Trump or No Trump?

Or How Not to (Play) Bridge

The title of this essay alludes to the card game of Bridge. My parents played Bridge; my grandparents played Bridge; I have no clue how to play Bridge. I suppose it’s becoming a lost art, kind of like playing piano in the parlor. Forsaken pianos have become a nice piece of furniture in a well-appointed house (disclosure: I have a grand piano, I love it, I play it, but I’m no pianist). One thing I did find fascinating about Bridge are those terms “trump” and “no trump.”  I have no idea what they mean in Bridge, but in the political context I do, and it’s not good.

I’m one of those many squeezed between the Trump and No-Trump political tribes. I often end up arguing points of difference with both. Back in 2016 I was a No-Trumper, mostly because I thought he was completely inexperienced as a political leader and suspected his campaign was mostly a publicity stunt. I was no fan of Hillary Clinton either and voted for neither. I was as surprised as anyone when Trump actually won. (And yes, he did win. The national voting data showed that Trump won convincingly across the broad landscape of the country. Russian bot interference was not in any way determinant.)

However, I found the craziness that ensued after Trump’s election rather troubling. As a long-time student of US politics, I knew Trump was a symptom, not the cause of our national political dysfunction. But the No-Trumpers had convinced themselves that he was the cause of all our national chaos and therefore needed to be removed at all costs. I suspect this thinking follows from the Great Man (Person?) perspective on history. The prime example of this school of thought is that if there had been no Hitler there would have been no Second World War and no Holocaust. I have never found this approach a convincing way of understanding history. Did Hitler create Mussolini? Stalin? Mao? The Japanese military machine? Single personalities certainly do shape the contours of history, but I truly doubt they are the singular or dominant cause of what transpires on a grand scale. If Putin or Xi had not arisen, someone similar would have taken control of these authoritarian regimes.

The past six years of national political disorder promoted by the No-Trump left and right has convinced me that perhaps we need to continue to disrupt the political status-quo. After all, who were the great disrupters in 2016? Not Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush. No, the disrupters were Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. The DNC kneecapped Sanders in the primaries, so we the people elected the Chief Disrupter. And who were the disrupters in 2020? Again, it was Sanders and Trump, certainly not Biden. Biden looks more and more like a placeholder for the Democratic liberal left.

The different voters’ responses of the Democratic left and Republican right to party dysfunction are worth noting. Leading up to the 2016 Republican primaries, Republican voters had already dismissed the Republican vanguard that failed to represent their interests. John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Jeb Bush, John Kasich, John McCain, Mitt Romney, all had been pushed to the sidelines by primary voters. On the Democrat side,  despite the populist and popular criticisms by Bernie Sanders, nothing of the sort happened, as establishment Democrats were rewarded with re-election. The biggest surprise was probably the election of a few political novices, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, but they hardly represented the concerted voices of disaffected Democratic voters.

This dichotomy among partisan voters is likely driven by the behavioral predilections of right-leaning conservatives vs. left-leaning liberals. Conservatives believe in small, decentralized government and individualism, whereas liberals see centralization and collectivism as the solutions to national problems. It is much more difficult for the Republican party to get its voters to march in lockstep, while it comes rather naturally for liberal Democrats. There was almost no objection to the DNC sidelining Sanders, who proceeded to endorse his primary opponents Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. On the other hand, Republican voters ended up going all in for the anti-establishment candidate who might disrupt ‘politics as usual.’ So, disruption is coming from only one side of the political aisle, while the other stands pat trying to hold onto power.

But if Trump is a symptom, then all the anti-Trump rhetoric is a dangerous sideshow. It maintains the illusory center of attention through the megaphones of the media and establishment political parties. But in no way am I able to condone removing our institutional constraints in order to delegitimize a presidential administration, no matter how much I disagree with the policies of that administration. But while institutional constraints have been applied in total against Trump’s indiscretions and miscues, there has been no institutional constraint on the anti-Trump side. This has led to a double-standard of justice that serves politics, not justice.

Like I said, all this craziness has convinced me that going back to the establishment of Clinton, Biden, Bush, Obama, McConnell, Schumer, and Boehner is a non-starter. I argued this reasoning for the re-election of Donald Trump in 2020. The J6 protest was another symptom of the disruptive forces in our politics. Trump was imprudent to stand pat when the protest turned riotous and he has suffered politically for that mistake ever since. It was not smart politics, as he seemed to be driven by his ego.

So let me be clear on what I’m arguing. The disruption we need is not to destroy the institutions of our democracy, but to replace the political class that is failing to uphold the interests of the voters it claims to represent. This means that incumbent politicians and their party apparatus need to be challenged by voters and I suspect most of this challenge is coming from the right. And their standard-bearer is, for better or worse, Donald Trump. While this might sound like an endorsement of Trump to those No-Trumpers out there, it’s really a decrying of the politics-as-usual status quo that seems to be dividing this nation into two camps. As they say, “Throw all the bums out!”

I find it ironic that the No-Trumpers are arguing that such populist rhetoric now threatens our democracy. (Yes, it seems only right populism is the threat, left populism is, well, the voice of the people?) But isn’t populism the distilled essence of democracy? But, they say, Hitler was elected by a democracy. Technically true, but the institutional constraints had collapsed and Hitler amassed an army of supporters under the Nazi Party with the SS and Gestapo. Trump has certainly not enjoyed any such support from the US military or the FBI or CIA. On the contrary, all these bureaucratic enforcement elites appear to have been vociferously opposed to POTUS Trump. 

So, isn’t the real threat the politicization and corruption of our institutions? From what I see, Trump has been constrained by thousands, if not millions, of bureaucratic Lilliputians, while the institutions of the Justice Department, the FBI, the CIA, the military, and the Fourth Estate all seem to be doing the bidding of a political party. These institutions have worked for us in the past because they have not done the work of politics, but rather the work of the Constitution. If so disfavored, Trump, or Biden, or whoever, should be removed by the electoral process. To prevent this happening through fair elections is the real threat to democracy.

I don’t have a lot of hope for bridging our national politics coming up to 2024, because nothing is resolved. Biden offers a sclerotic and incompetent response and Trump a chaotic one. The Rich Men North of Richmond appear to be losing total control and the natives are restless. Perhaps it will take a crisis for disruption to really take hold. One can only wonder how it will all turn out. I don’t have the answer, but I do know one thing with almost complete certainty: Trump or No Trump? is not the question. Pray for a miracle.