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government of the United States into chaos that
President Obama issued the very order that he himself had so repeatedly denounced as beyond his authority. In the long history of presidential overreach, there had never been a case like it: a president asserting a power that he himself while actually serving as president had forcefully and repeatedly condemned as unlawful.
It’s a strange version of the Constitution that says the president gains greater power to say yes when Congress tries to tell him no. Pre-2012
Nothing like this radical denial of the Americanism of a serving president had been seen since the Civil War era, if then. The denial also revealed that as the country diversified, its conservatives would insist ever more militantly that no matter who might reside within the United States, the country’s institutions and identity should belong only to those recognizably like them.
They are. Of many things. But @ealDonalTrump [sic] has all the right enemies.”2
president’s defense of Confederate monuments had boosted his approval ratings
Donald Trump confess to a lifelong practice
WikiLeaks detonated the distraction that saved the Trump campaign.
greatest gift of the WikiLeaks Podesta hack to the Trump campaign, however, was the accelerant it offered to right-wing cultural
“A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian. This is not the gospel.”37 As ever,
disgraceful. I am proud to be a Christian and as President I will not allow Christianity to be consistently attacked and weakened, unlike what
But he never spoke to or for the whole nation.
He excelled instead at discerning the grievances and angers that set American apart from American—and especially the grievances and angers of those who, like himself, felt entitled to dominate the apex of American society and now found themselves somehow occupying a place beneath their expectations.
So how was Trump’s record-breaking $107 million inaugural haul actually used? Good question, and one to which few will ever learn the answer. Many inaugural donors voluntarily disclose their gifts, but there is no obligation upon the inaugural committee to disclose
charity ever announced receipt of any gift from this source, nor did Trump’s inaugural committee offer any accounting for
the party institutions that yielded to Trump, far and away the most important was Fox News.
Megyn Kelly would leave Fox in January 2017. After the election, Fox’s coverage descended to new sub-basements of abjectness. Fox would replace Kelly with Tucker Carlson, who filled his hour with trolling and spoofing
is spreading today is repressive kleptocracy, led by rulers motivated by greed rather than by the deranged idealism of Hitler or Stalin or Mao. Such rulers rely less on terror and more on rule twisting, the manipulation of information, and the co-option of elites.
No president in history has burned more public money to sustain his personal lifestyle than Donald Trump. Three-quarters of the way through his first year in office, President Trump was on track to spend more on travel in one year of his presidency than Barack Obama in eight—even though Trump only rarely ventured west of the Mississippi
120 million to provide security to the Trump family, half of it to reimburse local police in Palm Beach and New York City for the extra costs imposed by President Trump’s weekend getaways and the decision by First Lady Melania Trump to maintain a separate residence in the first year of the Trump presidency.6 Even this
as the Trump family was to the presidency, the presidency was correspondingly lucrative to the Trump family. Jonathan O’Connell reported in the Washington
Authoritarian governments around the world scented possibility in an incoming Trump administration whose style so resembled theirs. Days before the 2016 election, the brutal president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, named the developer of Manila’s Trump-branded property as his special envoy to the United States.27 Duterte would collect his reward in the form of a flattering phone call from President Trump on April 29, 2017.
Trump has successfully rolled back—and then some!—the ethical rules that have accreted around the presidency since Watergate. Tax
Trump is one by one disabling the federal government’s inhibitions against corruption. On March 10, 2017, Trump
you don’t get people in these roles, where they’re supposed to be working with prosecutors on the ground, it could really slow down high profile criminal investigations.
personal loyalists.
repeatedly publicly demanded that his attorney general initiate criminal proceedings against his former opponent,
Corruption is the resting state of public affairs; integrity a painstaking, unceasing struggle against cultural inertia and
The theory of American government is that official role, not blood relationship, determines who does what. If the president dies in office, he is succeeded by the vice president, not the first lady. There is no such role as “first daughter,” despite Ivanka Trump’s sometime use of that
Kushners accepted the prestige, power, and perks of the White House, but not
satisfying assurance that the president is appointing the fittest individuals—and not seeking “to build up fortunes for himself and his family”—is precisely what is most lacking under Trumpocracy.
“He’s the meanest man I’ve ever met,” a reporter
Trump has created a snake pit working environment, seething with hatreds and perforated by mutually vindictive leaks. He extracts groveling flattery in public and private, but never requites even the most abject loyalty.
Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, has been obliged to deliver untruth after untruth on Donald Trump’s behalf.
Between 2011 and 2015, Sekulow collected $230 million in charitable donations, the Washington Post reported in
most troubling of all of Trump’s hires, however, was his principal national security adviser during the campaign, the former lieutenant general Michael Flynn.
security team keeps well away from the more contentious forms of politicking. Condoleezza Rice, for example, spoke at
understand what Donald Jr. would later claim he did not appreciate: that he was witnessing—and being invited to participate in—a Russian espionage attempt against the US political process. Flynn would later neglect to disclose his Russia contacts on the relevant forms, forms signed under the penalty of felony.
Chief of staff Reince Priebus allowed Trump’s favorites to build self-aggrandizing empires of a kind never before seen in the West Wing. Jared Kushner has—and
When good men do bad things, they usually have good motives. McMaster, like many other national security experts and veterans, joined
The plan was never presented. Instead, the US military continues to execute Obama-era plans against ISIS in Iraq, capturing Mosul on exactly the timetable Trump had once derided as too slow and “so dumb.”44 Trump’s distinctive change to US counterterrorism policy has been
Twitter feud with Sadiq Khan, the
exhaustively investigated the deaths of US personnel at the Benghazi consulate in 2012, and the Internal Revenue Service’s scrutiny of the tax-exempt status of conservative groups that strayed too close to electoral politics, yawned away the ethical infractions of the Trump White House. “I think the people who voted for Donald Trump went into it with eyes wide open,” Jason Chaffetz, the chair of the House Oversight Committee, told my Atlantic colleague McKay Coppins in March 2017. “Everybody knew he was rich, everybody knew he had lots of different entanglements. . . . These other little
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businessman and Trump the candidate, plunged his working environments into chaos because he intuited that chaos enhanced his power. “We can’t do that, sir, it’s against the rules”
Trump did not merely fail to organize his government. He actively sabotaged organization wherever it began to take form. He let
Trumpocracy as a system of power rests not on deregulation but on nonregulation, not on deconstructing the state but on breaking the state in order to plunder the state.
American president in history—no national political figure of any kind since at least Senator Joe McCarthy—has trafficked more in untruths than Donald Trump. He owed the start of his political career to the Birther hoax. He
purpose: blatantly, to assert power over truth itself.”24
soon be commercialized—that will enable Internet trolls to create fake video clips of politicians and celebrities that will look and sound exactly like the impersonated original. Meanwhile, the line between fake-news trolling and ordinary right-of-center journalism is blurring.
United States used to champion rights and liberties around the world. In his July 2017 trip to Warsaw, however, Donald Trump stood side by side with Polish president Andrzej Duda and joined him
