Thomas Edsall writes a regular feature for The New York Times. In this stunning article, he recounts the views of numerous scholars about what Trump has done since his Inauguration.
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Edsall writes:
One thing stands out amid all the chaos, corruption and disorder: the wanton destructiveness of the Trump presidency.
The targets of President Trump’s assaults include the law, higher education, medical research, ethical standards, America’s foreign alliances, free speech, the civil service, religion, the media and much more.
J. Michael Luttig, a former federal appeals court judge appointed by President George H.W. Bush, succinctly described his own view of the Trump presidency, writing by email that there had never
been a U.S. president who I consider even to have been destructive, let alone a president who has intentionally and deliberately set out to destroy literally every institution in America, up to and including American democracy and the rule of law. I even believe he is destroying the American presidency, though I would not say that is intentional and deliberate.
Some of the damage Trump has inflicted can be repaired by future administrations, but repairing relations with American allies, the restoration of lost government expertise and a return to productive research may take years, even with a new and determined president and Congress.
Let’s look at just one target of the administration’s vendetta, medical research. Trump’s attacks include cancellation of thousands of grants, cuts in the share of grants going to universities and hospitals and proposed cuts of 40 percent or more in the budgets of the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Science Foundation.
“This is going to completely kneecap biomedical research in this country,” Jennifer Zeitzer, the deputy executive director at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, told Science magazine. Georges Benjamin, the executive director of the American Public Health Association, warned that cuts will “totally destroy the nation’s public health infrastructure.”
I asked scholars of the presidency to evaluate the scope of Trump’s wreckage. “The gutting of expertise and experience going on right now under the blatantly false pretext of eliminating fraud and waste,” Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton, wrote by email, “is catastrophic and may never be completely repaired.”
I asked Wilentz whether Trump was unique in terms of his destructiveness or if there were presidential precedents. Wilentz replied:
There is no precedent, not even close, unless you consider Jefferson Davis an American president. Even to raise the question, with all due respect, is to minimize the crisis we’re in and the scope of Trump et al.’s. intentions.
Another question: Was Trump re-elected to promote an agenda of wreaking havoc, or is he pursuing an elitist right-wing program created by conservative ideologues who saw in Trump’s election the opportunity to pursue their goals?
Wilentz’s reply:
Trump’s closest allies intended chaos wrought by destruction which helps advance the elite reactionary programs. Chaos allows Trump to expand his governing by emergency powers, which could well include the imposition of martial law, if he so chose.
I asked Andrew Rudalevige, a political scientist at Bowdoin, how permanent the mayhem Trump has inflicted may prove to be. “Not to be flip,” Rudalevige replied by email, “but for children abroad denied food or lifesaving medicine because of arbitrary aid cuts, the answer is already distressingly permanent.”
From a broader perspective, Rudalevige wrote:
The damage caused to governmental expertise and simple competence could be long lasting. Firing probationary workers en masse may reduce the government employment head count, slightly, but it also purged those most likely to bring the freshest view and most up-to-date skills to government service, while souring them on that service. And norms of nonpoliticization in government service have taken a huge hit.
I sent the question I posed to Wilentz to other scholars of the presidency. It produced a wide variety of answers. Here is Rudalevige’s:
The comp that comes to mind is Andrew Johnson. It’s hardly guaranteed that Reconstruction after the Civil War would have succeeded even under Lincoln’s leadership. But Johnson took action after action designed to prevent racial reconciliation and economic opportunity, from vetoing key legislation to refusing to prevent mob violence against Blacks to pardoning former members of the Confederacy hierarchy. He affirmatively made government work worse and to prevent it from treating its citizens equally.
Another question: How much is Trump’s second-term agenda the invention of conservative elites, and how much is it a response to the demands of Trump’s MAGA supporters?
“Trump is not at all an unwitting victim,” Rudalevige wrote, “but those around him with wider and more systemic goals have more authority and are better organized in pursuit of those goals than they were in the first term.”
In this context, Rudalevige continued, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025
was not just a campaign manifesto but a bulwark against the inconsistency and individualism its authors thought had undermined the effectiveness of Trump’s first term. It was an insurance policy to secure the administrative state for conservative thought and yoke it to a cause beyond Trump or even Trumpism.
The alliance with Trump was a marriage of convenience — and the Trump legacy when it comes to staffing the White House and executive branch is a somewhat ironic one, as an unwitting vehicle for an agenda that goes far beyond the personalization of the presidency.
In the past, when presidential power has expanded, Rudalevige argued,
it has been in response to crisis: the Civil War, World War I, the Depression and World War II, 9/11. But no similar objective crisis faced us. So one had to be declared — via proclamations of “invasion” and the like — or even created. In the ensuing crisis more power may be delegated by Congress. But the analogue is something like an arsonist who rushes to put out the fire he started.
One widely shared view among those I queried is that Trump has severely damaged America’s relations with traditional allies everywhere.
Mara Rudman, a professor at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, wrote in an email:
The most lasting impact of this term will be felt in the damage done to the reputation of the United States as a safe harbor where the rule of law is king and where the Constitution is as sacred a national document as any country has developed.
Through his utter disregard for the law, Trump has shown both how precious and how fragile are the rules that undergird our institutions, our economic and national security and the foundation for our democracy.
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