In September 2016, as the most anti-intellectual political campaign in modern American history neared its end, a surprisingly highbrow defence of Trumpism appeared in the Claremont Review of Books. Entitled “The Flight 93 Election”, an essay published under the pseudonymous byline Publius Decius Mus argued that the upcoming vote was a do-or-die moment for American conservatives, akin to the crisis of the September 11 passengers on United Flight 93. Charging the cockpit would bring no guarantee of success. “You may die anyway. You — or the leader of your party — may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. [but] if you don’t try, death is certain.” The author, Michael Anton, a Conservative intellectual who had written speeches for Rudy Giuliani and worked on Wall Street, urgently stressed that four more years of Liberalism, a la Clinton, would prove a death knell for the prospect of meaningful conservative reforms.
Anton’s essay turned all the right heads – he went on to serve as a national security official in the new administration – and was easily the most cogent explanation of the forces which had enabled Trump’s victory over far more experienced Republican candidates. Translated into slogans, however – and this was all Trump seemed capable of – its premises became childishly simple. America’s malaise due to too much government, too much political correctness, too many open borders, and too many foreigners and foreign entanglements. The time had come to reclaim the country; to make it great, again. Six months later, after Trump’s stunning victory had upended the political status quo, Steve Bannon, the White House’s chief strategist, tried to raise the intellectual tone of the discourse. He spoke about reinvigorated “economic nationalism”, Trump’s border-sealing sovereignty and, with visible excitement, looked forward to the wholesale “deconstruction of the administrative state.”
Two years later the consequences of these ideas are becoming painfully clear. Michael Lewis’s book “The Fifth Risk” recounts what happened to whole sectors of the US government after Trump’s election. First, Lewis outlines the myriad ways that the federal government permeates the lives of ordinary Americans: building firehouses, subsidizing food and ensuring its safety, preventing nuclear waste from seeping into rivers and gathering vast quantities of useful and often life-saving data. Gradually, its labyrinthine workings genuinely start to seem, as one bureaucrat puts it, like “the single most important and most interesting institution in the history of the planet.” And yet, although everyone knows about its weaknesses and failures, only a tiny handful of citizens grasp how much the much maligned administrative state underwrites their collective safety and well being. Which is largely why Trump has been allowed to assault the administrative state so easily.
Lewis considers the work of the “Food, Nutrition, and Consumer Services” at the Federal Department of Agriculture as one example of what is at stake. Prior to the Trump transition, this section of the FDA was managed by Kevin Concannon. For eight years he oversaw “the nation’s school-lunch program [which] ensures that pregnant women, new mothers, and young children receive proper nutrition; and a dozen or so smaller programs designed to alleviate hunger … approximately 70 percent of the USDA’s budget — he’d spent the better part of a trillion dollars feeding people with taxpayer money while somehow remaining virtually anonymous.” Like other senior bureaucrats, Concannon made elaborate preparations for a handover to new management when Trump was elected. But a formal transition never took place. Trump’s people did not even bother to speak with anyone who reported to Concannon. And so it seemed fair to say, [as he tells Lewis] that ‘they don’t seem to be focused on nutrition.’”
Similar outrages took place in nearly every department of the federal government. In many cases the administration sent over a handful of poorly informed and incurious outsiders who were imposed on agencies that they barely understood, or even actively opposed. (Politico subsequently reported that for “several USDA jobs, some of which paid nearly $80,000 a year, the Trump team had inserted a long-haul truck driver, a clerk at AT&T, a gas-company meter reader, a country-club cabana attendant, a Republican National Committee intern, and the owner of a scented-candle company, with skills like “pleasant demeanor” listed on their résumés.”)
Lewis’s chilling account of this malign contempt towards several branches of the government goes a long way towards explaining Trump’s subsequent missteps; his indifference to shutdowns, his willingness to declare a national emergency in order to build his wall. It also suggests a retrospective irony in the Flight 93 essay. Although – to revisit Anton’s image – the cockpit was successfully raided, it seems that Capt. Trump then did no more than stare idly at a few controls before handing over the aircraft to people who have steered it into a dive. Rather than “deconstructing” the federal government, Trump’s astonishing detachment from the institutions under his control has made his presidency into a do-or-die moment for US governance, just not in the way that his apologists intended.
