Trump’s Disgrace

It was one thing to anticipate this prolonged political moment; it has been, these past weeks, quite another to live it. Each day is its own fresh hell, bringing ever more outrageous news from an autocrat who revels in his contempt for the government he leads, for the foreign allies who deserve our support, and for the Constitution he is sworn to uphold. Since beginning his second term, six weeks ago, Donald Trump has commandeered public attention to such an extent that it is hard to recall that there was ever a time when an American President went about his first weeks in office in a frenzy of activity characterized not by threat, chaos, and corruption but by discipline, competence, and compassion.

Yet there was such a time. On the overcast morning of March 4, 1933, Franklin Roosevelt arrived at the U.S. Capitol to deliver his first Inaugural Address. The country was in a general state of misery. Since the start of the Depression, in late 1929, one out of three American workers had lost his job. Countless schools were shuttered. Banks were collapsing. Edmund Wilson, reporting for The New Republic, wrote that “there is not a garbage-dump in Chicago which is not diligently haunted by the hungry.”

Roosevelt, having defeated Herbert Hoover in the popular vote by eighteen points, could honestly boast of a mandate and understood its meaning. As he said in his speech at the Capitol, the demands of the “stricken” electorate were clear: “This nation asks for action, and action now.” Before the notion of a President’s “first hundred days” was ever codified, he set off on a tear of executive orders and legislative initiatives. Roosevelt, with the support of enormous Democratic majorities in Congress, quickly saved the national banking system, took the U.S. off the gold standard, paid out significant relief to the poor, and created federal agencies that not only provided work to the jobless but helped revive the country’s economy and infrastructure for decades to come.

It has not taken Trump a hundred days to match Roosevelt’s New Deal for its speed, its “muzzle velocity,” as Steve Bannon, Trump’s formerly incarcerated court philosopher, has put it. But, while Roosevelt set a modern standard for the revitalization of a society, Trump seems determined to prove how quickly he can spark its undoing. In record time, he has brought shame and disorder to the country. Where F.D.R. set out to build and to comfort, Trump has set out to fire countless civil servants, punish his adversaries, and threaten the press. He has cast aside essential climate actions, humiliated undocumented immigrants and trans men and women, coddled dictators, and unnerved allies. F.D.R. appointed Cordell Hull, Harold Ickes, and other formidable advisers to his first Cabinet; Trump has empowered extremists distinguished principally by their conspiracy thinking, sycophancy, and incompetence.

F.D.R. created the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Tennessee Valley Authority; Trump has deputized Elon Musk, who has billions of dollars in contracts with multiple federal agencies, to freeze federal funding for programs that millions of Americans depend on and to fire thousands of workers in vital government agencies. “We will make mistakes,” Musk said in the White House, flashing a smile of privilege and malice. So far, these little goofs include, but are not limited to, momentarily laying off people who oversee the nuclear-weapons stockpile and cancelling Ebola-prevention measures.

Roosevelt, in his time, led the conquest of global fascism and the rescue of Europe. On matters of foreign policy, Trump has rapidly made common cause with autocrats from Budapest to Beijing and has made it clear to our European allies that when they come to Washington they had best flatter his ego and bear gifts, such as an invitation to visit King Charles. In the Oval Office on Friday, Trump nakedly sided with Russian aggression, berating the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, for failing to show him sufficient gratitude and respect and for “gambling with World War Three.” Zelensky is a hero of historic scale, brave beyond measure; Trump’s behavior was disgraceful. He and his Vice-President, J. D. Vance, deliberately tried to intimidate Zelensky with all the finesse of a couple of small-time hoods. The incident was both shocking and inevitable, all in line with the over-all temper of Trump’s Presidency—the threats, the firings, the multiple doge fiascoes, the proposal to cleanse the Gaza Strip of two million Palestinians.

Is this really what Trump’s supporters voted for? How does the decimation of American values, institutions, and commitments bring down the price of eggs? Writing in Foreign Affairs, Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way make a painstaking and convincing case that most autocracies that have emerged since the end of the Cold War retain certain democratic features, particularly elections, but weaponize the state, purging it of perceived enemies. This sort of “competitive” autocracy—like Erdoğan’s Turkey and Orbán’s Hungary—is, the authors argue, what is now taking shape in Washington. To minimize the unending fusillade of Trump’s first weeks in office, to choose to turn away, to shut off the news, is to indulge in self-soothing.

There is no guarantee that Trump’s perverse momentum will slow, or be derailed, of its own accord. He has the unwavering support of his MAGA base, the cowed compliance of his congressional caucus, and the backing of multibillionaires such as Jeff Bezos, who would rather diminish the vitality of his newspaper than risk the dinner invitations of the sovereign.

And yet the current torrent, fuelled by years of planning in right-wing circles and by Trump’s demagogic energies, is hardly unstoppable. Will working-class and middle-class Americans tolerate the self-indulgence and the corruptions of Trump’s favored billionaires while their own interests go unaddressed? Will Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who is currently being tested by an outbreak of measles in Texas, have the public’s trust in the event of another pandemic? We have already seen how at least some courageous judges, governors, and law-enforcement officials have refused to bow down to the politicization of the law, or, as Levitsky and Way put it, the weaponization of the state.

Roosevelt, at the start of his Inaugural Address, said that there was no need “to shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today.” In our time, the crisis resides in the Oval Office. Whether there is a mandate for what is being practiced there will be made clear in the months to come––in Congress, in the courts, in the press, in the streets, and, eventually, at the ballot box. Fear itself was the singular enemy in Roosevelt’s time. It remains so today. ♦