Saboteur in Chief Fintan O’Toole DECEMBER 6, 2018 ISSUE the Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis Norton, 221 Pp., $26.95
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Saboteur in Chief Fintan O’Toole DECEMBER 6, 2018 ISSUE The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis Norton, 221 pp., $26.95 Donald Trump; illustration by Joanna Neborsky Writing about her friend the famously unpleasant Evelyn Waugh, Frances Donaldson reflected that the weakness in attributing any particular quality to Evelyn is that he could not allow anyone to dictate his attitude or virtues to him. Consequently, if he was accused of some quality usually regarded as contemptible, where other men would be aroused to shame or hypocrisy, he studied it, polished up his performance, and, treating it as both normal and admirable, made it his own…. Consequently, it was never any good looking straight at him to learn the truth about him. Donald Trump is not often compared to a great English novelist, and the word “studied” does not apply—he is all instinct. But his instincts lead him in precisely the same direction. He disorients us by wearing his most contemptible qualities as if they were crown jewels, by brandishing as trophies what others would conceal as shameful secrets. He uses his dirty linen as a cloth with which to polish up his performance. Thus, on the evening of October 24, the day it was discovered that explosive devices had been mailed to several leading Democrats, Trump, at a rally in Mosinee, Wisconsin, mouthed the expected platitudes about coming together in “peace and harmony.” Any politician of the kind we are used to would have left it at that, keeping a straight face and willing his audience to forget his own hate-mongering. But Trump did not leave it at that. He tickled his fans with a teasing acknowledgment that this emollient rhetoric was unreal and that stirring up hatred was, and would remain, his essential effect: “By the way, do you see how nice I’m behaving tonight? Have you ever seen this?” The message was not subtle: I’m adjusting my act a little tonight but don’t worry, normal service will resume shortly. Or, while any other politician accused of breaching electoral law to cover up a sexual liaison with a porn star would try to avoid the subject, Trump feeds the story by calling Stormy Daniels “Horseface” on Twitter. Or, while any conventional party leader would want to erase from the public memory an incident in which one of his candidates (Greg Gianforte) violently assaulted a reporter (Ben Jacobs) for asking him a question, Trump returned to it a year and a half later to propel it back into the headlines just as the murder of another journalist (Jamal Khashoggi) was on everyone’s mind. Or, while any other rash Tweeter might at least privately regret tweeting that the women demonstrating against the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court were “paid professionals,” Trump circled back to simultaneously retreat and up the ante: “The paid D.C. protesters are now ready to REALLY protest because they haven’t gotten their checks—in other words, they weren’t paid!” And so on. When Guy Debord wrote in 1967 that “by means of the spectacle the ruling order discourses endlessly upon itself in an uninterrupted monologue of self-praise,” he can hardly have imagined that his insight would be so literally embodied or that an American president’s self-praise would take a form that, in conventional politics, would be self-sabotage. Most of us are conditioned to regard these incidents as mere proof of Trump’s inability to control his impulses. But his urges are powerfully honed by decades of collusion with the scandal-mongers and gossip columnists who made him famous and helped him to create his brand. The outbursts and asides establish and maintain his alpha-male reputation in the eyes of his fans (though they might not quite put it like this) by not allowing anyone to “dictate his attitude or virtues to him.” Trump’s flaunting of his own most shameful qualities deflects the damage that any revelation can do to him. When he displays his vices so openly, the drama of revelation leads only to a shrug of the shoulders: tell us something we didn’t know. His outbursts normalize the outrageous—habit, as Samuel Beckett has it, is a great deadener. Most subtly but most effectively, they play havoc with one of the things we think we know about politics: the game of distraction. We all know that people in power deploy distraction as a professional skill, much as magicians do. We are used to it. In every act of political communication, “Look at this” is always the explicit obverse of an implicit “Don’t look at that.” But Trump confounds us by using as distractions the very things that other politicians want to distract us from. In democracy as we think we have known it, the art of governance is, in part, the skill with which our attention is diverted from the sordid, the shameful, the thuggish. Yet these same qualities are the gaudiest floats in Trump’s daily parade of grotesqueries. This is his strange, and in its own way brilliant, reversal: instead of distracting us from the lurid and the sensational, Trump is using them to distract us from the slow, boring, apparently mundane but deeply insidious sabotaging of government. He is the blaring noise that drowns out the low signal of subversion. There is, surely, a reason why books that give us Trump in all his outlandish tawdriness—like Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury and Bob Woodward’s Fear: Trump in the White House—cannot, however appalling their accounts may be, do him any harm. They are exercises in “looking straight at him to learn the truth about him,” an act that seems entirely right by any traditional political and journalistic standard but that misses the specificity of Trump’s performance. If you look straight at such a glaring object, you are blinded. Michael Lewis’s The Fifth Risk is a much shorter, simpler book, with no great drama and no real claims to be comprehensive or definitive. But it does something both brave and highly intelligent: it looks at Trump not straight but crooked. He is hardly in the book at all and yet it tells us more than Wolff or Woodward about the long-term damage he is doing. For while they give us an aberrant buffoon whose incompetence must surely doom him, allowing the normal business of government to resume, Lewis points toward a much deeper assault on government itself. Lewis is (justly) a nonfiction star, a weaver of propulsive, character-driven narratives in which people, money, and technology are thrown into a dizzying spin. Moneyball and The Big Short have been made into gripping movies. Michelle and Barack Obama have acquired the rights to The Fifth Risk for a possible Netflix series, but it is hard to imagine that they faced much competition from more typical movie producers. The pitch would be the toughest since The Producers. “So Trump’s in this, right?” “Well, he makes a cameo appearance at the start. But we’ve got John MacWilliams who used to work for the Department of Energy and Catherine Woteki who used to be chief scientist at the Department of Agriculture and Kathy Sullivan who was head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) at the Department of Commerce and D.J. Patil who was Obama’s chief data scientist.” “Never heard of them. And what is this fifth risk anyway?” “We find out in the big reveal at the end of the first act: it’s ‘project management.’” The Fifth Risk is a passionate, even earnest, book about people who have worked as public servants for the federal government and the things they worry about. But it is also a challenge to think about not who Trump is but what he is doing, to see how, in some important respects, the phrase “the Trump administration” is an oxymoron. His project is not to administer the government of the United States. It is to bring it into disrepute. In October 1987 Ronald Reagan sprayed his folksy charm over an old antigovernment joke: “You know, it’s said that the ten most frightening words in the English language are: ‘Hello, I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’” Reagan was speaking to small-business owners likely to be receptive to the idea that even the most well- intentioned government agencies do nothing but get in the way. There was always an element of hypocrisy in this—Republican politicians have gone on deploying the power of federal patronage, and their supporters have never been allergic to taxpayer dollars. Republican presidents thus continued, even as they starved some parts of the federal government, to have an interest in actually running it. The joke, though, was always likely to become a serious proposition sooner or later. If you keep saying that government is not the solution but the problem, that “Washington” as a generic term for all the institutions that manage the public realm is just a swamp to be drained, you will end up wanting to destroy it. And if this is what you want to do, then the aspects of Trump that seem most like political weaknesses—his ignorance and his incompetence—are not weaknesses at all. They are powerful weapons of administrative destruction. The best way to undermine government is to make it as stupid and as inept as your rhetoric has always claimed it to be. The American system is uniquely vulnerable to this maneuver. Americans tend to think they have the best system of government in the world.