Imagine that an impeachment
resolution against Trump passes the House. Trump claims it’s the work of the
“deep state.” Fox News’s Sean Hannity demands every honest patriot take to the streets.
Right-wing social media call for war. As insurrection spreads, Trump commands the armed forces to side with the “patriots.”
Or it’s November 2020 and Trump has
lost the election.
He charges voter fraud, claiming that the “deep state” organized tens of millions of illegal immigrants to vote against him, and says he has an obligation not to step down.
He charges voter fraud, claiming that the “deep state” organized tens of millions of illegal immigrants to vote against him, and says he has an obligation not to step down.
Demonstrations and riots ensue.
Trump commands the armed forces to put them down.
If these sound far-fetched, consider
Trump’s torrent of lies, his admiration for foreign dictators, his off-hand
jokes about being “president for life” (Xi Xinping “was able to do that,” he
told admirers in March. “I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll give that a shot some
day.’), and his increasing invocation of a “deep state” plot against him.
The United States is premised on an
agreement about how to deal with our disagreements. It’s called the
Constitution.
We trust our system of government
enough that we abide by its outcomes even though we may disagree with them.
Only once in our history – in 1861 – did enough of us distrust the system so much we succumbed to civil war. But what happens if a president claims our system is no longer trustworthy?
Only once in our history – in 1861 – did enough of us distrust the system so much we succumbed to civil war. But what happens if a president claims our system is no longer trustworthy?
Last week Trump accused the “deep state” of embedding a spy in his campaign for political purposes. “Spygate” soon unraveled after Republican House Oversight Chairman Trey Gowdy dismissed it, but truth has never silenced Trump for long.
Trump’s immediate goal is to
discredit Robert Mueller’s investigation. But his strategy appears to go beyond
that. In tweets and on Fox News, Trump’s overall mission is repeatedly
described as a “war on the deep state.”
In his 2013 novel “A Delicate Truth,” John le Carré describes the “deep
state” as a moneyed élite — “non-governmental insiders from banking, industry,
and commerce” who rule in secret.
America already may be close to that
sort of deep state. As Princeton professor Martin Gilens and Professor Benjamin
Page of Northwestern University found after analyzing 1,799 policy issues that
came before Congress, “the preferences of the average American appear to have
only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public
policy.”
Instead, Gilens and Page concluded, lawmakers respond to the policy demands of
wealthy individuals and moneyed business interests.
Gilens’ and Page’s data come from
the period 1981 to 2002, before the Supreme Court opened the floodgates to big
money in its “Citizens United” decision. It’s likely to be far worse now.
So when Trump says the political
system is “rigged,” he’s not far off the mark. Bernie Sanders said the same
thing.
A Monmouth Poll released in
March found that a bipartisan majority of Americans
already believes that an unelected “deep state” is manipulating national
policy.
But here’s the crucial distinction.
Trump’s “deep state” isn’t the moneyed interests. It’s a supposed cabal of
government workers, intelligence personnel, researchers, experts, scientists,
professors, and journalists – the people who make, advise about, analyze, or
report on public policy.
In the real world, they’re supposed
to be truth-tellers. In Trump’s conspiracy fantasy they’re out to get him – in
cahoots with former members of the Obama administration, liberals, and
Democrats.
Trump has never behaved as if he
thought he was president of all Americans, anyway. He’s acted as if he’s only
the president of the 63 million who voted for him – certainly not the 66
million who voted for Hillary or anyone who supported Obama.
Nor has he shown any interest in
unifying the nation, or speaking to the nation as a whole. Instead, he
periodically throws red meat to his overwhelmingly white, rural, and older
base.
And he has repeatedly shown he couldn’t
care less about the Constitution.
So what happens if Trump is about to
be removed – by impeachment or even an election?
In early April, Sean Hannity predicted that if impeachment began, “there’s
going to be two sides of this that are fighting and dividing this country
at a level we’ve never seen” – “those that stand for truth and those that
literally buy into the corrupt deep state attacks against a duly elected president.”
Last summer, Trump consigliore Roger Stone warned of “an insurrection like you’ve never
seen,” and claimed any politician who voted to oust Trump “would be endangering
their own life.”
A second civil war? Probably not.
But the way Trump and his defenders are behaving, it’s not absurd to imagine
serious social unrest. That’s how low he’s taken us.
Robert
B. Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of
California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center for Developing
Economies. He served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, for
which Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries
of the twentieth century. He has written fifteen books, including the best
sellers "Aftershock", "The Work of Nations," and "Beyond
Outrage," and, his most recent, "The Common Good," which is
available in bookstores now. He is also a founding editor of the American
Prospect magazine, chairman of Common Cause, a member of the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences, and co-creator of the award-winning documentary,
"Inequality For All." He's co-creator of the Netflix original
documentary "Saving Capitalism," which is streaming now.
