There Is Nothing for You Here, page 28
In the United States, the peculiarities of the institution of the presidency, as well as of the political party system, made it remarkably easy for a president like Trump to claim excessive power. The American president is at least three things in one: head of state, commander in chief, and chief executive. And in many respects the presidency has become aggrandized over time, taking on more roles and accruing executive authorities, all the while losing some of the careful calibrations and constraints devised by the Founding Fathers.
Like the office of the presidency, the Democratic and the Republican parties also are open to exploitation. Unlike the parties I grew up with in the UK and elsewhere in Europe, the U.S. parties are both big-tent political movements with weak internal leadership and discipline and no fixed platforms. They provide havens for all kinds of individuals and groups with extreme views on the left and the right—including on the far right in Republican circles, such as white supremacist movements and militias, which Trump increasingly appealed to during his presidency.
In time Trump would prove himself able to turn all these factors to his advantage. And the way in which he did so begged yet another inauspicious comparison between the United States and Russia. In many of his actions there were shades not just of the tyranny of the past, which had propelled the American colonies to seek independence from Great Britain, but also of the authoritarian playbook adopted by Vladimir Putin and other global leaders over the years to subvert democracy. In the course of his presidency, indeed, Trump would come more to resemble Putin in political practice and predilection than he resembled any of his recent American presidential predecessors. Sometimes even I was startled by how glaringly obvious the similarities were.
In the case of both Putin in Russia and Trump in the United States, for example, prominent legal scholars around them were willing to push the idea that they, as president, were the embodiment of the executive branch and the constitution. And as they stood above everyone and anything else, they should be in control of the country almost without limits. President Trump was certainly a great believer in his executive privilege rather than in the powers of the larger executive branch per se. During his first campaign, Trump bragged that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it. Later, after his first impeachment trial, in January 2020, he seemed to believe that he now had license to commit political murder—usurping power—as well as literal murder, when he set out to retain the presidency at the end of that year.
Trump was completely transparent about his admiration for autocrats and authoritarians and their style of governance. In a wide-ranging series of taped telephone interviews, he told the veteran American journalist Bob Woodward that he much preferred autocratic strongmen to his democratic counterparts: “It’s funny, the relationships I have, the tougher and meaner they are, the better I get along with them. You’ll explain that to me someday, okay? But maybe it’s not a bad thing. The easy ones I maybe don’t like as much or don’t get along with as much.”
Even before the revelations from Woodward’s tapes, the president’s views were clear to anyone who saw him in action at the White House. In May 2019, for instance, President Trump met with Hungarian prime minister and self-styled populist strongman Viktor Orbán. He was full of praise for Orbán in press interviews, notwithstanding the frequent European criticisms of Orbán’s illiberal turns at home.
Ambassador Bolton had sat in on the private Oval Office meeting between the two while the rest of us waited in the Cabinet Room for an expanded meeting with the Hungarian delegation. Ambassador Bolton rushed out ahead of the president and prime minister, clearly unhappy with the trajectory of the conversation. He turned to me and said, emphatically, “Well, he’s [Orbán’s] definitely his [Trump’s] kind of guy.”
The U.S. ambassador to Hungary, David Cornstein, a jeweler from New York who had known Trump for decades, concurred. The ambassador had worked hard to set up this meeting of kindred spirits. In a shockingly frank interview with The Atlantic in June 2019, Cornstein told journalist Franklin Foer, “I can tell you, knowing the president for a good twenty-five or thirty years, that he would love to have the situation that Viktor Orbán has, but he doesn’t.” In my discussions with Ambassador Cornstein, he said the same thing to me, seemingly without any comprehension that his observation might be problematic for the future of democracy in the United States.
President Trump was attracted to “the tougher and meaner” leaders because he literally wanted to be them. In the international arena, Trump saw himself sparring, wrestling with the tough guys, as he had with real estate titans back in New York. But in the U.S., he wanted to govern like them. He wanted raw power without much in the way of constitutional or other checks and balances. In time, the country whose divisions and decay had led to Trump’s election would pay an even steeper price for that fateful set of personal political preferences.
Autocrat Envy
Trump was clearly envious of Orbán, but also of a number of other contemporary leaders and international figures. He referred to Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as “the Sultan” and often bantered with him about how he, Trump, was jealous of Erdoğan’s seemingly boundless ability to get his own way at home. Trump made similar comments about President Xi of China, who had lifted his own term limits on staying in office and had removed the Chinese Communist Party’s ten-year collective leadership turnover rule. Trump stated that he would be delighted to do the same—usually in a jocular manner, so that he could say he was joking if anyone commented. But the frequency of the references told a different story. He was deadly serious.
Queen Elizabeth II was another subject of envy as well as admiration, because of the reverence accorded her at home and abroad and her fabulous wealth. In the 1980s the Queen had been one of the world’s richest individuals and certainly the richest in the UK. She had been deposed on that front in the new century by all kinds of billionaires at home and abroad, but irrespective of this and the constraints on her actual political power, she was still the Queen of England. She was the symbol of the state. Whenever Trump looked into the Queen’s, Orbán’s, Erdoğan’s, or Xi’s eyes, or anyone else’s of this vaunted global stature, he was seeking the reflection of himself.
Putin, even more than the others, was the ultimate international populist in style, swagger, and potential wealth. Russia had more than its fair share of billionaires—the emergence of the super-rich in Russia, the so-called oligarchs, as well as in the United States and globally—was a major phenomenon in the 2000s, but Putin was rumored to be the richest man in the world, the billionaire to top all billionaires. Trump seemed to look up to Putin because of his wealth, and he admired the way Putin ran Russia like his own private company. People like Putin, who was simultaneously an autocrat and reputedly super-rich, were an elite of their own. This was the group Trump wanted to see himself in—the internationally very rich, very powerful, and very famous.
This was a troubling aspiration for an American president, to say the least, and it had grim implications for an already struggling United States. In Russia in the 1990s and early 2000s, those with the best political connections (first to President Yeltsin and then to Putin) captured everything. Russia’s billionaire oligarchs grabbed the plum assets in key industries during the government’s privatization program and then moved money out of Russia to banks and shell companies overseas. As a result, Russia (and other former Soviet states) became kleptocracies, not just market economies, and eventually descended into authoritarianism. Oligarchs used their enormous fortunes to bribe politicians and fight regulations and oversight, thus undermining Russia’s nascent democracy. They also evaded taxes and deprived the state of revenues. Cronies—insiders to the Russian system—were always preferred to outsiders in big state contracts and other business deals. They took advantage of those contracts to amass more wealth by padding out contract budgets with “creative billing” and bringing in their family members and personal networks as staff or subcontractors.
Putin, for his part, had perfected the art of populist patronage and the big show that Trump tried to emulate. Putin was frequently featured on Russian TV, summoning the oligarchs and publicly upbraiding them for something they had done or not done. It was obvious when you turned the lens around from Putin and Russia to the United States that Trump was trying to do the same thing: order business leaders around.
When Trump set up his short-lived Business Council, or invited businessmen to one-on-one or small group meetings, or deployed Wilbur Ross, his billionaire commerce secretary, to deal with pet projects, or phoned up the heads of huge American companies to berate them, the U.S. president was doing exactly what Putin did. I once heard Trump telling Wilbur Ross in April 2019 to figure out how to increase U.S. investment in Turkey as a favor to President Erdoğan. I also watched and heard Trump call out U.S. businessmen and -women to cajole them into following some specific set of personal directions. One of these played out publicly in November 2018, when Trump called Mary Barra, the head of General Motors, to insist that she not close four factories in Ohio, a particularly important issue for his voter base. Just as in the case of Putin in Russia, Trump’s meetings and calls to account were purely for show—the populist at work in ostentatious displays.
But behind this flashy showmanship there was a darker kind of substance. Under Trump, the United States began to develop its own version of “the people who run the country own it,” which was a description applied to Russia by the Carnegie Moscow program head Dmitri Trenin. In populist settings you frequently end up with crony capitalism. Those who have personal ties get preferential treatment and rise to the top of the economy. The grabbing hand of state becomes the grabbing hand of the head of state. Personalized leadership tilts the playing field away from good governance and the true private sector toward corruption and nepotism. In the public realm, the focus is on the political—creating jobs for “your” voters, which is something Trump always said he wanted to do.
Inevitably, cronyism bolsters the desire for authoritarianism, retaining power by any means to keep you and yours in charge of the state and its spoils. In the end, this trend leads to economic stagnation. Democracy and growth are clearly correlated in Europe as well as in the United States. When democracy slides, so does the economy. This is the lesson from Russia and the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the early 2000s. But in the following decade it became clear that Trump had drawn a very different conclusion from his Russian case study.
America’s robust and vibrant democracy and vaunted political stability were always the spur for domestic and foreign investment. But after Trump assumed power, he set about undermining that cornerstone of the country’s economic foundation. He systematically attempted to appoint his personal friends or cronies to state offices, regardless of their qualifications for the positions. He also sought to privatize some of the U.S. state assets or reduce them in size and repurpose them—like the U.S. Postal Service, as well as federal lands run by the Department of the Interior through the sale of licenses and the deregulation of land use—which would ultimately leach revenues away from the state. Indeed, Trump had a low view of handing money over to the U.S. government. Taxes, he essentially said, were for suckers or losers—or at least the ordinary Americans who weren’t billionaires. Not paying them made him “smart.”
Under Trump, foreign investors and businesses started to hesitate and pull back when America seemed to go off the rails. In 2019, when I was wrapping up my time at the NSC, several top European businessmen privately told me and other colleagues that despite the U.S. economic performance, they were starting to see Trump’s United States as a politically risky investment proposition. Not knowing where it was heading, they were holding off on some of their foreign direct investment commitments. This was the kind of discussion I was more used to having about Russia than about America.
The Real Deal
When you looked more closely, Trump and Putin seemed to have a lot in common in terms of their domestic political tactics as well as their strategy. But a closer inspection also revealed important differences—contrasts that further underscored why Trump’s personalized and populist political approach was so detrimental both to America’s democracy and to its national security.
In contrast to Trump, Putin, before he became a reputed billionaire head of state, was the real deal of the “average working-class guy” in Russia. Unlike Trump, Putin grew up in a poor family in a poor neighborhood of St. Petersburg—in a communal flat, where multiple families shared a large divided apartment and all its facilities. As president, Putin shared the same political base as Trump in the U.S., with similar grievances—older, more male, less educated than others. In Russia’s case, most of Putin’s supporters worked in the public sector, given the heavy state influence in the economy. But, also like Trump’s, Putin’s supporters were more religiously observant and often living in semirural small towns and cities. Putin’s support was weak in the big cities, including Moscow and his hometown of St. Petersburg. Putin loved to play the regular guy with factory workers—men in hard hats—and appeal to their strongman instincts.
At one point, during huge demonstrations against his rule in Moscow in 2011, Putin visited a massive tank plant in Nizhny Tagil in the Ural Mountains, a place renowned for its fervent support of his presidency. The factory foreman offered to go to Moscow with “some of the boys” to “sort out” the protesters for Putin. The Russian president declined the offer, but later appointed the factory foreman to be his official presidential representative to the Urals region. It was a spectacular piece of political populism. It was also strikingly reminiscent of President Trump’s efforts to solicit support from the far-right Proud Boys militia, who would violently confront Black Lives Matter protesters in the summer of 2020. After public outcry on that occasion, Trump called on the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” instead of asking them to cease and desist their activities. They would not stand by for long: on January 6, 2021, in the waning days of Trump’s presidency, the Proud Boys would be among the militia groups and other Trump supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol Building.
There were many other ways in which Putin and Trump resembled each other in playing to their similar crowds. Manipulation and exploitation of the media were one of the more obvious—a Kremlin stock-in-trade—but there were others that were perhaps less evident. Trump tried to prevent the removal of Confederate-era statues and the renaming of American military forts named after Confederate generals. Putin put the statues of Soviet-era figures back on their pedestals and restored Soviet memorials that had been toppled under Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Both created and invoked their own versions of the country’s “golden” or “silver” ages and their personal lists of “national heroes” to appeal to their voters’ nostalgia or conservatism. Both constantly talked about their direct connection to “the people.” They used this constant invocation to draw authority directly from the powers of the presidency, the number of votes in their favor, and opinion polls rather than from their nominal political party. And they always blamed bad bureaucrats for anything that went wrong.
Ironically, however, Putin was much more cautious than Trump in who he blamed and how he whipped up division. Putin would never blame the “deep state,” for example. He was a product of the real deep state, having walked the back corridors of the Soviet-era KGB to power. Putin ruled Russia as a state insider, unlike Trump, who wanted to rule America as an outsider. Putin saw the state apparatus as a useful tool for wielding power; Trump saw the state and its structures as an obstacle to his power games.
In part because he was such a consummate deep-stater, Putin was not keen on militias. Independent paramilitary organizations could be dangerous in Russia, where the state always wanted to ensure the complete monopolization of firepower. Putin reined them in at home, although he often allowed them to operate abroad as proxies for the state in conflicts in places such as Ukraine and Syria where he wanted to minimize regular Russian military forces’ exposure.
Unlike Trump, Putin also would never incite far-right groups against minorities, many of whom were historically core to the Russia state and his own political support, including Russian Muslims and Jews and immigrants from Central Asia. Russia gave the world the word “pogrom.” And in Russia’s imperial past, it was potentially explosive to provoke an ethnic or religious riot. These usually got out of hand and resulted in large-scale massacres. In modern times, someone from Putin’s internal or external opposition could theoretically whip up a pogrom and turn people against him by exploiting divisions.
Thus, when Putin tried to sow or exploit division, he homed in on the smallest and weakest possible groups, which were easy targets. These included Russia’s LGBTQ community and tiny political opposition parties or loose opposition movements that he dubbed “pro-Western, fifth-column liberals.” And of course Putin played up the United States as an external enemy which was—in his depiction—manipulating internal dissent in Russia to bring the country to its knees.
Putin did not, like Trump, rail against the Russian government and generally play with the country’s political, social, racial, and religious divisions to see what he could get out of it. Putin was always stressing unity—one synthetic Russian culture and identity to overcome the conflicts of the past that had destabilized and helped to bring down both the Russian empire and the USSR in the twentieth century. Putin had no desire to emulate Nicholas II or Mikhail Gorbachev, the czar and president who had both lost their countries.
In sum, Putin’s approach was a stark contrast to Trump’s efforts to emphasize America’s divides and pit political parties, politicians, social movements, and racial and religious groups against each other in 2016 and 2020. Putin wanted one Russia. Trump wanted many Americas, not one.
