“Strongman.” “Autocrat.” Donald Trump, as president, would seize power, increase it and impose his will on the country, we were told throughout the campaign and since Election Day.
“That’s his way,” Hillary Clinton said on the campaign trail, “one person getting supreme power and exercising it ruthlessly.”
This was always overhyped, unrealistic scaremongering, and Trump’s first month has shown why. The institutions that check the executive parts of government — Congress, the courts, the federal bureaucracy, the intelligence community, the press and corporate America, to name a few — were never going to be Trump’s lap dogs.
Trump has not trampled, smashed, or seized the permanent institutions of power. Instead, the institutions are assailing him and his young administration again and again, both for better and for worse.
The scuttling of Trump’s nominees, Mike Flynn and Andy Puzder, suggest Trump is beleaguered by Washington rather than dominating it. And intelligence officials planting an innuendo-heavy, fact-light story on Russia in the New York Times on Tuesday night suggests the deep state, the unaccountable, opaque panopticon, is a bigger threat to liberty than the country’s elected officials.
Our system of government is planted thick with checks and balances. The Constitution made many of these explicit. The courts, legislature and executive restrain and check one another. The Founders understood the press as an indispensable check on power. In the 19th century, we established a civil service, a permanent bureaucracy, which now includes a large intelligence community. The “deep state” is one term for this institution that doesn’t blow with the political winds as the elected branches do.
The checks these institutions provide are indispensable, but they are also often frustrating, and sometimes they are pernicious and unaccountable. In Trump’s first month in power, they have flexed their muscles, sometimes merely constraining Trump but at other times overreaching.
Whatever you think of Flynn’s communications with Russia — no one has yet disclosed details of the transcripts, which would displace tendentious guesswork with solid facts — or his forthrightness about it all, the Russia leaks that brought him down were dark and chilling.
Many in the news media seem to love it, and have described the leakers as brave. But the federal government isn’t supposed to spy on Americans. U.S. intelligence was listening in on the Russian ambassador when the ambassador got on the phone with Flynn. Eventually someone in the intelligence community gave the Washington Post a version of what went on in that conversation.
National security writer Eli Lake commented on how unusual this is:
Normally intercepts of U.S. officials and citizens are some of the most tightly held government secrets. This is for good reason. Selectively disclosing details of private conversations monitored by the FBI or NSA gives the permanent state the power to destroy reputations from the cloak of anonymity. This is what police states do.
A parallel story unfolded over Trump’s executive order on immigration. We opposed the order as hastily drafted and poorly targeted. But the president seems pretty clearly to have legal authority to bar some entrants from a group of countries declared by Congress to be of special concern.
The unelected parts of the state worked immediately and with abandon to undermine the order. Obama holdover Sally Yates, as acting attorney general, declared that the Justice Department wouldn’t enforce the order. Her letter declaring this made no argument, didn’t cite anything illegal or improper in the order and didn’t cite a law the order violated. This wasn’t a lieutenant refusing to follow a lawful order. This was a bureaucrat who had the power, if not the legal or moral right, to void the lawful though unwise order of the president.
Then the federal courts followed suit. In a spasm of sloppy jurisprudence, 9th Circuit judges blocked the order.
Checks on the presidency and on the elected branches of government are crucial. The bureaucracy, the courts, the deep state and the media are, in this role, indispensable. But their lack of democratic accountability, intended as a bulwark against popular passions, makes these institutions dangerous.
Trump’s ascendancy spurred a wave of fear. It was a fear we always considered overblown, most of all because we knew that the institutions would check the new president. But that fear seems to have overwhelmed the institutions themselves, and they’ve lost their sobriety.
The media for the past month has been the sloppiest we’ve ever seen it. The 9th Circuit’s ruling was embarrassingly shoddy. And the intelligence community’s willingness to spy and leak on an American for political purposes is not normal, thank God.
The permanent state and the other institutions of power made us more sanguine about Trump, his temperament and his inexperience. Now it’s these very institutions, which are supposed to moderate the excesses of the public, that are most worrisome.
