Democracy's Institutions are Falling to the Demagogue

Department of Justice lawyer Erica Newland

An article published in April in The Atlantic, The President Is Winning His War on American Institutions, lays out the status of the president's attacks on institutions that were supposed to stand in defense of democracy and the rule of law. This is very ugly. If the president is re-elected, he could very well push this country into a downward corrupt, authoritarian trajectory that it cannot recover from. The Atlantic writes:

“After three years, the adults have all left the room—saying just about nothing on their way out to alert the country to the peril—while Trump is still there. 

James Baker, the former general counsel of the FBI, and a target of Trump’s rage against the state, acknowledges that many government officials, not excluding himself, went into the administration convinced “that they are either smarter than the president, or that they can hold their own against the president, or that they can protect the institution against the president because they understand the rules and regulations and how it’s supposed to work, and that they will be able to defend the institution that they love or served in previously against what they perceive to be, I will say neutrally, the inappropriate actions of the president. And I think they are fooling themselves. They’re fooling themselves. He’s light-years ahead of them.” 

The adults were too sophisticated to see Trump’s special political talents—his instinct for every adversary’s weakness, his fanatical devotion to himself, his knack for imposing his will, his sheer staying power. They also failed to appreciate the advanced decay of the Republican Party, which by 2016 was far gone in a nihilistic pursuit of power at all costs. They didn’t grasp the readiness of large numbers of Americans to accept, even relish, Trump’s contempt for democratic norms and basic decency. It took the arrival of such a leader to reveal how many things that had always seemed engraved in monumental stone turned out to depend on those flimsy norms, and how much the norms depended on public opinion. Their vanishing exposed the real power of the presidency. Legal precedent could be deleted with a keystroke; law enforcement’s independence from the White House was optional; the separation of powers turned out to be a gentleman’s agreement; transparent lies were more potent than solid facts. None of this was clear to the political class until Trump became president. 

When Trump came to power, he believed that the regime was his, property he’d rightfully acquired, and that the 2 million civilians working under him, most of them in obscurity, owed him their total loyalty. He harbored a deep suspicion that some of them were plotting in secret to destroy him. He had to bring them to heel before he could be secure in his power. This wouldn’t be easy—the permanent government had defied other leaders and outlasted them. In his inexperience and rashness—the very qualities his supporters loved—he made early mistakes. He placed unreliable or inept commissars in charge of the bureaucracy, and it kept running on its own. 

But a simple intuition had propelled Trump throughout his life: Human beings are weak. They have their illusions, appetites, vanities, fears. They can be cowed, corrupted, or crushed. A government is composed of human beings. This was the flaw in the brilliant design of the Framers, and Trump learned how to exploit it. The wreckage began to pile up. He needed only a few years to warp his administration into a tool for his own benefit. If he’s given a few more years, the damage to American democracy will be irreversible.

[Department of Justice lawyer Erica] Newland and her colleagues were saving Trump from his own lies. They were using their legal skills to launder his false statements and jury-rig arguments so that presidential orders would pass constitutional muster. When she read that producers of The Apprentice had had to edit episodes in order to make Trump’s decisions seem coherent, she realized that the attorneys in the Office of Legal Counsel were doing something similar. Loyalty to the president was equated with legality. ‘There was hardly any respect for the other departments of government—not for the lower courts, not for Congress, and certainly not for the bureaucracy, for professionalism, for facts or the truth,’ she told me. ‘Corruption is the right word for this. It doesn’t have to be pay-to-play to be corrupt. It’s a departure from the oath.’” (emphasis added)

Despicable John Bolton

In a recent interview, John Bolton said that he would not vote for the president or Joe Biden. Instead, he will find what he considers to be an acceptable conservative and write that person in as his vote for president. For all the good that tactic will do, Bolton should just write in himself or Mickey Mouse or anyone else real or imagined. It will be just another vote for the president that he so bitterly criticizes. Given Bolton’s insider knowledge and experience, his write-in tactic is idiotic and unpatriotic. He knows far better than most of us. Bolton’s lunacy is just another example of how incoherent, authoritarian and tribal the GOP and its radical ideology have become among GOP elites and probably many of the rank and file. Despite his first-hand knowledge, he still doesn’t have the moral courage to bring himself to defend the country against a demagogue tyrant-wannabe.

The irrational John Bolton