The wheels on the bus
Trump's plans for a fascist second term
Marty Bannon was a hard-working man.
Like his father before him — like many in our area — he worked for AT&T for a good half-century, progressing through the ranks from blue-collar to white-collar status despite having only a third-grade education. So loyal was he to the telecom giant that he invested the bulk of his savings in company stock.
“He’s the backbone of the country, the everyman who plays by the rules, the hardworking dad that delays his own gratification for the family,” one of his two sons once said.
In October of 2008, as the Great Recession roiled the nation, Bannon saw economic showman Jim Cramer on the “Today” show advise everyone to sell, sell now. So he did, for pennies on the dollar. A hundred thousand dollars evaporated overnight. And while financial institutions lined up for government bailouts, Bannon had no such recourse; he was wiped out.
This is why one of his sons — former White House strategist and pardoned felon Steve Bannon — became a foe of “the administrative state” and eventually tossed his lot in with then-presidential candidate Donald Trump. “Everything since then has come from there,” Bannon told the Wall Street Journal in an extensive interview in March 2017. “All of it.”
And that’s when I first realized that Steve Bannon was full of shit.
Because Bannon’s father would not have been helped by the absence of an administrative state.
He would, however, have achieved some measure of justice if a stronger administrative state had existed — one that kept tighter reins on financial institutions and punished corrupt corporate heads who benefitted from crashing the economy. He would have been helped if Democratic financial reforms remained in place, rather than being watered down by Republican legislators who allowed their donors to gamble with our money. (He also would have been helped if he’d asked his son, a one-time investment banker, what he should do rather than listen to a TV showman.)
That’s not the case Bannon made, though. As many con men do, Bannon practiced the old bait-and-switch: He clearly identified the problem — the unjust loss of hard-earned savings — then blamed the wrong party — the authorities that oppose that kind of injustice.
I’m not the only one who realized this, of course. In a 2017 Washington Post guest column, Richard Cohen wrote, “At some point in the Steve Bannon story I started wondering: If his father got fleeced, if ‘nobody [was] held accountable,’ how can the remedy be less regulation? If Wall Street picked his old man’s pocket, why has President Trump appointed tycoon after tycoon who think the fairest tax is none at all and, in some cases, got immensely rich by collapsing companies and squeezing employees?”
Bannon’s solution wouldn’t have helped his dad, but it would serve another purpose: It opens the door to the type of authoritarian state that Trump aspires to install here; one in which the president “can do whatever I want,” as Trump once claimed, with no oversight, no checks or balances, while suffering no consequences for any actions, even if they’re illegal and/or unconstitutional.
Does anyone really think this is a good idea?
Even the Republicans who are currently scrambling to pin something, anything, on President Biden, don’t, not really, or they’d leave Biden alone. It’s only their guy who gets the privilege.
I suspect that many rank-and-file Republicans would have difficulty defining what’s even meant by “administrative state.” They just know it’s bad, like “the deep state,” “globalists,” “woke,” “politically correct” and “liberal” — they’re all just “things I’m told not to like.” But at its heart, “administrative state” describes agencies that keep accurate records, that document proceedings, so that we can apply rules fairly and consistently and hold people to account for their actions. It represents the rule of law.
Common sense tells us that we need records and record-keepers. They serve as proof that we own our homes, that we’ve paid our bills, that we’re owed Social Security and Medicare. At the DMV, they attest that we’re qualified to drive safely. At the library, they tell us where to find the new Stephen King novel.
The administrative state also prevents rapacious developers from destroying the environment that supplies us with clean air and water. And it ensures that millionaires are paying their fair share of taxes.
Bureaucrats are sometimes pedantic. They may reach inconvenient conclusions.
But they are our friends. They protect us from exploitation. Federal bureaucrats serve, not one political party or interest, but the American people.
You know what else we get with an administrative state? We get an accurate and impartial count — of votes, of COVID deaths and of carbon particles in the air. No wonder Trump and Bannon hate it.
This might all be academic — and old news — if Trump weren’t running for another term in which he promises, if re-elected, to eliminate the administrative state and replace it with the Trump state — loyalists who swear to serve him rather than the American people or the U.S. Constitution. He promises to persecute his perceived enemies, including political opponents, career military officers and media outlets that criticize him. He promises to suspend the Constitution if it gets in his way.
He has stated so, quite publicly.
And the far-right Heritage Foundation, with its Project 2025, promises to assist him in dismantling the civil service and replacing it with inexperienced loyalists who will “carry out Trump’s vision” … of being Emperor Trump.
In the Trump state, “rule of law” is a phrase that can only be used ironically. Documents are classified until he decides they aren’t. The fireplace is for burning the ones that are damning. Subpoenas are optional for Republicans but mandatory for Democrats. And truth is whatever our era’s most notorious liar says it is.
Incidentally, let’s remember that their guy is under multiple indictments and has been found guilty in courts of law of sexual assault and financial fraud. Their desire to turn a morally bankrupt criminal into an unquestionable dictator is simply insane.
Another Trump administration would likely mean the end of American democracy and American greatness. We can’t brag about being exceptional if we follow the path of dictators like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Consider the contrast to the statement made by outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley during his retirement ceremony on Friday at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall in Arlington, Va.: “We don’t take an oath to a tribe. We don’t take an oath to a religion. We don’t take an oath to a king, or a queen, or to a tyrant or a dictator. And we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator … We take an oath to the Constitution and we take an oath to the idea that is America and we’re willing to die to protect it.”
Yeah. I’m with him.
There may be a case to be made that our administrative state has grown too large and/or too powerful. But even if so, that’s no reason to burn it all down. We can’t exist as a society without an administrative function.
Or, as political philosopher Francis Fukuyama put it recently, “I think that you simply cannot have a modern democracy without a competent professional bureaucracy — civil servants that are chosen on the basis of merit, rather than on the basis of political patronage.”
Some Republican legislators no longer care about having a modern democracy, or the competence that rises with it, hand in hand. That’s not what keeps them in office.
Culture wars keep them in office.
I’m much more sympathetic toward Trump voters than I once was. I think I understand better now the forces that drove them and still drive them to feel that this is all wrong and something needs to change. They watched as the rich got richer and their own earnings stagnated. They sat by helplessly as affordable housing, medical care and higher education became more difficult to acquire, sometimes impossible. It was both frustrating and terrifying.
I feel like that sometimes, too.
Many would have tossed their votes to Sen. Bernie Sanders, had he been the Democratic presidential nominee.
I likely would have, too.
But that desperation doesn’t excuse them for being so easily manipulated — by Trump and Bannon and their allies — to blame the wrong people for their woes. It wasn’t illegal immigrants who were picking their pockets. It wasn’t Jews or Muslims or Blacks. It wasn’t LGBTQ or library books. It wasn’t CRT or COVID vaccines or a “woke” military or the mainstream media. It wasn’t drag queens. It was Republican-enabled economic policies, which deregulated important safeguards and shoveled more and more money to the top of the food chain while short-changing working people.
They’re still doing it.
They’ll do it as long as the suckers keep taking the bait.
It’s not too late, friends, to repent. Before we lose everything.
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Overflow:
In theory, Bannon’s father could have been helped by an authoritarian Trump predecessor — if Bannon had his ear. Trump got along notoriously well with anyone who told him what he wanted to hear, who flattered him, who kissed his ass.
But disagree with him one time, a la former attorney general Jeffrey Sessions, and you can count on becoming acquainted with the wheels on the bus. Authoritarian loyalty only works one way.
This is a lesson Trump’s staunch evangelical allies may now be forced to learn as he modifies his message on abortion in hopes of winning another presidential term. Following an interview last Sunday on “Meet the Press,” conservative writer A.G. Hamilton tweeted: “Trump just threw the entire [anti-abortion rights] movement under the bus. If they remain silent or just accept it, the credibility of the movement moving forward is gone.”
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Trump has long sought to emulate cruel despots and dictators:
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Bannon is a thoroughly disgusting character. His involvement in the “We Build The Wall” campaign — asking Mom and Pop to send their savings to complete the border wall Trump failed to force Mexico to fund — led to charges of wire fraud and money laundering. His two partners pleaded guilty and are going to prison.
Trump pardoned Bannon before his trial began.
“Rule of law for thee but not for me.”
Breitbart News cofounder Andrew Breitbart once described Bannon as “the Leni Riefenstahl of the Tea Party movement.” When did “you’re like that infamous Nazi” become a compliment in the conservative world?
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The Washington Post’s Fred Hiatt’s vigorous defense of our national treasure, an impartial civil service:
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Political philosopher Francis Fukuyama defends our civil service:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23276665.2023.2249142
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“Both the leading Republican presidential candidates have explicitly said they want to replace high-level civil servants with political cronies. This effectively means that we would have Trump/DeSantis loyalists running agencies like the FDA, FTC, Justice Department. The implications of this departure from a 150-year old system are more important than anything else in this race, but has gotten almost no attention.” — Dean Baker, co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
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Project 2025 would end the rule of law and usher in fascism. This is important news that is not being adequately covered:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/17/us/politics/trump-plans-2025.html
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The administrative state holds wealthy tax cheats to account; the Trump state would ignore them:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/09/28/wealthy-tax-avoidance-ron-wyden-data/
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A competent civil service costs more than the kind of libertarian free-for-all that conservatives endorse, it’s true. Because there is no free lunch. You get what you pay for. That’s a principle that fiscal conservatives used to understand.
It costs more to change the oil in your car every 5,000 miles, too. But it pays off in the long run. It keeps your car running.
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Trump co-defendant Scott Hall pleaded guilty on Friday to interfering with the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia; a reminder that everything Trump touches dies.
https://www.aol.com/irs-consultant-charged-leaking-trumps-234726115.html
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It’s not hard to find politically active people who just don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. They exist on the left, too. But nobody roasts them as entertainingly (and justly) as “The Daily Show’s” Jordan Klepper:
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A tune for a nervous age:
Thanks for joining me today; I’m grateful for your presence. If you like what you’ve read, please recommend my writing to others. I hope you’re having a wonderful weekend.
Bannon was convicted on contempt charges and his partners are in jail, so I don't really understand why he's still free.
wow! what a great and informative article! thanks Mick as always!