Chapter 7
“A record 137.5 million Americans voted in 2016,” reported the Pew Research Center after the fact.1 That achievement, however, was marred by some odd discrepancies.
African American electoral participation has steadily risen over the past decades, reaching a peak of more than 65 percent of those eligible in the presidential election of 2012. Four years later, only 58 percent of eligible black Americans cast a ballot, a decline unprecedented in modern times for any American ethnic group.
Perhaps black voters were uninspired by Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. “Young Black Voters Voice Doubts About Clinton,” reported the New York Times on September 5, 2016.2 On the other hand, similar headlines could surely have been reported about John Kerry in 2004. Yet African Americans turned out for Kerry in greater percentages than for Hillary Clinton.
Something else happened to dampen African American participation in the election of 2016, and that something was the surge of Republican victories at the state and local levels during the Obama presidency. Republicans entered the 2016 cycle controlling all elected branches of government in half the states in the country, their best showing since the 1920s. Democrats controlled only seven states, their worst showing since Reconstruction.
Among the first uses to which Republicans put their ascendancy was revising state voting procedures. Between 2010 and 2016, some twenty states rewrote their laws in ways that made voting more difficult, often with blatantly partisan effect. For example, six states cut back on early and weekend voting. Early voting encourages participation by minority voters, who tend to have less control over their working hours. By contrast, mail-in ballots—preferred by the elderly and by military personnel, and historically the most fraud-prone element of the American electoral system—went untouched. Ten states instituted new voter identification rules, again often with partisan effect. Texas, for example, allowed only seven forms of identification: a concealed-carry permit was acceptable; a photo ID from the state university system was not.3
Of the twenty states that raised new difficulties to voting during the Obama years, only six did so in time for 2012; fourteen in time for 2016. One of the most consequential of the pre-2016 changes occurred in Wisconsin, a must-win state for Republicans: the abolition of the state’s “special registration deputies,” individuals certified by the state to check proofs of eligibility and add names to the voter rolls. These deputies had played a critical role in minority registration drives in the city of Milwaukee. In their stead, Wisconsin instituted a system of online registration more convenient to those with computer access and savvy—and a stark impediment to those who lack either or both.4
Mike Pence’s Indiana did not lag far behind. An August investigation led by Fatima Hussein of the Indianapolis Star found that Republicans used their control of state and local government to reduce early voting options in center-city Indianapolis and expand them in the Republican suburbs to the northeast. Early voting stations in GOP-leaning Hamilton County were multiplied from one to three; in Democrat-favoring Marion County, they were cut from three to one. Result: while early absentee voting rose by 63 percent in Hamilton between 2008 and 2016, it tumbled by 26 percent in Marion. Options were expanded in other Republican counties as well, helping to shift the state from Obama’s Democratic column in the presidential election of 2008 back to Romney and Trump in 2012 and 2016.
Enabling many of these changes was a 2013 Supreme Court decision, Shelby County v. Holder, that put an end to the most biting section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. That section required nine states (Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia) as well as some forty counties (in states including California, Florida, New York, and North Carolina) to gain preclearance from the federal Department of Justice for changes to their voting rules.
At the time Republican-led states adopted their new voting rules, Donald Trump’s candidacy for president was imagined by virtually nobody. Wisconsin’s governor, Scott Walker, hoped that the 2016 Republican presidential nominee might be himself. But the new system was positioned for Trump to use—and to weaponize with some special measures all his own.
Throughout their existence as members of a self-governing republic, Americans have fused a deep conviction that “here, the people rule” with a deep ambivalence about who exactly should be enumerated among “the people.” This ambivalence has never been resolved, and if anything seems to have become more intensely felt over the past quarter century. The same Marist poll quoted in the previous chapter that showed that 43 percent of Republicans thought the country had “gone too far” in protecting the rights of the media also showed that a quarter of them believed the United States had gone “too far” in protecting the right to vote.5
As the country has become polarized between rich and poor, and as the white majority in the United States has dwindled, a mood of anxiety has gripped those who feel themselves vulnerable to new demands on the state. This anxiety was eloquently expressed by Paul Ryan’s 2011 “tipping point” speech:
America is drawing perilously close to a tipping point that has the potential to curtail free enterprise, transform our government, and weaken our national identity in ways that may not be reversible.
The tipping point represents two dangers: first, long-term economic decline as the number of makers diminishes and the number of takers grows . . . and second, gradual moral-political decline as dependency and passivity weaken the nation’s character.6
The same thought was expressed more crudely the next year by Donald Trump Jr., who in October 2012 tweeted, “The American republic will endure until the day Congress discovers it can bribe the public with the public’s money,” a remark he (spuriously) attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville.7
The elder Trump articulated the same apprehension for the future in a September 2016 interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network’s David Brody.
I think this will be the last election if I don’t win. I think this will be the last election that the Republicans have a chance of winning because you’re going to have people flowing across the border, you’re going to have illegal immigrants coming in and they’re going to be legalized and they’re going to be able to vote and once that all happens you can forget it. You’re not going to have one Republican vote. And it’s already a hard number. Already the path is much more difficult for the Republicans. You just have to look at the maps.8
It was not out of the ether that Donald Trump confected his postelection claim that he lost the popular vote only because “millions” voted illegally.9 Such claims have been circulating in the Republican world for some time, based in some cases on purported statistical evidence.10 Beyond the evidence, however, was fear: fear that the time would soon come, and maybe already had come, when democracy would be turned against those who regarded themselves as its rightful winners and proper custodians. That fear can legitimize actions that once would have seemed utterly unacceptable, antidemocratic, un-American, verging on the treasonable.
Through the 2016 campaign, Trump had denounced American democracy as a “rigged system”: rigged against him, specifically, by a “small handful of global special interests.” Trump’s final campaign ad, released on November 6, 2016, showed three faces to illustrate those “global special interests”: the financier George Soros; the chair of the Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen; and the CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein. A voice-over intoned:
It’s a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth, and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities.11
The Anti-Defamation League issued a worried statement about this closing appeal:
Whether intentional or not, the images and rhetoric in this ad touch on subjects that anti-Semites have used for ages. This needs to stop. In the final days before the election, tensions are extremely high. It’s a time when all candidates need to be especially responsible and bid for votes by offering sincere ideas and policy proposals, not by conjuring painful stereotypes and baseless conspiracy theories.12
But for some Republicans, Trump’s “rigging” claims represented an opportunity rather than an embarrassment. Trump followed up his ungrounded claims of widespread illegal voting by forming a presidential advisory commission on electoral integrity under Vice President Mike Pence. The commission’s strongest personality, Kansas’s secretary of state, Kris Kobach, had long argued that US elections were corrupted by illegal voting—and that the proper remedy was the frequent and aggressive purging of voter registration rolls.
Duplication of voter registration is an endemic feature of American life. A young person born in one state who attends college in another, finds a first job in a third, and then settles down in a fourth could leave a trail of registrations behind her, because nobody invests much energy removing people from registration rolls when they leave a state. On the other hand, there’s very scant evidence that this duplication of registration leads to duplication of votes. While it’s theoretically imaginable that our itinerant young person could fraudulently request absentee ballots from states one, two, and three, the lawbreaking would require considerable effort. Absentee ballots are typically sent by US mail only to the recorded street addresses, so the fraud-minded voter will have to arrange some kind of multi-state collection service.
To ascertain whether a Juan Garcia Gomez who cast a ballot in Kansas is the same person or different from a Juan Garcia Gomez who voted in Nebraska requires much more specific information, such as a Social Security number. State law, however, typically protects individual voter information. For that reason, fifteen states refused to cooperate with the Pence commission, contending that its requests for voters’ names, birth dates, and Social Security numbers violated state law; those states were Arizona, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Mexico, New York, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Tennessee, Virginia, and Wyoming. Others signaled negative responses soon to come: Arkansas, Hawaii, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Montana, and Rhode Island. The majority of the states that did offer cooperation with the commission insisted that they would provide only publicly available information, not including Social Security numbers, for example.13 (Wisconsin added that it would provide the federal government publicly available information only on the same terms it provides voter information to political parties: on payment of a fee of $12,500.)
But of course the publicly available information would not advance the commission’s case very far. Vexed, President Trump angrily demanded in a July 1, 2017, tweet:
Numerous states are refusing to give information to the very distinguished VOTER FRAUD PANEL. What are they trying to hide?14
The answer to that presidential question quickly became obvious, as the White House was forced to acknowledge that it lacked a secure means to store voters’ information. It would be too grimly ironic if a White House project to stop voter fraud instead created a centralized database of voter information that hackers could access . . . to enable voter fraud.
This fear is not at all a hypothetical concern. The Russian effort to subvert the 2016 information did not stop at “fake news.” Hackers attacked state voting systems too: 150,000 attempts just in the state of South Carolina.15 Like the invading Martians in H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, who are ultimately laid low by humble earthly diseases, the Russian hackers were impeded by the decentralized chaos of American voting systems. If election-critical information is centrally stored, however, it will have to be effectively secured. The competence record of a White House that routinely misspells names, bungles titles, and makes crude factual errors in the course of wrongly accusing others of factual errors is not reassuring.16
I write this book, and perhaps you read it, at a time when many details of the Trump-Russia collusion remain unsettled. Yet the essential elements of the transaction have been apparent since the summer of 2016: Russia mounted a costly and aggressive espionage campaign to help elect Donald Trump and congressional Republicans and to defeat Hillary Clinton and congressional Democrats.17 Donald Trump’s son, son-in-law, and campaign manager privately met with Russian spies offering damaging information about Hillary Clinton. “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer,” replied Donald Trump Jr. to the offer of Russian aid, an offer that specifically referenced “Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”18
Trump’s team of foreign policy advisers in 2016 was led by people who had received pay from the Russian state or state-controlled businesses.19 Most troublingly—and without overstepping what has yet been proved—it certainly looks as if the Trump campaign coordinated its strategy and messaging with Russian-sponsored hacking and disinformation efforts.20
But the culpability does not stop with Donald Trump, his family, or even his campaign.
In December 2016, the Washington Post reported on what had happened when congressional leaders were briefed on the Russian hacks earlier that year.
In September, during a secret briefing for congressional leaders, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) voiced doubts about the veracity of the intelligence, according to officials present. . . .
In a secure room in the Capitol used for briefings involving classified information, administration officials broadly laid out the evidence U.S. spy agencies had collected, showing Russia’s role in cyber-intrusions in at least two states and in hacking the emails of the Democratic organizations and individuals.
And they made a case for a united, bipartisan front in response to what one official described as “the threat posed by unprecedented meddling by a foreign power in our election process.”
The Democratic leaders in the room unanimously agreed on the need to take the threat seriously. Republicans, however, were divided, with at least two GOP lawmakers reluctant to accede to the White House requests.
According to several officials, McConnell raised doubts about the underlying intelligence and made clear to the administration that he would consider any effort by the White House to challenge the Russians publicly an act of partisan politics.
Some of the Republicans in the briefing also seemed opposed to the idea of going public with such explosive allegations in the final stages of an election, a move that they argued would only rattle public confidence and play into Moscow’s hands.21
The Obama administration observed increasingly assertive Russian attacks on European political systems as early as 2014. For reasons we will learn from the memoirs its members write, the Obama administration hesitated to respond. Was it to protect its Iran diplomacy? A hope it could mollify Russia into ending aggression against Ukraine? A more general aversion to forceful foreign policy? Overconfidence in the robustness of democratic political systems, including its own? Whatever the motive, the results are as we have seen: warnings were issued to Russia, but no action was taken during the election, and only very limited penalties applied afterward, most notably the seizure of two Russian diplomatic compounds.
By then it was too late. A president beholden to Russia had been installed in the Oval Office: the most successful foreign espionage attempt against the United States in the nation’s history. And from beginning to end, the president’s political party rallied to protect him—and itself—from investigation, exposure, and consequences.
“I’ll be the first one to come out and point to Russia if there’s clear evidence,” declared House intelligence chair Devin Nunes in December 2016.22 Instead, over the following months, Nunes actively collaborated with the Trump White House to sabotage his committee’s investigation, to the point where he was forced to recuse himself from further involvement. House Speaker Ryan issued multiple statements viewing Russia’s behavior with alarm in 2016. But Ryan took a firm stance from the beginning against anybody digging too deep into what had happened. “As we work to protect our democracy from foreign influence,” Ryan said in a written statement of December 12, 2016, “we should not cast doubt on the clear and decisive outcome of this election.”23 When in June 2017 the Senate voted 97–2 to limit President Trump’s ability to lift sanctions on Russia, Ryan whipped votes in the House to block the measure.24 (An amended version of the June sanctions bill did pass both houses at the end of July and was signed by President Trump in August.25 The sanctions remained unimplemented as of November 1, 2017.)
Even supposed Russia hawks like Senator Marco Rubio came to Trump’s aid when it counted. At the June 8, 2017, public hearing for the fired FBI director James Comey, Rubio used his public airtime to try to extract admissions that would discredit Comey and exculpate the president. Remember, Trump himself had acknowledged in an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt on May 11 that he had fired Comey precisely in order to put an end to the “made-up story” that Russia helped him win the election. Trump’s motive for firing Comey was no longer a matter in dispute. Yet it was Rubio more than any other senator on the committee who endeavored to distract from that undisputed fact.
Rubio: But the specific ask was that you would tell the American people what you had already told him, what you had already told the leaders of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans: that he was not personally under investigation. . . .
Comey: Yes, sir, that’s how I . . .
Rubio: In fact, he was asking you to do what you have done here today. . . .
Rubio: So, in essence, the president agreed with your statement that it would be great if we could have an investigation, all the facts came out and we found nothing. So he agreed that that would be ideal, but this cloud is still messing up my ability to do the rest of my agenda.
Rubio: So are those the other—are those the only two instances in which that sort of back-and-forth happened, where the president was basically saying, and I’m paraphrasing here, it’s OK, do the Russia investigation. I hope it all comes out. I have nothing to do with anything Russia. It’d be great if it all came out, if people around me were doing things that were wrong.
Rubio: You know, this investigation is full of leaks, left and right. I mean, we’ve learned more from the newspapers sometimes than we do from our open hearings, for sure. You ever wonder why, of all the things in this investigation, the only thing that’s never been leaked is the fact that the president was not personally under investigation, despite the fact that both Democrats and Republicans in the leadership of Congress knew that, and have known that for weeks?26
That last sentence, it should be noted, was the single most often heard pro-Trump talking point of the period. Rubio dutifully reprised it for the watching world.
The truth outed, as truth tends to do, especially with Trump’s stumblebum crew. The line written into the script of All the President’s Men about Watergate applies even more forcefully to the Trump family and its entourage: “The truth is, these aren’t very bright guys, and things got out of hand.” But it is also true that the wrong actions of Donald Trump and his family were protected before the fact, and condoned after the fact, by the larger Republican and conservative world. I jokingly tweeted at the end of May that after all the excuses condoning Greg Gianforte’s assault on Ben Jacobs, we would next be called on to explain why treason is bad.27 That joke all too quickly proved prophetic.
Geraldo Rivera opened the excuse making on the May 10, 2017, Hannity show.
If the Russian KGB chief is talking to Paul Manafort and the chief says, “You know, I’ve got this dirt here that says Hillary Clinton was this or that,” and Paul Manafort says, “Next Wednesday, why don’t you release that, that’d be great for us.” That’s not—I don’t know that that’s a crime at all. What’s the crime?28
In a conversation with me on the May 21, 2017, edition of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS, the pro-Trump author Ronald Kessler said, “There’s no violation of law if, in fact, the campaign colluded with Russia, whatever that means.”29 The conservative radio host Michael Reagan said the same thing in a CNN discussion on May 31: “Collusion is not breaking the law.”30
On his June 22, 2017, television program, Sean Hannity and former Speaker Newt Gingrich agreed that it would be a positive benefit to the United States if Trump had worked with the Russians against Hillary Clinton. “If I worked for President Trump and his campaign, and I thought the Russians had information that would expose Hillary for being a liar, and I said, ‘Could you release that?’ Is that a crime?”31
Hannity returned to the theme on his radio program the next day:
What was the collusion? That maybe somebody in the Trump campaign talked to somebody in Russia because Russia supposedly had the information that Hillary Clinton had destroyed on her server when she committed a felony and tried to cover up her crimes? Is that a crime, to say, “Release it?” To show the truth? To show damaging information?32
The former Fox anchor Brit Hume similarly absolved the Trump campaign on the June 25 Fox News Sunday. “While it obviously would be alarming and highly inappropriate for the Trump campaign to—of which there’s no evidence, by the way, of colluding with the Russians—it’s not a crime.”33 Some went further still, wondering why anybody need worry about Russia at all. “The news media in the West pose a far greater danger to Western civilization than Russia does,” tweeted the radio host Dennis Prager on July 14, 2017.34
Whether collusion with a Russian espionage agency would violate US election laws raises complex issues of legal interpretation. The national security implications, however, are straightforward and grim. A candidate who had received help from a hostile foreign power would depend hugely on that power’s goodwill. What if they released evidence against him? They could wreck his presidency, provoke an impeachment crisis, possibly send him to prison. He would have to govern himself very circumspectly, even at political risk to himself at home. Collusion between a US president and a hostile foreign power would constitute the gravest espionage crisis in American history—and one of its blackest pages of treason.
The below timeline of relevant events was compiled by NBC News, abridged by me with some interpolations in bold type.
June 9, 2016: Donald Trump Jr.—along with Jared Kushner and Trump’s former campaign chair Paul Manafort—meet with the Kremlin-connected lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.
June 9: Trump tweets for the first time about Clinton’s missing 33,000 emails.
July 18: The Washington Post reports on the first day of the GOP convention that the Trump campaign changed the Republican platform to ensure that it didn’t call for giving weapons to Ukraine to fight Russian and rebel forces.
July 21: Trump gives an interview to David Sanger and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times in which he repeatedly refuses to commit to defending NATO’s Baltic allies Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia against Russia.
July 22: WikiLeaks releases emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee.
July 27: In the final news conference of his 2016 campaign, Trump tells Russia: “If you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the thirty thousand emails that are missing.”
August 4: Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan, confronts his Russian counterpart about Russia’s interference.
October 4: WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange says his organization will publish emails related to the 2016 campaign.
October 7: The Department of Homeland Security and the director of national intelligence release a statement directly saying that Russia is interfering in the 2016 election.
October 7: The Washington Post reports the Access Hollywood video.
October 7: WikiLeaks begins releasing emails stolen from Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta, less than one hour after the Washington Post report.
October 31: “This WikiLeaks is like a treasure trove,” Trump says on the campaign trail.
November 4: “Boy, I love reading those WikiLeaks,” Trump says from Ohio.35
All this may be coincidence, a sequence of misunderstandings. But it does not look good for the integrity of the American political system. The authoritarians of older times abolished elections altogether or falsified them so outrageously as to render them meaningless. Modern authoritarian states do not so explicitly renounce the democratic idea. Even Vladimir Putin’s Russia has elections in which millions of people vote, and it’s not at all obvious that Putin cheats very much in the counting of that vote. In the Russian parliamentary elections of September 2016, Vladimir Putin’s party won a perfectly plausible 54 percent of the vote, on the basis of a turnout that the regime candidly described as the lowest since the end of communism.36 In Putin’s system, if you have to cheat in the vote counting, you’ve left things far too late. And Putin’s is the most repressive of the world’s de-democratizing states. The others—places such as Hungary, the Philippines, South Africa, Turkey, and so on—distort the election processes even less, although just enough to preclude unwelcome results.
In modern authoritarian states, unapproved candidates are deterred from running; disfavored people are discouraged from voting. Votes may be counted honestly enough, but voting systems are tilted in favor of the party of the leader. In the Hungarian elections of 2014, for example, the party of the prime minister won 133 out of 199 parliamentary seats, with only 44.9 percent of the vote. In such states, state resources are directed in ways that support the party of the leader. State-owned and state-influenced media spread disinformation and defamation about opponents. Rather than discuss issues, ethnic grievances are stoked—and when outsiders report on what is happening, the regime exploits the opportunity to denounce a hostile external world for defaming the nation.
Americans regard their democracy as beyond comparison to such sad international cases. Yet here too the democratic system was and is harshly contested. The right of all adult citizens to vote is no longer seriously debated by Americans, but the universal ability to vote seems to encounter new obstacles with every passing year. If Donald Trump entrenches himself in power, those obstacles will rise higher and proliferate more numerously across the American political landscape.
The fear that the younger Donald Trump inserted into Tocqueville’s mouth—that a democracy can last only until citizens discover they can vote themselves benefits—actually originated nearer to home. “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result that democracy collapses.” Those oft-quoted words, also sometimes attributed to Aristotle and Thomas Babington Macaulay, seem to have originated in a 1951 op-ed in the Daily Oklahoman by a retired Wisconsin state senator.37 What’s interesting about those words is not how prescient they are, but really how opposite to the truth.
In the United States as in other countries, the great threat to constitutional democracy has not been the demands for largesse by the many, but the fears for their property of the few. The most successful antidemocratic movement in American history—the reduction of voting rights after Reconstruction—was intended precisely to thwart local majorities voting themselves such benefits as schooling and paying for it by higher taxes on the rich. The rollback worked too. Only 50,752 ballots were cast by the 1.7 million people of South Carolina in the election of 1924, half as many as cast by 700,000 South Carolinians in 1872. (Connecticut, with 300,000 fewer people than South Carolina in 1924, cast eight times as many votes).
Now in the 2010s, the integrity of American democracy is challenged again—and again the challenge is backed by threats of armed violence. In June 2017, a rumor spread via Facebook that protesters planned to rally at a park in Houston, Texas, to demand the removal of a statue of Sam Houston. Hundreds of supporters of the statue rallied, a large number of them carrying rifles, some wearing body armor.
Hermann Park, the site of the Sam Houston statue, is one of the city of Houston’s most visited parks. The Houston Zoo is located within it; the Children’s Museum of Houston stands just a few blocks away. On weekends, the park is typically crowded with young families. Yet some dozens of Texans decided that this would be an appropriate place to plan a gunfight. And of course they were entirely within their rights, as those rights are understood in twenty-first-century America. Texas law forbids citizens to carry deadly weapons “in a manner calculated to alarm.” Otherwise, long arms may be shouldered by virtually anyone in almost any place. It might be thought that bringing a rifle into a playground is itself “calculated to alarm.” But over the past generation, gun carriers have become much more assertive and the authorities much more accommodating.
Gun carriers at the so-called Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in August 2017 acted more like a paramilitary force than as individual demonstrators. They wore pseudo-military outfits, including body armor. They took tactical formations to surround the site of the expected confrontation—although when murder was done, it was done ISIS-style, by ramming a car into a crowd of demonstrators.
The City Council of San Antonio, Texas, met in August 2017 to debate removal of a Confederate monument from that city’s Travis Park. Ten men bearing assault rifles and wearing Kevlar vests took positions outside the council’s chambers.38
The open display of military-style weapons at public meetings is not an ancient right cherished by Americans through the centuries. “Among free men,” Abraham Lincoln famously wrote, “there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and that they who take such an appeal are sure to lose their case, and pay the cost.”39 Yet just such a threat is what is being issued in Houston and Charlottesville and San Antonio—and more places yet to come.
The following happened in Loudoun County, Virginia, on Election Day 2016.
A man wearing a Donald Trump shirt and carrying a weapon stood outside a voting location in Loudoun County, Virginia. . . . “I had my 9-year-old son with me. I felt intimidated,” [Erika] Cotti said. “And I had to explain to my 9-year-old why a man with a 357 magnum is standing outside the polling station.”
Cotti said the man offered her a Republican sample ballot, which she declined.
“He’s like, ‘Who are you going to vote for, crooked Hillary?’ And I was like, ‘That’s really none of your business,’” Cotti said, adding that the man was standing in the sidewalk outside of the office when they left and blocking their path.40
Will there be more such incidents in 2018 and 2020? It’s all quite legal. In many Americans’ minds, the right to carry arms is now the master right of American law, to which all other rights must yield. In 1994, the average gun-owning household owned four weapons; by 2015, the average gun-owning household owned eight.41
At a press conference in the lobby of Trump Tower two days after the violence in Charlottesville, Trump channeled the feelings of the men who carried guns to prevent an elected government from putting lawful decisions into effect. “You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.”42 (The new name to which Trump objected was “Emancipation Park.”) A week later still, at an August 22, 2017, rally in Phoenix, Arizona, Trump again identified himself with those defending Confederate monuments by force of arms: “Yes, by the way, they are trying to take away our history and our heritage. You see that.”43
Through the 2016 campaign, Trump had condoned political violence by his supporters against protesters in their midst: “You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks.”44
Back then, however, the cause was purely personal: his own election, unconnected to any larger movement in American society or culture. As Trump’s personal popularity sagged, he sought larger and bigger forces to sustain him. Speaking to police officers in Long Island, Trump endorsed intentional police brutality against members of Salvadoran gangs, whom he condemned as “animals.”
They kidnap. They extort. They rape and they rob. They stomp on their victims. They beat them with clubs, they slash them with machetes, and they stab them with knives. They have transformed peaceful parks and beautiful quiet neighborhoods into bloodstained killing fields. They’re animals.45
When dealing with such subhumans, the police should dispense with legal niceties, urged the president.
When you see . . . these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon, you just see them thrown in, rough, and I said, “Please don’t be too nice.” Like when you guys put somebody in the car and you’re protecting their head, you know, the way you put their hand over, like, don’t hit their head and they’ve just killed somebody, don’t hit their head, I said, “You can take the hand away, OK?”46
Those remarks drew what was described as “wild applause” from the police attending.47 And even though the president’s words were promptly repudiated by senior police leaders across the nation, those who shared a national origin or a skin tone or a last name with the people Trump regarded as “animals” must wonder: Has the president of the United States authorized such actions against me as well?
The American economic system might feel “rigged” against Trump supporters. But the American political system of 2016 had in important ways been rigged in Trump’s favor. Yet as Trump and his supporters looked to the future, how secure could they feel? Their hold on the electorate was weak. Foreign governments’ hold over them was possibly very strong. Maybe the answer—the only answer—was not to rig less, but to rig much more.