All the Dictator’s Men
The assault on liberal democracy is a whole-of-government Trumpist project.
Part of the Trumpian project is to erect such an imposing façade of power and legitimacy that we forget that the underlying foundation is weak—very, weak. Check out this polling aggregation from the New York Times:
Nate Cohn writes: “The latest Times/Siena poll finds just 37 percent of Americans approve of President Trump’s performance, putting his ratings in new political territory. . . . no president’s approval rating has been under 38 percent for more than a few days in the last 17 years, according to our average.”
Until now, that is. Happy Thursday.
It Sure Looks Like Dictatorship
by Will Saletan
Todd Blanche, the acting U.S. attorney general, testified yesterday before the Senate Judiciary Committee. He is seeking formal confirmation to his job. The whole arrangement is grotesque: Blanche is Trump’s well-paid former personal attorney, and as deputy attorney general, he has already done numerous corrupt favors for the felon who appointed him.
But the hearing was instructive. Blanche displayed the sort of personality that serves comfortably in an authoritarian administration.
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) asked Blanche, “Do you think [the] blanket pardon by the president of January 6th rioters was the right thing to do?”
Blanche gave an answer that would have sounded quite natural in a dictatorship: “The Constitution gives the president the full power to pardon anybody for any reason he wants. And so I don’t question President Trump’s authority or his decision to do so.”
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R. I.) asked Blanche about his role in arranging the dismissals of cases against January 6th defendants. Blanche again: “He has the absolute right to pardon anybody for any reason he sees fit. And every one of them got pardoned or commuted. . . . The fact that my department had to take action in response to those pardons, by dismissing some cases, is exactly what I have to do under the law. And it’s what I did.”
That’s how an apparatchik thinks in an authoritarian regime. To Blanche, “under the law” doesn’t mean that the president has to respect the jurors who convicted his supporters of crimes. It means that the apparatchik must do whatever the president commands. And if the president has a power, that power cannot be questioned, advised, or held to a higher standard.
Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) asked, “Is the Department of Justice that you are running independent from the White House?”
“The Department of Justice, like every single department in the executive, is part of the executive,” Blanche replied. “Article II of the Constitution gives the power of the executive to President Trump.”
Sen. Dick Blumenthal (D-Conn.) asked about Trump’s commutation of the sentence of David Gentile, a fraudster who reportedly said he had paid for clemency. Again, Blanche refused to address the merits. Trump “has full authority to pardon or commute anybody convicted of federal crime,” Blanche insisted. “He does not, nor should he—[he] has no obligation to discuss pardon or commutation decisions with me.”
Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) asked Blanche about a press conference he gave on April 8. At the press conference, a reporter had brought up Trump’s demands “to see his perceived political enemies prosecuted.” Blanche, responding to the reporter, had affirmed that some DOJ prosecutions involved people whom “the president in the past has had issues with and that [he] believe[s] should be investigated. That is his right. And indeed, it is his duty to do that.”
At yesterday’s hearing, Blanche stood by that answer. He told Hirono, “As the president of the United States, under Article II, he’s in charge of the Department of Justice. And so my answer reflects that idea.”
Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) asked Blanche whether the DOJ “should be independent or not.” Again, Blanche emphasized his loyalty to Trump: “The Department of Justice is under the executive branch. If confirmed, I will be a member of the president’s cabinet.”
Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) asked Blanche about an agreement he had signed—in response to a lawsuit filed by Trump—to exempt Trump’s family from tax investigations. Schiff noted that it was an obvious scam, since Blanche was Trump’s former lawyer as well as his appointee. Blanche stood by his role in the agreement. “Somebody had to sign that document, when the president sued,” he told Schiff.
Somebody had to sign that document. He has the absolute right. He has no obligation. Any reason he wants. I don’t question.
This is the sort of person who rises to power in an authoritarian government—or, to put it more precisely, the sort of person who rises in service to power.
Blanche is also the sort of person who gets confirmed by an authoritarian Senate. Even Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, the Republican on the committee who was considered most likely to oppose Blanche, endorsed the nominee’s slavish loyalty. Tillis said he opposed some of Trump’s decisions, but added, “Not you, Mr. Blanche. You work for somebody, and you’ve got to do what you’re told to do.”
Actually, no. In a free country, people don’t have to do what they’re told to do. Blanche could have opposed the January 6th pardons, the tax immunity deal (for which Blanche was recently referred by a federal judge to the New York Bar for discipline), or Trump’s demands to prosecute his enemies. Instead, he saluted and complied. He represents exactly what our government has become.
It Is What It Looks Like
by William Kristol
It’s sometimes painful, but surely important to see things as they really are. The last couple of weeks in American politics have been helpful in that respect. They’ve made it harder to miss seeing the stunning depth and breadth of the Trump administration’s illiberalism.
Actually, “illiberalism” is too mild. As Robert Kagan has explained, what we’re seeing is not so much illiberalism as anti-liberalism. It’s not that Trumpists don’t quite understand the case for liberalism, or that they’ve unwittingly deviated from liberal norms or principles. It’s a frontal assault on liberalism in the broad sense of the word—on democracy, on the rule of law, on civil and political liberties, on limited government, on pluralism, on honesty and decency. That assault has been purposeful. It now spreads across the entire Trump administration and permeates its ranks. For all of Trump’s erraticness and unpredictability, for all of his administration’s misfires and clownishness and zigs and zags, Trumpism has an animating spirit, and the Trump administration has a coherent project.
Just yesterday we saw this, at the confirmation hearings for Todd Blanche as attorney general and Jay Clayton as director of national intelligence. As Will explains above, Blanche’s testimony is an illustration of “how an apparatchik thinks in an authoritarian regime.”
Will’s analysis of Blanche also holds for Clayton. When Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee asked Clayton who won the 2020 election, his response was that Joseph R. Biden Jr. was “certified” as the winner. Clayton wouldn’t actually say Biden won.
This is all part of the Trumpist rewriting of history. Indeed, Trump will deliver a primetime speech tonight challenging the results of the 2020 election. It will no doubt be an easily mockable performance, and there will be much talk of Trump’s endless obsession with 2020 and of his psychological need not to admit defeat.
But it is more serious than that. As Orwell famously wrote, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” The speech will claim to be based on new “intelligence” assembled by Bill Pulte, Trump’s current acting director of national intelligence. And it’s part of a series of claims Trump has been making of widespread rigging of elections in the United States—not just of the 2020 contest. All of this is, in turn, undergirds a broad-based effort by his administration to lay the groundwork for an attempt to subvert free and fair elections in 2026 and especially in 2028, and if necessary for not abiding by the results.
It was also yesterday that Trump reversed the announcement by his Department of Homeland Security that it would suspend most vehicle stops in light of the killings of innocent men by government agents within the last week. Trump was caught unaware by the decision, and immediately overturned it. “We CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!” the president wrote. Trump cares more about maintaining the all-out assault on immigrants than even pretending to make obviously reasonable reforms. Meanwhile, an unprecedented number of individuals are not just being killed on the streets by ICE but are dying in ICE’s custody.
The more one looks at the mass deportation agenda and the fervor of its embrace by Trump and Trumpists, the more one is reminded of Umberto Eco’s observation in his great 1995 essay, “Ur-Fascism”:
Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks for consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country. This is the origin of nationalism.
And one can easily look beyond DOJ and ODNI and DHS for evidence of the assault on liberal norms and principles. From the weightiest matters, such as Trump’s renewed threat to commit possible war crimes by targeting civilian infrastructure in Iran, to the more symbolic ones, like the attempt to reshape the history told in our national parks and the Smithsonian, the assault on liberalism is a whole-of-government effort.
Dare one apply to that project Eco’s term, Ur-Fascism? It can sound extreme or overwrought. But read Eco’s essay. And look at the Trump administration, with its assortment of diligent apparatchiks, crazed fanatics, eager enablers, slimy opportunists, and, yes, performative clowns pushing more or less in the same direction. Look at the spirit of the political movement that impels it. This is in fact what many fascist and proto-fascist governments and movements have looked like. Trumpism looks and sounds and behaves like ur-fascism. It can be unpleasant to see things for what they are. But it’s important to do so.
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AROUND THE BULWARK
Who’s to Blame? Ask the Far Right—They Have a List. Feminists, immigrants, professors, and just about everyone else: a look at the movement’s ever-expanding catalogue of villains, from MATT MCMANUS.
Trump’s Sort-of Gift to Kyiv… Making Patriot missiles in Ukraine is a good idea . . . eventually, writes BRYNN TANNEHILL.
Senate Dems’ Top Strategist Outlines His Path to the Majority… A good environment, the right candidates, and a bit of luck might very well equal 51 members, even with Platner-esque speed bumps, reports LAUREN EGAN.
Quick Hits
NOW I’M JUST A HUMBLE COUNTRY CHICKEN: The thing about populists is that most of the time, the people who base their entire political brands on appealing to “real Americans,” the “working people,” the “common man,” the “forgotten men and women of America” are actually egomaniacs who disdain the rubes they trick into supporting them. Especially in America, plenty of politicians grow up poor or experience hardship in their lives before they rise to high office. The late Lindsey Graham is one example—but he never promoted himself as the true champion of the toiling masses.
You know who did, though? Vice President JD Vance. While Vance has already, in his short political career, changed his tune more often than a toddler with Spotify, the central theme of it has been his hardscrabble upbringing (as detailed in his best-selling memoir Hillbilly Elegy and then later in the major film of the same name) and his authentic representation of a forgotten, downtrodden part of (white) America—not just Appalachia but anywhere drugs and deindustrialization have ruined the lives of (white) people.
All of which is to say that this report from MS NOW about Vance’s abuse of expensive government-funded travel for the most ridiculous possible personal reasons is completely unsurprising:
On Thursday last week, Secret Service agents groused among themselves as they prepared to deliver another perk to Vice President JD Vance’s family: join a military helicopter crew to fly his young son to his golf lesson. . . .
Agents have shared concerns internally about Vance and his office pressing them for trips and assignments that some agents consider an inappropriate or even unprecedented use of government resources compared to prior vice presidents, they said. . . .
Operating the helicopter costs taxpayers between $16,000 and $24,600 per hour of use, according to 2022 Defense Department budget estimates.
Read the whole thing. It’s always the ones you most suspect.
YOU’RE FIRED: The Trump administration—and Donald Trump himself—aren’t exactly known for their stable and predictable personnel practices. But in terms of government tenures, this story makes Anthony Scaramucci look like Andrew Marshall:
The Trump administration fired a federal prosecutor on Wednesday, less than an hour after he was appointed to lead the United States attorney’s office in Seattle, a move that sets the stage for a likely legal battle.
Federal judges in the Western District of Washington had unanimously appointed Roger Rogoff to be the Justice Department’s top official there, filling a vacancy that the president has never addressed. But the Trump administration has largely defied attempts by federal judges to fill vacancies, leading to Mr. Rogoff’s swift dismissal, via email, after 54 minutes.
Unlike in similar Trump administration firings, Mr. Rogoff has retained an employment law firm and is weighing a legal fight over his dismissal.
The New York Times has the full story. The second Trump administration has a long-running beef with the judiciary about who gets to appoint U.S. attorneys and how. The judiciary’s position is: Only people legally allowed to hold the roles get to fill them, and if the offices stay vacant for too long, the local courts will pick someone, per longstanding precedent and law. Trump’s position is: Screw you and your rules! To which he apparently also now wishes to add: If I can’t (or, more accurately, won’t) pick a U.S. attorney, then no one can!
REMEMBER EBOLA???: Explosive diarrhea is bad and all, but that Ebola outbreak in central Africa still isn’t contained—not by a long shot. The Economist has the story:
“We keep asking and we still haven’t got anything,” says Moise Bulabantu, from a dingy clapboard clinic on the outskirts of Bunia, a city in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. The 38-year-old community nurse is the only public-health worker in his district of more than 40,000 people, where an outbreak of Ebola has been spreading. Every day he sees patients who are feverish or vomiting. But the government has yet to send protective equipment. “We’re pushing for the minimum,” says Mr Bulabantu, who has bags under his eyes. “We only have gloves.”
Stories such as Mr Bulabantu’s are common across Ituri, the main province affected by the Ebola epidemic. When the Congolese government declared an outbreak on May 15th, the disease had been spreading for at least six weeks, prompting the World Health Organisation (who) to declare it a public-health emergency two days later. Health authorities are still failing to contain the epidemic.
As of July 11th Congo had confirmed 1,830 infections, more than 90% of them in Ituri, and 648 deaths. On July 9th the government admitted that the disease had spread to two other provinces. There is a high risk it could soon enter neighbouring South Sudan. Unless the response improves dramatically, the current outbreak may become as bad as the one that killed more than 11,000 people in West Africa a decade ago, according to calculations in June by the American Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.
Read the whole thing. Surely none of this is exacerbated by the massive cuts to USAID, right?
Cheap Shots
Jon Ossoff was great yesterday, but he still didn't ask the question I would have posed about the 2020 election. I would ask the nominees, "Do you believe that the president would rescind your nomination if you stated clearly and unequivocally that Joe Biden won the 2020 election?"
I wish someone had asked Blanche if he is an agent for selling pardons and if he is recieving a commission on such transactions