American Resistance by David Rothkopf directing the Trump horror show

[ad_1]

President Donald Trump listens as Anthony Fauci speaks to the coronavirus task force during a briefing at the White House in April, 2020 The Washington Post/Getty Images

Government institutions are only as strong as the people who work for them. That may not be a particularly sharp insight, but it is one that is often ignored by political scientists who prefer to focus on the national-level electoral races that make headlines.

But anyone living in a dysfunctional developing world country, or even a decaying first-world capital, can attest to the consequences of being governed by a bureaucracy that has lost the people’s trust. Young and talented people avoid government service. Low levels of corruption and graft are becoming common. Taxpayers work diligently to avoid tax.

It becomes a vicious circle. Political and crooked bureaucracies become magnets for grifters and cases of patronage. The cycle repeats, but only gets worse. As a result, trust in government institutions is almost impossible to regain once it is lost.

The threat of that kind of politicization and corruption in the American government is the leitmotif of American Resistance by David Rothkopf, a longtime analyst and author based in Washington.

There were multiple moments when you’d be saying to yourself, I can’t tell, is he really clueless?

Arguably, the Rothkopfs book focuses on telling the stories of government workers who did the opposite: in the face of the bald-faced cronyism that surrounded then-President Donald Trump during his normal-bending four years in the White House , they stood for. their institutions and ensured that they did the important and sometimes difficult task of governing properly.

As examples of these outstanding public servants, Rothkopf presents us with many of the names we already know in the Trump era, some of whom are given pages of verbatim quotes to commemorate their experiences.

There’s Anthony Fauci, the US government’s leading infectious disease expert, recalling the solutions he devised in an often futile attempt to keep America’s pandemic response from deviating from futility. There’s Mark Esper, Trumps next-to-last defense secretary, telling how he stopped the commander-in-chief from deploying American soldiers against Black Lives Matter protesters. And there’s Fiona Hill, the British-born Russia expert at the National Security Council, who reports how so-called adults in the administration have attempted to prevent Trump’s devotion to Russia’s Vladimir Putin from distorting in American foreign policy.

Fiona Hill is sworn in before testifying at a House Intelligence Committee hearing as part of the impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump on Capitol Hill in November, 2019 AFP/Getty Images

Hill told Rothkopf how people like Rex Tillerson, secretary of state and a former chief executive of ExxonMobil, who have years of experience dealing with Russia are very reluctant to let the president anywhere near the Russians. So, we tried to find a way that we could, in some way, accommodate his desire, for example, to have an arms control deal, while still keeping his other impulses [for cozying up to Putin] under control, managing how he got information, and how he was presented with options, Hill said.

But for all the Rothkopfs’ efforts to keep the American Resistance focused on those who persisted in their institutions in the face of a Trumpian assault, the book is perhaps inevitably a litany of Trumpian horror stories. They begin with the Muslim ban in the early days of his presidency and end with the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.

Not that these horrors and their exponents are not worthy of concern, how close the US government is to losing itself in the Trump years. Trumps longtime anti-immigration aide Stephen Miller’s dystopian fantasy accounts of hordes of terrorists entering the US through its southern border and discussions in the Oval Office about whether the deployment of alligators in moats or missiles against immigrant caravans is the effective response to the policy that remains cold until now.

There were multiple moments when you’d be saying to yourself, I can’t tell, is he really clueless? Elizabeth Neumann, an assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, tells Rothkopf. How does a person respond with the appropriate respect in the office, when inside your brain you’re going, I can’t believe it’s happening.

The problem for Rothkopf is that many of these horror stories have been told elsewhere, and often with more compelling detail, either in the dozens of earlier books chronicling the Trump years, or in his own government investigations into Trump’s various misdeeds, most recently congress. report on the January 6 insurrection.

In addition, Rothkopf succumbed to a fallacy that often afflicts those who have spent most of their adult lives in Washington: the assumption that, because most of the people he spent decades with in the American capital seemed decent people, those in permanent government are falsely made scapegoats for the nations ills.

Rothkopf may be right that the bravery of one Fiona Hill and the dozens like her who resisted the whims of a powerful, benevolent commander-in-chief helped ward off what could have been bigger disaster But he seems to be ignoring the role that both permanent governments played in creating the circumstances in which Trump could thrive.

Washington is a clubby town, prone to groupthink and self-indulgence. It’s also the home of what Mark Leibovich, in his book This Town, calls an overcrowded send-off of official Washington’s big, lucrative revolving door between money, media and politics. (Full disclosure: I’ve worked with Rothkopf on journalistic ventures in the past.)

When many Americans look at their national capital, they see the Leibovichs Washington, not the Rothkopfs. They see an entrenched, entitled elite expending great effort climbing the American power ladder while giving only a passing value to national well-being. It is Washington that has contributed to the anger in the countryside that has allowed Trump and his acolytes to thrive.

Rothkopf thinks this criticism is unfair, and says as much in the opening pages of American Resistances. But when I spent nearly 15 years as a correspondent in Washington myself, I learned that what makes the Fiona Hills of America’s capital so compelling is that they are so rare.

Indeed, in some ways Trump provided a moment of much-needed clarity. When a proto-tyrant arrived on the scene, most within the Capital Beltway particularly within the Republican party attempted to find a way to ride his coattails to greater power and influence. That is, after all, the Washington way.

It is to the credit of Hill, Fauci, Esper and a handful of their compatriots that the institutions of American government have emerged from the Trump years only damaged and not destroyed and they deserve the praise of the Rothkopfs. But worryingly for the country, much of official Washington has proven cynical during the Trump years. Public trust was further eroded. The cycle will repeat, but only get worse.

American Resistance: The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation by David Rothkopf PublicAffairs 25/$29, 288 pages

Peter Spiegel is the FTs US managing editor

Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Caf

[ad_2]