Tag Archives: Trump

Consequences…

As the evidence of Trump’s mental illness gets stronger and more difficult to hide, and the resistance gets stronger, it’s possible to envision an end to MAGA’s horrific assault on America’s philosophy, norms and institutions and to engage in speculation about what comes next. Just how much of the damage being done is irrevocable? What can be fixed, and what harms lie beyond repair?

There is no denying the amount of damage done in just the first hundred days. It isn’t simply the “I’m king (or Pope) delusions–Trump and Musk have mostly resembled toddlers who somehow got control of the family’s technology, not understanding how it works or what the intended uses are–and are just gleefully smashing mechanisms they don’t begin to understand.

The rest of the world has looked on with a mix of horror and schadenfreude. (Our anguish has actually prompted some sanity elsewhere–both Canada and Australia have repudiated Trump-lite candidates in the past couple of weeks.) The Guardian recently reported that the United States has been added to the watchlist maintained by an international organization monitoring democratic progress and regression.

Civicus, an international non-profit organization dedicated to “strengthening citizen action and civil society around the world”, announced the inclusion of the US on the non-profit’s first watchlist of 2025 on Monday, alongside the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Italy, Pakistan and Serbia.

The watchlist is part of the Civicus Monitor, which tracks developments in civic freedoms across 198 countries. Other countries that have previously been featured on the watchlist in recent years include Zimbabwe, Argentina, El Salvador and the United Arab Emirates.

Not exactly the company we’re used to keeping….

The decision to add the US to the first 2025 watchlist was made in response to what the group described as the “Trump administration’s assault on democratic norms and global cooperation.”

In the news release announcing the US’s addition, the organization cited recent actions taken by the Trump administration that they argue will likely “severely impact constitutional freedoms of peaceful assembly, expression, and association.”

It’s instructive that the organization cited assaults in two separate domains: democratic norms that affect our internal governing behaviors, and the attacks targeting international cooperation, because my own reading of the daily damage being done reflects a similar division.

Assuming the success of what I have been calling the resistance, We the People will face the formidable–but ultimately “do-able”– task of reconstructing our federal governing apparatus. It won’t be easy, and a lot of Americans will be badly hurt before repairs can be made. Much like the occupants of a house destroyed by a hurricane, ordinary citizens will have lost a great deal–but they can also (to use Biden’s terminology) “build back better.” (Perhaps the threatened drastic cuts to Medicaid and other social welfare programs will finally prompt us to emulate the other Western countries where citizens have access to national health care systems. Etc.)

In other words, given sufficient time, Americans can repair the domestic damage. That is very unlikely to be the case with our international stature. Trump has demonstrated–vividly–that America cannot be trusted, that we are always just one election away from irrationality and chaos. We are already seeing the EU step up to fill the leadership gap in NATO. (We are also seeing China and Russia savor the moment–a more troubling development.)

America is in the process of learning an important lesson: it’s much too late to retreat from the global economy. Trump’s insane tariffs will hurt us badly, but the fallout will also demonstrate the folly of trying to retreat from an increasingly integrated world ecosystem. We can re-enter the global marketplace and economic reality, but I am convinced that the days of America’s overwhelming global dominance are over. Permanently.

And pardon me for my arguably unpatriotic reaction to that reality: it’s probably for the best. Our efforts to control the international order have too frequently been Machiavellian rather than noble. We have certainly done a great deal of good–which is why the assault on USAID is so horrific–but we’ve also flexed our international muscle in ways that were unwise and even shameful.

A global order in which we actively participate but don’t dominate–an international order in which no one country is able to call the shots–would be a step forward.

And while we’re not telling everyone else what to do and how to do it, we’ll have a civic house to rebuild.

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The War On Women Continues

One of the constants of Trumpism has been its war on women. Trump himself sees women only as sexual objects; the Christian Nationalists who support him see us as “feeders and breeders”– designed by God to submit to men and produce babies.

I was reminded of MAGA’s war on women when I read that Trump’s “big, beautiful budget” will defund Planned Parenthood, among other obscenities that will differentially hurt women.

During the first Trump  administration, Trump blocked women’s access to health care through legislation, regulations, judicial appointments, and legal action, slashing funding for family planning, rolling back rules requiring employers to offer no-cost birth control coverage, and revoking multiple protections against sexual harassment, sexual assault and discrimination.

Trump II has been more of the same–and then some.

Trump has decimated boards that administer workplace anti-discrimination laws, rescinded prior Executive Orders against discrimination, reduced enforcement of the Pregnant Workers Act, and undercut civil rights and anti-discrimination laws across the government, with anti-DEI efforts front and center. The administration has cut funding for research on women’s health, erased vital information from federal websites, and eliminated the Gender Policy Council. It proposes huge cuts to Medicaid, SNAP and other programs disproportionately depended upon by women and children. (There’s much more at the link.)

All of these measures are part of the Right’s hysterical resistance to culture change.

A significant minority of Americans feel existentially threatened by the progress of women and minorities. That progress challenges their worldviews, their beliefs about the “proper” order of the world. Trump was elected by those hysterical people. Even those who recognized his personal repulsiveness supported him because he promised to reverse what most of us consider social progress– to turn back the cultural changes that so frighten and infuriate them.

I wondered what research tells us about whether government can reverse cultural changes, so I looked into it.  

Studies tell us that such efforts face significant structural, social, and generational resistance. It turns out that entrenched social changes are really difficult to reverse. Shifts of attitudes about race, gender roles, sexuality, and religion occured over generations, and as a result, contemporary perspectives on individual autonomy and diversity are unlikely to be reversed.

 
 
 
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Being An American

I recently happened on a post I wrote in the run-up to the 2000 election, addressing a question that had been posed to me during a speaking event. The question was “What does it mean to be an American, and how will the answer to that question matter in the 2020 election?

I argued that being American requires understanding, supporting and protecting what I have frequently referred to as “The American Idea”– the essential elements of our country’s version of liberal democracy: majority rule and the libertarian brake on that majority rule, aka the Bill of Rights. American identity isn’t based upon race or religion or country of origin–it is based upon support of the American Idea.

I also argued that, in order to protect the legitimacy of U.S. government, we needed to address the escalating assaults on majority rule– gerrymandering (the practice whereby legislators choose their voters, rather than the other way around); the growth of vote suppression tactics (everything from voter ID laws to the spread of disinformation); the disproportionate influence of rural voters thanks to the operation of the Electoral College; the growing (mis)use of the filibuster, which now requires a Senate supermajority to pass anything; and the enormous influence of money in politics, especially in the wake of Citizens United.

Those assaults on democratic legitimacy were troubling enough in 2020. They clearly enabled the further assault on American democracy that we are experiencing under a mentally-ill would-be autocrat and his MAGA cult in 2025.

Trump hasn’t limited his efforts to the assault on majority rule. He has also taken Musk’s chainsaw to the individual liberties protected by the Bill of Rights, refusing to recognize–let alone honor– fundamental rights to due process, free speech and (above all) civic equality.

Individual liberty in the United States is protected by the constraints on majority rule required by the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment. Those provisions–those protections–mirror the libertarian principle that animated the nation’s Founders: the right of all people to live as they see fit, so long as they do not thereby harm the person or property of others, and so long as they are willing to grant an equal liberty to others. That “live and let live” principle doesn’t just  require limitations on government overreach; it requires that we combat official sanctions of racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, misogyny, Islamophobia…all of the “isms” that deprive some citizens of equal civic status and that operate to deny them their individual liberties.

It’s one thing to understand Trump himself: he’s obviously damaged– needy, massively ignorant, intellectually limited, declining into dementia. The harder question is, what explains the MAGA cult? What leads millions of presumably sane Americans to cheer on Trump’s defiantly anti-American efforts?

Part of the answer is civic ignorance; understanding and protecting both majority rule and individual rights requires an informed citizenry–something we don’t have, as mountains of data clearly show. When people don’t know how their government is supposed to work, they are less likely to recognize assaults on its governing philosophy. But civic illiteracy doesn’t explain MAGA, although it undoubtedly feeds it.

Racism, White Christian Nationalism and other associated bigotries are at the root of MAGA and Trumpism. America has never been able to overcome the periodic emergence of primal hatreds that motivated the Confederacy and the KKK, despite the fact that those hatreds are contrary to everything that defines Americanism.

Back in that 2020 talk, I said I was convinced that our civic challenge was about America’s structural and systemic distortions—that (assuming a Biden victory) our first order of business should be to confront the misuses of power that make fair and productive political debate about substantive issues impossible–that these failures of American governance needed to be addressed before any of the policymakers we might elect would be able to discuss, let alone pass, rational, evidence-based policies.

The need to address those systemic distortions has become more imperative, as we watch Trump take advantage of them to turn America into a very different country. As I said in 2020, you can’t drive a car if it’s lost its wheels, and you can’t govern if your institutions have lost their legitimacy.

Unless the systems are fair, unless we can rely on obedience to the rule of law by those in office, no minority of any sort–political, religious, racial, economic–is safe.

Assuming we emerge from this lawless and destructive administration more or less intact, we have our work cut out for us.

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Patrimonialism

What in the world is “patrimonialism”?

In a recent Atlantic essay, Jonathan Rauch argues that Trump’s approach to governance isn’t classic authoritarianism, autocracy, oligarchy, or monarchy. Instead, Trump is installing what scholars call patrimonialism. (I’m evidently not much of a scholar, because that’s a term I had never previously encountered. Live and learn…)

Rauch began by describing what we’ve all seen:

Since taking office, he has reduced his administration’s effectiveness by appointing to essential agencies people who lack the skills and temperaments to do their jobs. His mass firings have emptied the civil service of many of its most capable employees. He has defied laws that he could just as easily have followed (for instance, refusing to notify Congress 30 days before firing inspectors general). He has disregarded the plain language of statutes, court rulings, and the Constitution, setting up confrontations with the courts that he is likely to lose. Few of his orders have gone through a policy-development process that helps ensure they won’t fail or backfire—thus ensuring that many will.

In foreign affairs, he has antagonized Denmark, Canada, and Panama; renamed the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America”; and unveiled a Gaz-a-Lago plan. For good measure, he named himself chair of the Kennedy Center, as if he didn’t have enough to do.

Rauch cites to scholarship that locates the origin of the term in the writings of Max Weber–he of the Protestant ethic.

Weber explored the issue of legitimacy. What elements of leadership support an individual’s claim to rightful rule? According to Weber, there are two avenues to such legitimacy. One is “bureaucratic proceduralism”– a system in which following the rules and norms of institutions bestows legitimacy,. That, of course, is the system Americans have taken for granted. It’s why Presidents, federal officials, and military inductees swear their oath to the Constitution, not to a person.

The other source of legitimacy is more ancient, more common, and more intuitive—“the default form of rule in the premodern world,” Hanson and Kopstein write. “The state was little more than the extended ‘household’ of the ruler; it did not exist as a separate entity.” Weber called this system “patrimonialism” because rulers claimed to be the symbolic father of the people—the state’s personification and protector. Exactly that idea was implied in Trump’s own chilling declaration: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”

In his day, Weber thought that patrimonialism was on its way to history’s scrap heap. Its personalized style of rule was too inexpert and capricious to manage the complex economies and military machines that, after Bismarck, became the hallmarks of modern statehood. Unfortunately, he was wrong.

As Rauch explains, patrimonialism isn’t a systematic approach to governing; instead, it is “a style of governing,” replacing  rule-based, formal lines of authority with highly personalized ones based on loyalty to an individual. It’s a “system” of rewarding the leader’s friends and punishing his enemies. (Think about how “governance” works in tribes, street gangs, and criminal organizations.)

In government, it’s running the state “as if it were the leader’s personal property or family business.”

The difference between patrimonialism and autocracy is the former’s disdain for bureaucracy, because bureaucratic rules and processes might obstruct the “dear leader’s” desired actions.

People with expertise, experience, and distinguished résumés are likewise suspect because they bring independent standing and authority. So patrimonialism stocks the government with nonentities and hacks, or, when possible, it bypasses bureaucratic procedures altogether. When security officials at USAID tried to protect classified information from Elon Musk’s uncleared DOGE team, they were simply put on leave. Patrimonial governance’s aversion to formalism makes it capricious and even whimsical—such as when the leader announces, out of nowhere, the renaming of international bodies of water or the U.S. occupation of Gaza.

Rauch points out that Trump is patrimonialism “perfect organism.” He’s unable to distinguish between public and private, legal and illegal, national and personal. As John Bolton, Trump’s first-term national security advisor, said “He can’t tell the difference between his own personal interest and the national interest, if he even understands what the national interest is.”

Patrimonialism has two fatal flaws: incompetence and corruption, and Rauch spends much of the essay documenting the evidence of both. It is well worth your time to click through and read in its entirety, especially since most observers–including this one–have been fixated on the incompetence and insanity, and only vaguely aware of the copious corruption. As Rauch reminds us, however, corruption is the real Achilles’ heel, because it’s understandable– not an abstraction like “democracy” or “Constitution” or “rule of law.”

The resistance needs to focus on it.

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There’s No Method To His Madness

The New Republic recently ran an essay titled “There is No Method to his Madness. He’s Simply Insane.” I couldn’t agree more.

The article began by noting that past heads of state have sometimes pretended irrationality in order to confuse opponents, but noted–confirming what any rational observer has already concluded–Trump is not among them. For one thing, he clearly lacks the intellectual capacity to devise such a strategy. Or any strategy.

It’s not just Trump’s unpredictable tariff policy that appears insane. His entire administration is defined by madness—in both senses. On Friday, he went on another incoherent rant on social media, claiming once that the 2020 election was stolen from him and rewriting history to blame all of our current problems, including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, on Joe Biden. In other Truth Social posts, he’s boasted about being a king and claimed that the “European Union was formed for the sole purpose of taking advantage of the United States.”

If these acts were merely confined to deranged posts, perhaps one could argue there’s “method in his madness.” After his rant on Friday, Trump gave a speech at the Justice Department wherein he kvetched about various imaginary enemies of the United States (which, coincidentally, are his personal enemies) and made clear that he expects the department to serve as an extension of his personal wrath. Similar delusions have led to the dismantling of USAID, a wasteful visit to Fort Knox to check if the gold had been stolen, and continual talk about annexing other countries.

The article goes on to detail further evidence that our would-be King has no (mental) clothes, despite his courtiers’ efforts to find method in the madness.

What makes the insanity so dangerous, however, isn’t simply Trump’s ignorance of governance and economics, but the venom that characterizes his approach to others, and the festering resentments that impel his actions. Trump is a limited intellect and damaged ego occupying a human body;  fears and jealousies and grievances–not strategies or principles–prompt his eruptions, and explain both his grandiose fantasies (comparing himself to Winston Churchill, annexing Canada) and his tacky decorating fetishes (gold toilets).

While it would be inaccurate to describe them as principles, there are a few long-standing grievances that predictably motivate Trump’s constant stream of illegal (and often ridiculous) Executive Orders. Our mad king thinks he is in a position to take revenge, not just over the legal system which (finally) was holding him to account, but over all those people who sneered at him over the years–those “elitists” with their intellectual and cultural bona fides, the businesspeople who made their fortunes without ripping off suppliers or hiding in bankruptcy court, the women who found his “charms” unpersuasive.

Politics gave Trump the adulation he wanted, but from people he clearly despises.

Those long-standing resentments explain so much: Trump’s war on a legal community defending rules he regularly broke–and his special animus for the lawyers who had the nerve to represent people antagonistic to him. His refusal to allow disclosure of his own GPA undoubtedly sheds some light on his efforts to destroy intellectual inquiry on the nation’s campuses. Both his own resentments and the need to pander to his MAGA cult help explain his efforts to turn academia into a mechanism for Right-wing propaganda.

As for the roots of his White Nationalism–his definition of “DEI” as discrimination against White men and his ferocious efforts to return women and minorities to subservience–I can only assume that he agrees with MAGA that his White skin is a sign that he is superior and that any effort to ensure fair treatment for women and minorities is an attack on that superiority. (Unfortunately, his entire administration demonstrates the folly of believing Whiteness denotes even minimal competence…)

Bottom line: the United States has a president who is ignorant, petulant and demonstrably insane. He is also, in all probability, a Russian asset. Our constitutional system of checks and balances is currently not working, because members of the GOP majorities in the House and Senate fear the mad king and are not living up to their oaths of office, and the Supreme Court’s majority is ethically compromised.

The remedy must come from We the People. And it begins by acknowledging the truth of that last paragraph.

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