President Trump's Attack on Justice Scalia's Structure

This article is about the psyche of President Trump, how it informs his interactions with foreign leaders, it's consequences, both domestic and international, and what it means for the U.S. and to the future of democratic polities around the world. Furthermore, these facts about our President's behavior provide us a map, revealing the causal source of the current attack on our elections.

Trump’s behavior is more akin to that of a benevolent king than a democratically elected president. In his mind he is unilaterally responsible for the safety and prosperity of Americans. The best way for him to accomplish this is through direct, unilateral engagement between himself and foreign leaders. Institutions play no role in his calculus because he trusts his ability as a "deal maker" to solve any problem the nation faces. Additional actors in the process add clutter between him and his policy goal. This mode of leadership, which prefers a one on one approach, necessitates an inevitable gravitation towards relationships with authoritarian regimes. Dictators are leaders who are not constrained by governmental mechanisms and thus decisions can flow quickly from agreement between the two interlocutors. Trump does not like structured approaches, opting instead to trust his abilities as a “deal maker” and act on intuition. This approach facilitates cooperation with authoritarians but is impotent with democratic leaders because it simultaneously has no effect on democratic leaders, who are constrained by their governments from acting unilaterally, Furthermore, it undermines the efforts of U.S. executive branch agencies to function properly. 

This is partly why Trump’s administration has one of the highest turnover rates of political appointees, at both the cabinet level and the agency head level. He is now on his third DOD Secretary in one term, after Mark Esper was removed for, among other things, refusing to deploy U.S. active-duty military forces against American citizens. Trump removes advisors and agency heads, whom he appointed, if their expert opinion, conflicts with his goal. Every president does this to some extent, but rarely, if ever, has a president been able to persistently alienate appointees from his own ideological milieu, namely, John Bolton, Rex Tillerson, Dan Coates, H.R. McMaster, John Kelly, Ambassador Taylor, and now Mark Esper.

Trump’s modus operandi of trying to concentrate decision making power in his singular hands, which I call the “Winner Doctrine”, has three major consequences. Two are domestic and one is international.

Trump does not believe in the U.S. balance of powers mechanism, especially congressional oversight. This was profoundly worsened by the hasty and poorly executed impeachment effort. He believes oversight is the effort of malicious actors trying to prevent him from carrying out his duties to make America safe. Congress and an independent judiciary are the strongest deterrents to employment of his “Winner Doctrine”. Any law that constrains executive power is a threat to the country, in Trump’s mind, because it hamstrings his ability to freely engage with foreign leaders and cut deals on a whim, something he frequently tried to do. John Bolton, a life long devout Republican, recounts in his book “The Room Where it Happened” numerous acts of borderline treason. Trump asked president Xi Jingping to buy more U.S. agricultural products to help him get re-elected. Bolton says that Trump told Xi Jingping that the Uighur concentration camps were not an issue, nor was China’s repression of Christians, because he was afraid of harming his personal relationship with the dictator. 

Trump has no compunction with labeling anyone a traitor who tries to limit his power, especially political foes and his own cabinet members, who desperately tried to keep him out of one on one meetings with dictators who consistently played him like a fiddle with flattery. If the goal is good, any method Trump employs to achieve it is justifiable and any dissent is treason. Trump will continue to attempt to undermine the efforts of the legislative and judicial branches, as well as his own executive branch, to carry out their constitutional duties because they are the most powerful obstacles to achievement of his goals via his “winner doctrine” strategy. 

Isolation of the decision maker is the second consequence of Trump’s “winner doctrine”. The problem with authoritarianism is that it blinds the leader while maintaining the illusion that the leader, now cut off from information on the ground, knows what is best. Given enough time, the leader purifies the environment around him of anyone willing to provide constructive criticism of the leader’s decisions and methods. Poor optics are the result as the flow of information from people most intimately connected to the problems about which he is supposed to be making decisions abates. Given four more years, Trump could turtle up inside the executive branch, purifying the ranks of civil servants in policy positions and security clearance privileged positions through executive orders such as Executive Order on Creating Schedule F In The Excepted Service enacted on October 21, 2020. This Executive Order could place many civil servants in a position of choosing between loyalty to the president and loyalty to the American people. In the wake of the departure of Cabinet members General Mattis, General Kelly, John Bolton, and now Mark Esper, compounded by an effort to purge the civil service ranks, the reality of an Executive Branch loyal to the president before the American people is a possibility and an immense threat. The next time Trump tries to leverage a foreign leader to help get an edge against a domestic political rival, no one will be left to sound the alarm. We just won’t know. 

The last consequence of Trump’s “Winner Doctrine” is international. Trump’s international negotiation tactics lead inevitably to closer relationships with dictators, and erosion of relationships with friendly democracies. The “Winner Doctrine” pushes the needle of the international system towards multipolarity, the most dangerous configuration of international relations, and one that we have successfully avoided since WWII. This will yield short term benefits economically for the U.S. The long term consequences cannot be quantified yet, but multipolarity is extremely unstable and without democratic trade partners, the costs will eventually far surpass the current short term benefits of Trump’s “deal making”. According to a study published by the University of Minnesota, Trump’s trade war has cost China 30 billion dollars while it has cost us 15 billion. This is a race to the bottom that can only get worse. Trump promotes not an America first strategy, but promotes a world friendly towards authoritarianism and inimical to democracy. We will not be spared the consequences.

I rest my belief on these matters, and the resulting conclusions of this analysis of Trump’s executive methods, squarely at the feet of the SCOTUS Justice Antonin Scalia who famously stated, “The structure of the government preserves a free society. That is what they debated about in 1777...it is the structure of government that prevents anyone from seizing all the power. Structure is destiny.” The key here is that security and safety rests not in any agent force, no matter the strength of their moral convictions, but in structure and process and political rules. It is the responsibility of the President to defend and protect this structure, not undermine elections which are the fundamental pillar of order in our society. It is this structure that keeps us free and safe to make the world better, instead of spending our energy fighting one another in a war of all against all. No individual can replace it. Any moral victory, at the expense of government structure, is Pyrrhic. Always.

We’ve never faced a more dangerous attack then one mounted by our own President against our own government. If we allow it, the costs will be immense. Let us hope they are not irreparable. God bless the United States of America.