Beyond Scandal: Tracking Trump
A lot has been written about Donald Trump. But are we any closer to understanding his significance? And when we do, can we live with what it tells us?
I am finishing a book on presidential scandals since Watergate, and summing up Trump is lying across the finish line like a beached whale. Initially, I felt his major achievement would be to rescue the reputation of George W. Bush, who I had down as the worst president of my lifetime; “worst” in the sense of incompetence, married to a rare ability to mutilate the English language. Now, it’s clear Trump can also claim to have rescued Richard Nixon.
The Nixon Library recently exhibited cordial letters exchanged between the disgraced former president and the then rising real-estate developer that document Trump’s belief that Nixon got a raw deal. Unsurprisingly, I don’t agree, but certainly the Watergate break-in and the efforts to conceal the burglars’ ties to Nixon seem paltry, when compared to Trump’s readiness to accept Russian intelligence against Hillary Clinton, the timely Wikileaks revelation of hacked emails; his willingness to pressurise Ukraine into finding dirt on Joe Biden’s son, Hunter; his non-cooperation with Congressional investigations; victimisation of whistle-blowers; and finally being prepared to foment insurrection rather than accept defeat. He dawdled during the Capitol riot and seemed indifferent to whether or not the mob managed to hang Vice-President Mike Pence.
Nixon used to refer to politics as the arena. He felt it was ruthless, and you did to the other side what they would do to you. But while he tried to use presidential powers for electoral advantage, he did not embrace foreign interference in his presidential campaigns with the readiness of a Donald Trump. During the 1960 campaign, Nixon did not publicise intelligence reports that showed that there was no “missile gap” in the Soviets’ favour as his Democratic challenger John Kennedy alleged. When Kennedy won by a whisker, Nixon accepted the result ostensibly to ensure that the nation was not weakened by internal divisions (privately, he was also advised that legal challenges were unlikely to succeed). Nixon was, however, happy to use intermediaries to encourage the North Vietnamese not to agree a cease-fire or negotiating terms in 1968 as that might otherwise help Hubert Humphrey.
In much the same way, Ronald Reagan was untroubled by his team’s readiness to work to delay the release of US embassy hostages from Tehran in order to ensure that their captivity remained a drain on Jimmy Carter’s presidency. The Reagan team, like the Trump one, was also ready to depict Congressional Democrats as working to weaken the United States. That outlook fuelled the Contra part of the Iran-Contra scandal. As subsequent investigations revealed, Oliver North and others in Reagan’s National Security Council felt that the State Department’s policy of not trading arms for hostages could cost lives and damage Reagan politically. They thus foreshadowed the way Trump’s entourage worked against what they saw as “deep state” Democrats among career diplomats and administrators across several departments, not just State. In other words, what seems striking about Trump is not that he tried to run America for his own advantage, but that he did it more blatantly, with little or no effort at concealment; apart from (and this is hardly a little thing) his refusal to allow staff to comply with Congressional requests for testimony or documents.
It can be argued that Iran-Contra was a bigger constitutional crisis than Watergate, yet Reagan was not impeached, and his legacy and reputation emerged remarkably untainted. Americans were not scandalised enough. Of course, Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh’s report was not filed until after Reagan had left office and his successor George Bush, Sr. pardoned several key players at the end of his own term, which helped to contain the scandal further. Trump, of course, pardoned several past associates such as Michael Flynn and Roger Stone, and he also pursued those who had informed Congress of his wrongdoing or testified against him. This was symptomatic of a partisanship that had tipped over into personal vendettas. Back in 1987, Dick Chaney and others on the Congressional investigative committee made clear in their dissent from the majority report that Iran-Contra had exposed partisan divisions that made it more likely that future presidents would face hostile independent prosecutor investigations. The Democrats were accused of criminalising policy differences; an approach Trump would dub a “witch hunt.” The intensified, partisan warfare of the Trump era can also be traced to Bill Clinton, who not only beat Bush in 1992, but reversed GOP expectations (raised by the Republican Congressional surge under Newt Gingrich in 1994) by winning again two years later.
Understanding Donald Trump, ironically, requires us to understand America’s complex relationship with Bill and Hillary Clinton. They were his enablers in the key sense that they left the country even more cynical about politics. The “Moral Majority” felt in 1992 that Bill Clinton was as suspect a candidate as many Democrats felt Trump to be when he ran against Hillary. Both men had skeletons in their closets, and in sharply different ways, an uneasy relationship with the truth. Clinton’s slipperiness was captured by his response to questions about his pot smoking in which he famously declared that he didn’t inhale. Hillary’s antipathy to press questions about her finances fed into what became the Whitewater scandal, the unlikely springboard for the Lewinsky investigation and impeachment. Trump’s chronic inability to tell the truth is well documented. He routinely has either failed to see the moral dimension of charges against him ( boasting of a “perfect phone call” to the Ukraine premier) or reacted by talking about somebody else’s wrong-doing (Bill Clinton’s when the Access Hollywood tape caught Trump boasting about his abusive treatment of women). He has decades of experience in legally stalling and counter suing, or accusing both judges and the media of bias and spreading “fake news.”
Trump’s victory was inextricably tied to America’s mixed attitudes to Hillary Clinton. Her nomination reflected her place as the best-known woman on the political scene, and her defeat confirmed that knowing was not always the same as liking. Progressive Democrats, the kind attracted to Bernie Sanders, felt she was just another corporate lawyer, while Trump Republicans were ready to believe that she was in league with paedophiles and other agents of Satan. If, by the end of his two terms, many Americans mistrusted Bill, an even larger proportion, perhaps, had never warmed to Hillary. Her profile as a smart, successful, career woman triggered for some, both fear and resentment. By 2016, if you sought a face to symbolise the establishment, you could have chosen few better than Hillary’s, and for all those people, energised by the Tea Party, who equated this establishment with the “swamp,” she embodied what they detested. The rumours about who funded the Clinton Foundation and where its money really went, fed the suspicion that Hillary’s natural habitat was the wetlands of “crony capitalism.” She may have spoken the consensus in her own circle that Trump was rallying the “deplorables,” but in key states, she underestimated how widely she herself was deplored. Inside the Trump camp, it was recognised that victory depended on making the election about voters’ fears about her, not Trump; and they were there.
Trump’s success was also rooted in profound changes in the Republican Party. In the decade after Bill Clinton’s 1996 victory, a conservative realignment in American politics became ever more visible at the state level. State Republican majorities used this local power to redraw district boundaries. Politicians got to choose their voters rather than voters choosing politicians. The result was to make primary contests tougher battles than the general election and favoured hard-line partisan figures. Candidates had to feed true believers with a rich diet of core party values. Once Republicans and Democrats had shared a consensus. Social media and talk radio had sharpening the divide into a chasm. Now, within the GOP, there developed a paranoid view that you couldn’t trust Washington to do the right thing on immigration, abortion, gay rights, foreign wars, or the economy.
What angry Democrats saw as a carefully orchestrated plot by Florida Governor Jeb Bush to steal the White House for his brother G.W. in 2000, was more clearly the product of a system that relied on local people and ageing technology that were simply not up to the task. But in setting the stage for Trump, it was an episode that eroded faith in the integrity of elections. Eight years later, Barack Obama’s victory seemed to renew both faith and hope, but his presidency camouflaged what was actually happening. Conservative rather than progressive forces grew more entrenched (witness the Tea Party’s rise, for example, or the “gun control” debate). For all the chatter about Obama’s win heralding a post-racial society, the reality was a nation growing more racist.
Meanwhile, Trump was establishing his truly national profile via The Apprentice, playing the part of a successful businessman who told it straight. He was tough and direct, not like established politicians, who churned out pre-vetted statements and obsessed about issues understood only inside the Beltway. Trump himself was a TV product who relied on television for his version of reality. Re-watch the early series of the hit show Scandal and ponder how most of its politicians from the President down rely on Olivia Pope to conceal their secrets, while plotting ever more scandalous acts. Its depiction of the “deep state” is lurid enough to have lodged permanently in Donald Trump’s psyche. One can readily imagine him longing for a secret cadre of ruthless killers who would take down his enemies, and it seems the obvious source for his conviction that his opponent tampered with the voting machines to rig the election!
The Obama years were perhaps inevitably dispiriting for many African Americans. They fed the never-fully-dormant suspicion that no matter how great a candidate sounded, little seemed to change for them once he or she was in office. The Trump campaign was not the first to try to boost voter apathy in key Democratic districts but social media offered new weapons. One set of messages could get Republicans angry enough to vote for Trump and another set could get Democrats too suspicious or resentful to vote for Clinton.
Ultimately, to understand Trump’s significance, you need to focus on the hard fact that his 2020 vote tally was significantly higher than four years earlier. Despite all the scandals, more Americans chose him. They chose him even though they had seen him in action. Such support has made leading Republicans wary. Even after the January 6 Capitol invasion, efforts to punish Trump have gained little traction within the GOP, and that confirms my main point. To understand Trump, you need to see him not as an aberration or in isolation, but as symptomatic of a toxic political culture.
Conservative jurists are apt to celebrate the Founding Fathers and preach that they want the Constitution to be read as the Fathers intended. The Founders themselves, it’s fair to say, were more sceptical than celebratory of democracy as we understand it. Those who favoured a republic stressed that its survival depended on virtue. Politicians needed to be virtuous men and voters needed to be virtuous, too (and for a long time, that meant they had to be free white males, too). Typically, this emphasis has justified political exclusion; not everyone was virtuous enough to vote and even fewer were virtuous enough to hold office. Derived from the classical world of Athens and Rome, the concept implies the ability to exercise sound moral judgement. Few would see Trump as virtuous in this sense, and a society that chooses Trump as its president and overlooks his scandals is lacking virtue as well. Even if fears of a resurgent Trump in 2024 prove groundless, Americans across party lines need to find enough virtue to regain their ability to hold scandalous presidents accountable.
