How the Swamp Drained Trump
A year after arriving in Washington promising to hand power back to the people, the president has instead given the city’s insiders precisely what they wanted.
Elites were tormented by visions of torches and pitchforks on the horizon—red-capped zealots encircling their co-ops, crashing through their gated subdivisions, banging down the doors of their brownstones. At a dinner party early in Trump’s first term, I heard a well-appointed Washingtonian fret that the #MAGA army might literally march on the nation’s capital to visit violence and destruction on its inhabitants. At another event, a top executive at a Fortune 500 company pitched me on monetizing the insights I’d gleaned from covering Trump by becoming a consultant for corporate America. “I’m telling you, there are CEOs and boards all over the country right now that are terrified of Trump’s Twitter feed,” he said with great enthusiasm. “They’re trying to figure out how to stay on his good side and get what they want out of him.”
A year later, it seems clear they didn’t need my services—they figured Trump out all on their own.
For all his anti-establishment bluster, Trump has proven to be a paper tiger as president. Instead of cracking down on Wall Street plutocrats, he’s appointed them to his cabinet and given them tax cuts. Instead of browbeating world leaders, he’s let them flatter him into submission with theatrically obsequious state visits. Instead of locking out the sneering media elites, he’s pantingly courted the approval of New York Times reporters and book-writing dandies from Manhattan. And while he hobnobs in Davos with the globalist glitterati, the ragtag team of loyal lieutenants who set out in 2016 to upturn the established order with Trump has been largely shoved to the sidelines or purged altogether from his White House.
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“He’s a sucker for compliments,” said one former campaign aide, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about Trump. “It’s not even that hard. If you come to him with the right attitude and the right approach, it’s easy to extract things from him.” Of course, the practical effect of this trait is that Trump is constantly veering from one position to another, always a victim of his last conversation. But while the former aide conceded that this might not be ideal, the aide also empathized with his craving for respect.
“He’s faced such an onslaught of criticism, especially these past couple years,” the aide said. “So, he’s prone to be receptive to someone who shows appreciation for him. It’s an understandable human need.”
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A longtime Trump adviser who helped launch the billionaire’s presidential campaign, Nunberg now sees establishment spies and sell-outs infecting every level of the administration. He refers derisively to the president’s chief economic adviser as “Gary ‘Carried Interest’ Cohn,” or alternately, “Mr. Goldman Sachs.” He seethes that National-Security Adviser H.R. McMaster has “never missed giving a speech at a George Soros-funded event in his life.” Defense Secretary James Mattis is, in his view, a “John McCain type of Republican (which is to say, the bad type); and Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, and their cohort of cosmopolitan allies are “a bunch of Democrats.” (If you’re having trouble making sense of these insults, it’s likely because you don’t speak Breitbart—suffice it to say, they are not minor slurs.)
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In retrospect, Nunberg said, he can see how Trump would be uniquely vulnerable to being wooed by the rich and powerful. Though he ran in 2016 as a foe of the billionaire donor class, Trump had spent much of his professional life before that trying (and tragically failing) to convince America’s corporate chieftains that he was more than just a cartoonish TV personality—that he was one of them.
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But in Trump’s lifelong quest to gain entry into favored crowds like this one, he’s never been able to escape the gnawing fear that behind the obsequious smiles lurks a fundamental lack of respect. It’s that fear that makes him so vulnerable to flattery by the ruling class—and it haunted him on that day in Davos, too.
In the Q&A session that followed Trump’s speech, the forum chairman Klaus Schwab asked him how his business background informed his approach to governing. Trump’s answer drifted, almost involuntarily, into a thoroughly uncouth riff about the “nasty” and “mean” and “vicious” and “fake” press that he has to contend with in politics.
And yes, the audience ended up booing the president—but first they did something much worse. They laughed at him.
