Always on the make, Pence parlayed his “think tank” and talk radio connections into a Republican nomination for Congress in 2000, won the seat and quickly began angling for positions of authority in Washington. He was a steady vote for the foreign and domestic policies of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. But his ambition often got the better of him. Pence bid for the post of House minority leader in a 2006 race with eventual Speaker John Boehner, but earned only twenty-seven votes from social-conservative hardliners.
In 2009, Pence was elected to the third-ranking post in the House, Republican Conference chairman. But he quickly began making noise about running for an Indiana U.S. Senate seat. Then he repositioned himself for a 2012 gubernatorial bid, which he won. A single controversy-plagued term saw Pence promoting religious-right agenda items (including a Religious Freedom Restoration Act designed to permit discrimination against members of the LGBTQ community that provoked widespread outrage and had to be rewritten); picking on refugees, immigrants, labor unions and public schools; and trying, without success, to set up a taxpayer-funded state-run news service that critics described as “the Pence News Service” and that one Indiana editor dismissed as “antithetical to the idea of an independent press.”
Pence’s many stumbles and conflicts made him unpopular at home. Polls had him in a tight race for reelection in 2016, leading Democrat John Gregg. The Indianapolis Star reported in that spring, in a May 19 article, that “[poll results] found that Pence has been unable to make up much of the ground he lost after last year’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act controversy. Only 36 percent [of voters] said he should be re-elected.”
The year 2016 was not shaping up as an easy one for Pence in Indiana. So as soon as word arrived on July 14 that he was Trump’s vice presidential pick, the Indianapolis Star reported that Pence was “dropping his re-election bid in Indiana.”
Why was Trump so attracted to a potential running mate who was not particularly popular in his home state?
It has a lot to do with the fact that Pence wanted the job, and that he had tended to say nice things about Trump when other Republicans had been condemning the billionaire. But it also had to do with where Pence comes from—not Indiana but the professional infrastructure established in the 1980s and 1990s by conservative political and economic elites. Toiling in the think tanks and radio studios of the right had made Pence exactly what Trump was not: consistent and connected. The governor was an absolutely steady social and economic and foreign policy conservative, who corporate CEOs and religious-right organizers alike knew they could count on to answer their call.
Pence had problems at home. But Andrew Downs told Politico in a July 12 article headlined “Trump flirts with unpopular Pence” that the governor’s “stance on things like the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in Indiana, as well as his stance on civil rights legislation in Indiana, those are things people are criticizing but they actually are things that help solidify social conservatives within the Republican Party.”
That’s what Trump wanted at this point, even if he had to settle for a weak endorser.
Pence didn’t get much respect. But he was cool with that. If the Trump campaign needed a Nixon, a Nixon Mike Pence would be. If the Trump transition needed a Nixon, a Nixon Mike Pence would be. If the Trump White House needed a Nixon, a Nixon Mike Pence would be. And he would do it without breaking a sweat.
PART 4
Privateers
[Private interests] had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.
—PRESIDENT FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT, 1936
Yes, as through this world I’ve wandered
I’ve seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.
—WOODY GUTHRIE, “Pretty Boy Floyd,” 1939
Half a millennium ago, the kings and queens of an old world formalized the practice of issuing letters of marque: official documents that authorized private vessels to cruise the high seas in search of foreign merchant ships laden with treasure. With a letter of marque in hand, a captain and his crew could attack, capture and plunder full-rigged ships, arrange for their “condemnation” and divide the bounty among investors, ship owners, ships officers and crews. Aside from a piece of paper conveying the “legitimacy” that extends from the royal hand, the armed brigands who fired upon, fought with and often killed the crews of targeted ships were difficult to distinguish from pirates. And when the privateers sailed into ports, they sacked cities with a purposeful precision and lethal lawlessness that rivaled the most ruthless marauders.
The new United States was not in its first stumbling moments above the employment of the seaborne skelm. But the enlightened among the founders recognized the folly of the endeavor; the wiliest of their number, Benjamin Franklin, made a strategic argument for the elimination of the wicked game, negotiating treaties that promised “if any person of either nation shall take commissions or letters of marque, he shall be punished as a pirate.” But Franklin’s efforts were so frequently thwarted and undone in times of war, even by allies such as the French, that the framers of the U.S. Constitution included in their charge to the legislative branch of the new federal government an understanding that “the Congress shall have Power… To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water.”
The development of naval ships and armaments sufficient to see off assaults by smaller private vessels, and the evolution of the law of the sea (from the 1856 Declaration of Paris to the 1907 Hague Conventions and beyond), would eventually make letters of marque and reprisal historical artifacts, even if right-wing militarists continued to champion them as libertarian responses to Somali piracy just a few years ago.
But, make no mistake, state-sanctioned plundering remains, with twists of practice and legality every bit as sly as those of the ancient brigands.
The swashbucklers of old, who grabbed letters of marque and reprisal before embarking on careers of pillage, went by a name: privateer. They boarded foreign ships with official sanction and claimed their treasure under a “prize law” that legitimized what their victims understood as piracy. Today’s pirates wear business suits and perfume themselves with the colognes and essences of political power. Yet, they still seek official sanction for acts of plunder. Though they do not identify as such, they are privateers, and though they do not acknowledge as much, they embrace a “prize law” mandate that is every bit as dangerous and disruptive as the state-sanctioned piracy of old. Only the convenient unfamiliarity of most Americans with the history of naval engagement and the progression of the English language obscures the tangled roots of the word they employ to describe their infamy: privatization.
Conservative “think tanks,” and the politicians and pundits who imagine that the association of the word “think” with a progenitor of proposals imbues self-serving “ideas” with virtue or value, have for decades preached a gospel of privatization. They use their resources and their bully pulpits to drag dysfunctional and discredited proposals—school vouchers, “self-regulation” of industry, incarceration for profit—from the far fringes of the national discourse to the center of policy debates. And now, as befits the administration of a grifter businessman turned grifter politician, the Trump presidency is empowering the most dysfunctional and discredited of these privateers to initiate expansive policies of piracy and plunder.
No president in American history has had as much experience as Trump when it comes to collecting federal, state and local government largesse. Though Trump “portrays himself as a swashbuckling entrepreneur, shrewder and tougher than any politician, and as a leader who would use his billionaire skills to restore discipline to the federal government,” the Los Angeles Times noted in 2011: “Trump glances over an expensive irony: He buil
t his empire in part through government largesse and connections.” As a New York City developer, Trump “sought to abuse the taxpayer and stretch the law” as he pursued massive government subsidies, says Congressman Jerrold Nadler, who represents much of Manhattan. Karen Burstein, a former auditor general of New York City who once concluded that Trump had “cheated” the city out of nearly $2.9 million, explained at a point when Trump was merely considering a presidential run that “it’s extraordinary to me that we elevated someone to this position of public importance who has openly admitted that he has used government’s incompetence as a wedge to increase his private fortune.”
Now, Trump has been elevated to the ultimate position of national guardianship, a position with immense authority to defend the public trust, or to barter it off. With his severely underdeveloped sense of irony, the president continues to peddle the fantasy that the private sector has the answer to every challenge facing America, and that the federal government should be dramatically downsized. One of Trump’s first acts as president was to issue an executive order that froze federal hiring while maintaining a burgeoning network of private contractors that now employs roughly twice the number of full-time employees as the does the government. “Numerous studies have shown that contractors are two to three times more costly than each federal employee they replace,” American Federation of Government Employees union president J. David Cox Sr. explained shortly after the president’s inauguration. “President Trump’s federal hiring freeze could result in more government waste if agencies are forced to hire high-priced contractors to do the work that federal employees can and should be doing.”
“All Americans,” declared Cox, “should be outraged that President Trump is gutting federal programs and funneling their taxpayer dollars into the hands of less-regulated private companies who answer to their corporate shareholders and not the American people.”
The causes for outrage extend far beyond a single executive order. The new president’s budget blueprint outlined deep cuts to domestic programs and proposals to end funding for programs to address climate change, programs to feed the poor, NPR, PBS, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Trump may know nothing of governing. But he is not a stupid man. He is an experienced crony capitalist who well understands the money that is to be made if and when the vital responsibilities of the federal government are bartered off to the highest bidders or, at the very minimum, leased away to the energy companies that lust after the oil and coal that lies beneath public lands. That understanding defined his thinking as he assumed the presidency. When he was transitioning from a campaign in which he promised to “drain the swamp” of official Washington to a presidency in which he would expand the swamp as never before, Trump assembled a crew of privateers who were not merely enthusiastic about cutting federal jobs and contracting out the work. Many were unrelenting apostles of privatization whose assumption of positions of power inspired a flurry of telling headlines in the weeks surrounding Trump’s inauguration:
Fortune: “Trump’s Team Said to Be Planning to Privatize Public Broadcasting”
New York Times: “Prisons Run by C.E.O.s? Privatization Under Trump Could Carry a Heavy Price”
Wall Street Journal: “Donald Trump Considers Moving VA Toward Privatization”
Reuters: “Trump could privatize nation’s air traffic controllers”
Slate: “How Trump Could Gut Public Education”
Forbes: “Trump Advisers’ Plan to ‘Privatize’ Indian Lands”
Huffington Post: “Trump’s infrastructure plan is a privatization trap”
Washington Post: “Elaine Chao emphasizes private funds for Trump’s promised transportation fixes”
The Washington Post headline got closest to the heart of the matter, as it focused not merely on Trump but on one of his nominees for a cabinet post. There is every reason to be concerned with allegations of illicit and ongoing profiteering on the part of a president who will not release his tax returns, engages in elaborate schemes to maintain a family-owned business empire and does not seem to understand that the Constitution he has sworn to “preserve, protect and defend” charges him with a responsibility to “promote the general Welfare,” as opposed to his own. But no president, no matter how nefarious, no matter how self-absorbed and self-serving, can empty the federal treasury on his own.
No president is possessed of sufficient time or energy, or authority, to fully betray the public trust in order to enrich the profiteering class that Franklin Delano Roosevelt decried as “those forces which disregard human cooperation and human rights in seeking that kind of individual profit which is gained at the expense of his fellows.”
A presidency that is inclined toward legalized larceny needs a complement of privateers, a gang of certain malefactors of great wealth, a wrecking crew waving modern-day letters of marque and reprisal as they board the ship of state. Not all Trump cabinet members and appointees will engage in careers of plunder on their own behalf. Some will do so as the extraordinarily well-compensated champions of a faux philosophy, developed by the pliant pundits of the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute and other “think tanks” that think primarily of enriching their benefactors. The distinctions are real. Some of Trump’s most prominent picks were indeed foxes-in-the-henhouse robber barons who the president was charging with oversight of the common coffers. Others are the mere servants of the robber barons: mandarins on a mission to facilitate pilfering on a grand scale. But the debate about gradations of greed ought not to obscure the broader point that the sacking of Washington has commenced. It threatens to extend across the nation, and around the world. And it may not stop there.
“You know,” says Trump, “space is actually being taken over privately, which is great.”
— 29 —
“I’VE GOT A BRIDGE TO SELL YOU”
Elaine Chao
Secretary of Transportation
When the U.S. State Department considers the corruptions of empire and avarice around the globe, it often highlights the unscrupulous practices that make governments the playthings of political and economic elites. Some less than democratic countries suffer under military rule, others struggle with rampant cronyism and still others wrestle with the ancient practice Italians call nepotismo. Nepotism is the stuff of scandal and conflict sufficient to collapse governments and spark people’s revolutions in states that have not previously known popular governance. Its manifestations are many, but some of the most concerning cases in recent years, like the one that destabilized the French ruling class on the eve of that country’s 2017 presidential election, have involved politicians who arrange sinecures for their spouses.
How might this work? Let’s imagine a scenario. The powerful majority leader of a legislative chamber that must approve or disapprove executive appointments could, in collaboration with a new and ethically unconcerned president, preside over the confirmation of his wife to serve as the overseer of a massive infrastructure program involving the distribution of a trillion dollars or more in direct funding, tax breaks and other benefits to industries with which the appointing president, the confirming husband and the confirmed wife have long maintained close and profitable relations.
Now, that could never happen in the United States, a country that was ushered into being by founders like Thomas Jefferson, who preached against allowing “government of an Aristocracy . . . riding and ruling over the plundered ploughman and beggared yeomanry” and warned that “the hereditary branches of modern governments are the patrons of privilege and prerogative, and not of the natural rights of the people, whose oppressors they generally are.” Or could it?
On January 31, 2017, the U.S. Senate voted after limited debate to approve Elaine Chao as secretary of the treasury. Just about everyone in the Senate supported the return of the former deputy secretary of transportation (for two years in the cabinet of President George H. W. Bush), dir
ector of the Peace Corps (for another two years under Bush the First) and secretary of labor (for eight years in the cabinet of President George W. Bush) to the government payroll. While many Trump nominations provoked bitter debate, the discussion leading up to the Chao vote was exceptionally cordial. The New York Times headline on the short story about her confirmation hearing with the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, at which she reportedly “offered remarkably few specifics,” read: “Elaine Chao Gets Cozy Reception at Confirmation Hearing.” And why not? She was introduced to the committee by the leader of the Senate, the man in charge of the chamber constitutionally mandated to provide “advice and consent” with regard to presidential nominations. A photo caption noted, ever so delicately, that “Ms. Chao sat with her father as her husband, the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, introduced her on Wednesday.”
McConnell did not vote to confirm his wife as secretary of transportation. But that did not absolve the couple from talk of whether they might be skirting the 1967 federal anti-nepotism statute that says “a public official may not appoint, employ, promote, advance, or advocate for appointment, employment, promotion, or advancement, in or to a civilian position in the agency in which he is serving or over which he exercises jurisdiction or control any individual who is a relative of the public official.” Something about introducing Chao to the relevant committee smacked of promoting or advocating her selection. But, you know, never mind.
The nepotism statute was written in 1967, after a Democratic president, John Kennedy, selected his brother Robert Kennedy to serve as attorney general in an administration where the vice president, Lyndon Johnson, used his influence as the former Senate majority leader (McConnell’s position) to secure approval of said brother to serve in the cabinet (like Chao). But, defenders of Chao noted that the measure, while written broadly, had been very narrowly applied. Indeed, as Adam Bellow, author of the book In Praise of Nepotism, has noted, the George W. Bush administration sort of settled the issue in the 2000s when “Michael Powell, son of Secretary of State Colin Powell, became chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Elaine Chao, wife of Sen. Mitch McConnell, became secretary of labor. Chao’s chief labor attorney, Eugene Scalia, was the son of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Elizabeth Cheney, the vice president’s daughter, became a deputy assistant secretary of state; her husband became chief counsel of the Office of Management and Budget. And in a crowning act of nepotistic chutzpah, Bush acceded to Sen. Strom Thurmond’s request that he appoint 28-year-old Strom Thurmond, Jr. U.S. attorney for South Carolina.”