How is Donald J. Trump Like the Coronavirus Pandemic?

 Learning from the stress-tests of 2020

Photo by History in HD on Unsplash

I’m not especially nervous about the coronavirus. Don’t get me wrong: it’s dangerous. It’s lethal, at least for some. It exposes some fundamental weaknesses of our systems. It threatens my family and my friends. It’s going to get much worse before it gets better.

I’m worried about it. I’m worried about it in the same sense that I want to make sure my life insurance is up to date, and the mortgage is paid, and all the fluids in my car are at the manufacturer’s recommended levels. It’s something that, if I don’t stay on top of it, might bring harm to me or to others.

But I’m not especially nervous about it. That’s because for about forty years I’ve been involved in the field of strategic studies. I’m aware of just how vulnerable we are, to so many things, and have been for longer than most people care to think about. I’m aware of so many things that could bring down this civilization, and of how little attention has been paid to so many of them by the people whose job it is to ready our response. I know that the situation could be far, far worse. I know that our public health officials have been anticipating that something like COVID-19 was on its way, even though they had no way to know exactly what form it might take, and they’ve taken the best precautions they have been allowed to by our political leadership.

When I watch the news today I think back to the morning of September 11th, 2001. My wife and I were watching TV as the second airliner flew into the World Trade Center. She turned to me and said, quietly,

“Well, you told them.”

For the rest of the world 9/11 might be “the day everything changed,” but for those of us with a working knowledge of the problem we’d been at war since 1979, and planning for this kind of attack for years. We’d done war games and other simulations. We’d prevented real attacks on more than one occasion. We knew that someday — someday — someone was going to get something like 9/11 done. And when it happened, we knew that it could have been worse.

(And no, don’t ask me how it could have been worse. I have no desire to give helpful tips to prospective terrorists.)

9/11 was a stress test. It took our system and pushed it towards a breaking point. It put American social and political institutions into a crisis, a condition when there is a perception of increased risk to what we value, surprise, and a limited time to respond. In conditions of low stress most people don’t perceive a problem. Nothing changes. Nothing is learned. In conditions of moderate stress some people are too overwhelmed to act, but some weigh the options provided by people who seem to have workable responses. Information is exchanged. Systems change, and adapt to the situation. We might, for example, improve cockpit security for aircraft, or infiltrate and monitor potential terrorist organizations. Appropriate lessons are drawn. In conditions of extremely high stress, people are too overwhelmed to react, or they react irrationally. Many follow the orders of the first person who seems to have a response, whether or not it makes sense. We might, for example, invade Iraq. Or force everyone to take off their shoes at airports.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a stress test. So is the presidency of Donald J. Trump.

The COVID-19 pandemic has put our medical, social, economic, and political systems under stress. The medical and public health systems have, for the most part, shown themselves to be capable of handling the load up until now. They are locating the carriers, within the limits of available testing. The experts are informing the public about what is known, what is not known, and what can be done by individuals and institutions to slow the rate of transmission and minimize the risks of exposure. Research is progressing to identify modes of transmission and to find ways to treat the symptoms. Eventually there will be a vaccine, and perhaps a cure, and when these are found there will likely be mechanisms to get those medicines to the people who need them. At present, hospitals have not been swamped by cases. Whether they will continue to do so well depends on the number of cases that have yet to be expressed, and how quickly they arrive. That, in turn, depends on the social, economic, and political systems.

The social systems have, in many ways, worked better than expected. People have been seeking out reliable information. Individuals have been taking action, both appropriate (limiting social interactions, avoiding unnecessary travel, stockpiling some essential non-perishables) and not (toilet paper?). Voluntary groups have been adapting: schools have been cancelling classes, or putting them on-line, while churches have been telling parishioners to stay home. Businesses have been advising employees to work from home, when possible, and to avoid unnecessary travel. Some have been limiting operating hours, while others (not all, to be sure) have been trying to help their employees to cope with the unexpected financial crisis.

The economy is not dealing well with the pandemic. But the financial system has been on unsteady ground for well over a decade. The Obama administration worked to prop up financial institutions and provide needed capital to large businesses, while failing to punish the people and organizations that enabled the 2007 financial collapse to take place. In fact, many of those people profited from their acts. Employment has increased since 2008, as has the accumulation of wealth by the top one percent, but there has been no corresponding increase in wages. Legislative reforms were enacted to limit financial speculation by lenders and to impose artificial stress tests to identify problems before they arose in practice. In 2010, the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act was enacted in the US following the crisis to “promote the financial stability of the United States”. Internationally, the Basel III capital and liquidity standards were adopted by the central banks of countries around the globe. To protect the rights of American consumers, in 2010 the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was established. But these innovations were systematically weakened between 2010 and 2017. In that time, the CFPB had moved from Special Advisor Elizabeth Warren to Acting Director Mick Mulvaney. Not all the necessary lessons were learned, and some which were learned were quickly forgotten.

For months, speculators have been waiting for a signal that it was time to grab profits and run from overvalued stock markets. The COVID-19 pandemic, followed immediately by the collapse of oil prices, have been taken as that signal, but they are not the cause. The problems with the global systems of finance and trade are structural. They existed well before the pandemic. And they have been encouraged by deeper problems in the global political systems.

Just as the COVID-19 pandemic has been a stress test, so has the presidency of Donald J. Trump. Like the pandemic, the deeper problems have been there for a long time. Trump is a trigger. Trump is a symptom. Trump is an indicator of the deeper problems. He has made things worse, but he is not the cause.

It’s easy to condemn Donald Trump. He’s an ass. He’s a buffoon. He’s a narcissist. He’s a racist and a narcissist a mysoginist and a friend to dictators. Whether or not he is in the service of some foreign master (a question that has yet to be settled), his actions have weakened American alliances, served American enemies, and threatened what many people consider to be the core values of American democracy.

And that’s ok — if we learn from it.

There’s no such thing as a perfect institution. Values and assumptions need to be challenged, once in a while. We need to rethink what we stand for, and what we stand against, and why. Much like the recession of 2007 highlighted the need for “stress testing” to avoid the collapse of our banks and our financial institutions, Trump and his enablers are providing a stress test for the American Republic. Rather than simply condemning him, we should learn from this experience. Fix our mistakes. Build stronger institutions. Reaffirm what we stand for.

Often, nothing is as educational as a bad example. Trump and Trumpism are, above all else, a bad example. Even his supporters — those with some measure of character — admit that as a person the president is not a “stable genius.” They accept that he is a deeply flawed individual, morally and cognitively, and many only voted for him because they believed the alternative was worse. They resented being ignored, being described as “deplorables” or told they “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” These voters wanted to shake things up. They wanted to break out of the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton cycle of establishment politicians trading chairs and reaping profits while the ship of state sank. Many of the people who voted for Trump in 2016 did it for the same reasons they voted for Obama in 2008. They wanted hope. They wanted change. And, to some extent, they got it from Trump. Change, at least.

The Trump years have been a stress test for American democracy. They have demonstrated how many of our problems are the result of individual shortcomings, and how much is due to the structure itself. On the individual side, in addition to Trump himself, we have people like Mitch McConnell, the Majority Leader of the Senate, self-declared “Grim Reaper” of bills from the House of Representatives, a presidential nominee to the Supreme Court, and testimony in the impeachment trial of Trump. But it’s not just Republicans. There are plenty of Democrats deserving of personal condemnation.

In any case, the important point is to learn from our mistakes. The people and the professional partisans need to develop a common understanding of where our weaknesses lie and what are some of the things that need to be reformed. People and parties need to be removed from power. Ideas need to be reconsidered. Institutions need to change. It’s encouraging that there are now more Americans who identify as “independent” than as a member of either of the two entrenched political parties.

The challenge to political institutions is more than just Trump. It’s more than just the United States, too. Some politicians still don’t get it. Joe Biden, for example, tells us the problem is “Trump,” and if he is removed from power we will return to a government of bipartisan consensus, negotiating over how best to achieve our common good. He’s wrong. Doesn’t he remember his own experiences under Obama? And the impeachment, where a partisan Senate fell into step to block a real trial and keep in office a man who had clearly violated his oath of office, is evidence that the problems we face are more than can be blamed on one noxious personality. The obstruction of justice, backed by the appointment of a partisan Attorney General and the replacement of judges and career civil servants with people selected on the basis of their partisan loyalties over demonstrated competence, underlines just how important the norms of service to the Constitution have been, and how easily they can be subverted by people who don’t share them.

Some simply to blame capitalism. Bernie Sanders, for example, has consistently positioned himself as a “democratic socialist” who considers capitalism itself to be contrary to the principles of freedom, and argues that if the levers of political and economic power are given to the “right” people, they will work together to achieve our common good. He’s also wrong. He’s wrong in his criticism because the economy we have today has little to do with the free, fair, and open markets proposed and fought for by Adam Smith. We have never lived under that kind of capitalism because true capitalism is about open competition under a set of open, transparent, unbiased rules supported by cooperation to maintain the rule of law. Real capitalism might work, but it would be messy, and we can’t do it with the current electoral system. We need a government strong enough to enforce the rules, professional enough to do it without parisanship, and open enough to popular opinion to not fall into the hands of a billionare class.

With the current first-past-the-post electoral system, the system of rewards leads to nothing better than a an ineffective system of two parties, each seeking the means to make permanent its own rule. The trend may be more obvious for the Republicans now, because demographic trends mean they have to work harder and break more laws to keep themselves in power. But the reward structure affects Democrats, too. And as more economic power resides in the state — either by military spending or public welfare — the pressure grows to be (in fact, if not in name) a one-party state. Neither capitalism or socialism requires democracy.

To the extent money is treated as “speech” it subverts the voices of the citizens of the Republic. Money is not speech: money is a bullhorn. And while money can’t buy an election (see Bloomberg), it can drown out alternatives. The treatment of money as speech, as taken to its apotheosis in Citizen’s United and McCutcheon means the death of representative democracy. It took a Civil War to overturn the Dred Scott decision. Let’s hope it doesn’t take anything like that to reverse our more recent mistakes. But until these decisions are reversed, there is a structural problem lying at the heart of the Republic.

A related problem was one anticipated by the anti-federalists, and their proposed solution remains open for ratification as an amendment to the US Constitution. Although the first ten amendments are now known as the “Bill of Rights,” there were in fact twelve amendments proposed. The first two were rejected, largely because they blocked the personal power and privileges of the legislators themselves. The second proposal was finally ratified by the states in 1992, and is now known as the 27th Amendment:

No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened

In other words, if Congress votes itself a pay raise, all of the members of the House (and one-third of the Senate) must face reelection before that raise will go into effect. If members of the Congress are seen as getting too greedy, they can be voted out of office before they get their raise.

The first proposal, now commonly known as the “Congressional Apportionment Amendment” remains open for ratification. Its effect on the structure of the government of the United States would be profound. The operative clause that applies once it becomes law is

there shall not be less than two hundred Representatives, nor more than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons.

Today the House of Representatives is capped by law at 430 Representatives. Under the new/old rule, given the current population of the United States, the House of Representatives would have more than six thousand!

Consider some of the consequences. As the number of Congressional districts increases, the size of each district — in land area and in population — declines. Each citizen finds it easier to contact and influence his Congressperson, and easier to run for Federal office herself. It is more difficult for a very wealthy person (or organization) to buy a sufficient number of elections to affect policy (especially if there are also limits to corporate and PAC spending). We would be closer to the ideal of one person-one vote. As the number of members of the Electoral College is related to the size of the House plus the Senate, even if the College can’t be abolished its results would be far more likely to reflect the popular vote. There would be no repeat of the presidential elections of 2000 and 2016.

The current number of Representatives is set by an Act of Congress, and with each census the members of the House grow farther apart from their supposed constituents. Given that most citizen’s votes would be worth more after the ratification of the proposed amendment, in terms of their proportional weight in the selection of Representatives, there would be more reason for citizens to get involved in local issues and elections.

To be sure, a 6500 member House would present difficulties for administration and negotiation, but today’s technology would make it easier to operate than it was to run the legislature when Congress had to always meet face-to-face and the transportation of people and information was limited to the speed of a horse. It would also open up more opportunities for private negotiations between members, more subcommittees, and more specialization by members on issues of importance to themselves and their constituents. Loyalties to constituents would be more influential than loyalties to Parties. Finally, as staff would grow to work with the larger, decentralized, body they would also be more available to monitor and influence the enormous bureaucratic apparatus of the Executive Branch. The Legislative Branch would have the resources it needs to better balance the Executive, and less need to make fundraising more important policy and constitutent service.

Maybe we should thank Trump. His stress test identifies real problems, and forces us to consider needs that would otherwise be ignored. His years in office are highlighting flaws in the American financial system, the electoral system, and the structure of American government. Maybe we should thank him for the unintentioned gift of his bad example — but I won’t.

Like COVID-19, the Trump presidency is a stress test. It’s unpleasant. It’s dangerous. It’s potentially deadly. But what’s important is what we learn from it and what we do about it. If we withdraw, we learn nothing. If we are stampeded, we may institutionalize changes that make things worse. But if we take this as an opportunity — to raise awareness, to mobilize emotion, to consider options, and to make useful changes — these are tragedies we can learn from. These are opportunities to do better. To be better. To be ready to better anticipate and deal with whatever is the next disaster to come along.