and danger of default, and Central America. The latter was especially important for the President because of campaign statements he had made.
After receiving an intelligence briefing informing him that Cuban military aircraft were flying arms to Nicaragua destined for rebels in Salvador, President Reagan made it clear that he might order the Air Force to shoot down any aircraft coming out of Cuba with arms destined ultimately for Salvadoran rebels. Reagan specified nothing about where the planes might be: over Cuban or Nicaraguan airspace, or over international waters. After the meeting, one of the note takers—a man named Timothy E. Deal—went up to Richard Allen and asked if he really wanted the President’s comments on this matter in the official record. Deal thought it unwise and Allen agreed, answering: “No, let’s leave that out of the meeting summary.”
Later on, after Reagan was wounded in an assassination attempt and then into the second term when his energies and mental acuity declined somewhat, a series of informal protocols allowed for the bypassing of the President on a fairly regular basis. At the same time, Reagan occasionally deferred major judgments to trusted aides, sometimes surprising and shocking those aides.1
And this sort of thing was by no means unique to the Reagan Administration. To cite just three examples, Edith Galt Wilson became de facto President after her husband’s stroke on October 2, 1919, at least according to many accounts. A kind of privy council ran the national security dimensions of the U.S. Government when President Eisenhower fell ill during his tenure: He suffered a heart attack in 1955, underwent abdominal surgery in 1956, and had a stroke in 1957. Most notably, Richard Nixon’s staff held a great deal from him during the waning days of his presidency, when the President seemed often not to be in his right mind.
Neither Edith Wilson nor Eisenhower’s advisers had to deal with someone who was, in the common vernacular, “crazy.” They were not therefore faced with managing from the inside what the Israeli scholar Yehezkel Dror famously referred to back in 1971 as a “crazy state.”2 Nixon was under acute but temporary stress, and his closest aides—including Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig, Jr.—did have to worry about outcroppings of “exotic” behavior from the beleaguered Nixon.
Donald Trump, however, is an altogether different story. Trump was never competent, either by experience or temperament, to be President. He showed clear signs of personality disorder, as a classic textbook narcissist. Anyone who agreed to work for him knew this, but figured either that once in office Trump would delegate responsibilities out of an awareness of his own limits, or that, if he didn’t, there but for the grace of God someone had to protect the country from his mania.
Some of the latter are true patriots. In June I spoke privately with an U.S. Army General serving in Europe, not yet retired so his name must remain unstated, who related a conversation he had had only shortly before in Washington with Secretary of Defense James Mattis. Secretary Mattis will remain in office so long as the President wishes him to, or at least does not explicitly wish him not to, I was told, not because Mattis craves the limelight but because he cares deeply about the security of the nation.
Does that include a willingness to lead or participate in a resistance from within? Could that come to include in extremis invoking the 25th Amendment, wherein a President can be relieved of office due to, among other conditions, “incapacitation”? Anonymous tells us in the New York Times that the resistance within eschewed from the start talk of invoking the 25th Amendment. Incapacitation, however, is a word that can mean many things. What if a group of senior officials comes to conclude that President Trump is mentally incapacitated, but the President disagrees? What if they proceed anyway, with the participation of senior military and intelligence officials? How does that differ from a coup?
Of course, many senior Republican figures said publicly during the campaign that Trump was not fit for the office and signed letters refusing to support him or work for him if he got elected. So in a way the “resistance” from within Republican quarters started before the Administration even began. Recall, too, that Republican Senator Bob Corker claimed back in October 2017 that the White House amounted to an adult daycare center. Others who left the Administration long before this month—H.R. McMaster, Rex Tillerson, Gary Cohn, and others—have held similar views, but had the decency not to run them up a flagpole. Still, people do talk, and word spreads.
The result is that it is hard to explain the surprise people have claimed to feel in recent days. Of course it is surprising in its details, because nothing so blatant and staged has ever happened before—and no one believes that the near-simultaneous revelations of the Woodward book and the Anonymous op-ed are an unrelated coincidence. But at the same time it is not surprising at all. What is happening was always inherent in the idea of a Trump presidency.
A psychological parallel with mourning may be at play. When someone is gravely ill, say with terminal cancer, we know they are going to soon die; but the actual death still comes as a surprise, as a shock, even though we ought to have been prepared for it. It’s just human nature. Most people just can’t assimilate the unusual even when they have every rational reason to be able to do so.
Not surprising? Always inherent in the idea of a Trump presidency? Yes; but also no for an increasing number of Americans. What do I mean?
Everyone knows that America is deeply polarized politically between “red” and “blue.” And it is, at least to some extent, although most Americans are probably still more centrist and tolerant than the more extreme ideologues who now dominate both major parties. But the polarization that matters right now is not that between “red” and “blue” but rather between “rooted” and “floating” people. The polarization that matters is not political but social.
Rooted people have at least a basic sense of what normal politics in Washington actually is like—because they read about it fairly regularly, work in or around large organizations that in some ways resemble modern governmental institutions, and care about such things even if they are not involved in them personally. Most floating people don’t read much of anything, are not conversant with symbol manipulators in complex organizations, and many inhabit a phantasmic fictional world of never-ending conspiracy theories peddled by mass entertainment media. Rooted people know the difference between reality and fiction. They may sense bias in the New York Times, say, but they know the difference between natural bias in real news and full-frontal faked news—and they know that the faked stuff comes from Fox and the White House, with some minor assistance from Russian bots. Floating people, often enough, really can’t tell which is which, so if they are disgruntled or confused they will incline to credit the insurgent anti-establishment Trump, not spokesmen for a reality on which they lack a firm fix in the first place.
Confronted with Woodward and Anonymous, rooted people gasp at the depth of dysfunction and the subterranean machinations that exist to protect against its more dangerous manifestations. That does not make them wholly immune to emotional overreaction and rancid ideological thinking, to be sure. The “hate Trump” crowd, similar to the “hate George W. Bush” crowd, is just the more or less equal opposite to the “hate Barack Obama” crowd—all these people evoke Niagara Falls moments in me. But floating people react mainly by invoking “deep state” conspiracy theories. Not that some egregiously partisan behavior inside the FBI isn’t a problem, but there simply is no American “deep state” comparable to that in places like, say, Egypt.
Yet floating people now have a prominent model for emulation, a powerful validator of their predispositions. We Americans have a President who, when shown unredacted signals intelligence evidence of Russian interference in the November 2016 election, simply replied, without elaboration, that he “had a different view”—clearly suggesting that he thought that senior U.S. intelligence officials had shown him faked documents. A floating person got elected President, thus norming a floating worldview for many Americans who had heretofore demonstrated some reluctance to go all in on a conspiratorial mindset.
The ratio of rooted to floating Americans has shifted markedly toward the latter at a time of eroding social trust and rising ambient fear at the pace and nature of social change, and that shift is the ur-source of the American polarization that matters most right now. Some refer to this shift generically as populism, but the term doesn’t begin to explain what is really going on. One way to think more usefully about the term is to define it as a level of mobilization in a mass-enfranchised democracy that dips below the mean of the deep-literate population—which has always existed. That’s a bad thing for those who see in the mobilized non-deep literate a horde of pitchfork-wielding deplorables, but it does not speak well for their faith in democracy. It’s not necessarily a bad thing for those who see in this mobilization a justified reaction to an elite that has become venal, condescending, complacent, detached, and very bad at making core public policy decisions.
As for me, populism thus defined does make me wary, not that I have much respect for the elite against whom that populism is aimed. (I haven’t voted for a major party candidate for President in a long time.) I have faith in Madisonian democracy—a form of the species that buffers the affairs of state from the urgencies of the mob. I share the sense in which Alexander Hamilton reportedly answered a democratic idealist with the words: “Your people, sir—your people is a great beast.”3 I have no problem with a dedicated elite devoted to public service having the lion’s share of authority in a republic, not by right but by benign custom. I do have a problem—even a Niagara Falls moment—whenever I hear some nitwit say that the problems of a democracy can all be solved by more democracy.
Consider in that light this sarcastic, tongue-in-cheek remark from H.L. Mencken, back on July 25, 1920 in the long-since defunct Baltimore Evening Star: “As democracy is perfected, the office of the President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be occupied by a downright fool and complete narcissistic moron.”
Alas, some predictions come true. But why did it have to be this one?
Will Donald Trump remain President until the end of his term? Or does the Woodward/Anonymous spectacle hint at a different future? Obviously, one cannot examine the spectacle in isolation from both the Mueller investigation, which since the flipping of Michael Cohen has made demonstrable progress, or from the upcoming midterm elections, which cannot help but be a referendum of sorts on the Trump presidency. And of course no one knows what will happen, for the future is a winking satyr bent on making fools of us all. I suppose it is safe to say that it is also an incubator of much shock and surprise to come.
That said, it seems to me that neither a kind of soft coup nor an impeachment conviction is in the offing.
The resistance within will not move to invoke the 25th Amendment unless it concludes that its efforts to constrain Trump are failing massively and portend clear and present danger, and that an effort like that could both succeed and be worth the damaging precedent it could set. It’s possible, but unlikely.
Impeachment would require significant Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate, for it is after all a political phenomenon, not a legal one. That may happen thanks to the midterms; but it probably won’t.
If that’s right, the basic result will be the even deeper paralysis of normal American government function for at least the next two years. The focus on what, for lack of a better term, has to be called a domestic crisis will deepen. The American role in the world will thus be at times distracted, at times manic, and at most times in unpredictable oscillation between the two. Adversaries and allies abroad alike will have little of dependable purchase from Washington. That can stimulate risk aversion abroad, but it can also be a goad to dangerously opportunistic behavior.
Whatever happens, rest assured: Many will express great surprise. And when they do, depending on how they do it, slowly I turn, step by step, inch by inch…….
