Trump Is Not Going To "Shake Up the System," You Fools
What exactly is this shaking supposed to produce?
I yield to no one in my contempt for “In Trump Country, Trump Supporters Still Support Trump” coverage, but not because I don’t think it’s worthwhile to understand what motivates those who cheer for the most toxic figure in American politics of the last century (at least). The trouble with that coverage is that most of it has been offered as a kind of apology to the good heartland folk who have been overlooked so unkindly by arrogant coastal elitists, and assumes that their views require respectful consideration no matter how ill-informed or morally distasteful they might be.
So yes, we can continue to interrogate what Trump supporters believe, so long as in seeking to understand them we also look honestly at them (and, for a change, ask the same questions about other kinds of voters). In that spirit, I want to scrutinize something that Trump voters, even the casual ones not committed to his cult, have been saying about him since 2016 and still do: that unlike other politicians, he’ll “shake up the system.”
The common response to this belief is Well, you can’t argue with that. But you can. Because Trump is not actually going to shake up the system, at least not in the way most people think.
People wanting a shakeup have no idea what they’re asking for
Let’s start with an illustratively vivid recent profile by Politico’s Michael Kruse of one New Hampshire Trump voter, a man named Ted Johnson whose thoughts are…let’s call them complicated. Johnson was thinking of going with Nikki Haley, but ultimately decided to return to Trump. He says about another Trump term, “it’s going to be hard to watch this happen to our country. He’s going to pull it apart” — but decides that however hard it might be, this pulling apart is actually what he wants. “He’s going to take the DOJ, he’s going to take the bureaucracy of the FBI, the CIA, all the stupid intel agencies that don’t do shit, and he’s going to upset the apple cart,” Ted says. And we all know how great an overturned apple cart is!
Here’s a key exchange:
“And trust me, the guy’s a pig, he’s a womanizer — arrogant a-----e,” Johnson said of Trump. “But I need somebody that’s going to go in and lead, and I need somebody that’s going to take care of the average guy.”
“But is taking care of the average guy and breaking the system the same thing?” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “Because they’re all in it for themselves.”
“And if you break the system, what does that look like?”
“Accountability,” he said.
I’d submit that when he says “accountability,” it’s just a word he uses because he has no idea what “breaking the system” would look like. He just knows that “they’re all in it for themselves,” they being an undefined group of powerful people, and “in it for themselves” is an almost meaningless shorthand for institutional failure. After all, if less selfishness was what you were after, the malignant narcissist Donald Trump would not be your first choice to produce it.
But however it might be expressed, the sentiment that underlies this general distrust of power is widespread and only occasionally unjustified. The last couple of decades have seen an economic collapse driven by Wall Street’s boundless greed, appalling sexual abuse scandals in multiple religious denominations, frequent government shutdowns and debt ceiling crises (all driven by Republicans, but presented to the public as “Washington dysfunction”), the collapse of local news media, the rise of disturbingly powerful technology companies led by grandiose sociopaths, and more.
Meanwhile, the American right has been carrying out a well-planned and well-funded campaign to discredit any institutions they don’t fully control, from education to the courts to science itself. Combine the real and the contrived, and it’s no surprise that polls show Americans’ faith in major societal institutions to be at or near all-time lows.
That’s the key context into which Trump’s claim that he’ll “shake up the system” falls. Almost everyone thinks that “the system” should be “shaken up” in some way or another. A system shaker could only be be brave and strong, breaking down the walls of oppression and banishing the corrupt and hidebound like Jesus casting the moneychangers from the temple, right?
Because most voters either don’t have the bandwidth to think in any more complexity than that, or are just simpletons, they don’t take the logical next step once you’ve declared that the system should be shaken: asking what an unshaken system would look like, and how we might get there.
All shakeups are not created equal
Donald Trump, of course, doesn’t either. He doesn’t have a reform agenda he’s waiting to implement to make government agencies more honest, efficient, and effective. His actual agenda is to take imperfect institutions and turn them into a parody of what he claims they are now. You think the DoJ is politicized because Trump is being prosecuted for some of his (alleged) crimes? Ho boy, just you wait; his vision of the DoJ is one that is almost entirely devoted to imprisoning his opponents and settling his old scores. You think the EPA or HHS are “in it for themselves”? Wait until all the civil servants are fired and they devote themselves entirely to enhancing corporate profits. You don’t like government bureaucracy? It’s not going to get more efficient under a Trump administration.
One might hope that voters yearning for a “shakeup” of “the system” would ask themselves: What is supposed to emerge on the other side of this dramatic shakeup? Is it a political system more honest, less corrupt, and more capable of providing necessary services to “take care of the average guy,” as Ted Johnson put it?
We’ve tried to fix the system before. In the Progressive era in the early 20th century, we created a series of changes to how politics was run and how businesses could operate, with women’s suffrage, new labor laws, restrictions on monopolies, direct election of senators, the creation of voter initiatives, and much more. Some of it worked, some of it didn’t. Similarly, after Watergate, we created new laws governing campaign finance, fostering openness in government, and restricting presidential power. Again, some of it worked, some of it didn’t.
But if you want to “shake up the system” now, what would you do? If voters like Ted — though probably not Ted himself; he seems too far gone — spent a minute or two asking that question, they might realize that if a candidate wants to shake things up, he ought to tell them what the shaking will consist of, otherwise he doesn’t deserve their vote.
The plutocrats funding the planning projects for a second Trump term know what kind of shakeup they want, and it sure as hell isn’t more honest, effective, and accountable government. It’s government of, by, and for them, which they already have to an extraordinary degree, but their greed and sense of entitlement know no limits. Perhaps that’s why, according to NBC News, the denizens of Wall Street are setting aside whatever personal distaste they might have for the former president as they realize that another Trump term would probably be good for them, with more upper-income tax cuts, weakened regulatory oversight, and an emphatically anti-worker agenda to warm their avaricious hearts.
As usual, the news media have only made things worse, talking a lot about what a disruptive, norm-breaking force of nature Trump is without ever considering that his claim to be the one and only person who can give the system a salutary shake is, at bottom, bullshit. There will certainly be disruption if he goes back to the White House, but none of it will improve the integrity of the government or its ability to make lives better for people. So they need to start asking what “shaking up the system” means and what kind of a system we want it to produce. That may not make the scales fall from the eyes of every Trump supporter, but it just might give some people who find the idea appealing but haven’t thought much about it a moment of pause.
I leave you with this:
I would like to ask these people: "Did you or your parents have to bribe anyone to get their Social Security and Medicare benefits?"
No? Well thank an honest bureaucracy and if Trump breaks it, you can look forward to having to bribe people to get your benefits.
This is probably a term they’re parroting from their favorite talking heads and websites.
But even in my own circles it seems most people aren’t creative problem solvers. It’s possibly worse on the right side of politics, but conservatives are happy to keep up the divisions.