Of all the images transmitted from the lobby of Trump Tower over the past few weeks, perhaps the most poignant were the ones of a white-haired Al Gore emerging from the elevators after a face-to-face with the building’s owner, on Monday. “I found it an extremely interesting meeting, and to be continued,” Gore told the ever-present cameras. “I’m just going to leave it at that.” Some people interpreted the fact that Donald Trump had met with Gore, the former Democratic Vice-President and veteran climate-change campaigner, as a sign that he might be rethinking the retrogressive views about environmental policy he expressed during the campaign. This line of thinking appeared to get another boost on Wednesday, when Leonardo DiCaprio, who earlier this year released a documentary about the impact of global warming called “Before the Flood,” also traipsed into Trump Tower.Then, just hours after Trump met DiCaprio, his campaign let it be known that he was nominating Scott Pruitt, the attorney general of Oklahoma, to run the Environmental Protection Agency. Pruitt is a hero to conservative Republicans and energy-industry executives alike, and has helped lead the legal battle to roll back President Obama’s environmental initiatives, including his Clean Power Plan, which used E.P.A. edicts to impose strict emissions standards on coal-fired power stations. Not content with fighting in the courtroom, Pruitt has also publicly questioned the existence of climate change, and argued that schoolchildren should be taught that the causes and extent of rising temperatures are still subject to debate.
While liberals and Democrats reacted with outrage to Trump’s selection of Pruitt, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Trump had already picked for his cabinet a Vice-President (Mike Pence) who opposed extending equal-rights legislation to gays and lesbians, and who has advocated for privatizing Social Security; an Attorney General (Jeff Sessions) who says that millions of undocumented immigrants will have to “self-deport”; a Health and Human Services Secretary (Tom Price) who has helped lead the congressional campaign to repeal the Affordable Care Act; an Education Secretary (Betsy DeVos) who wants the federal government to stop funding public schools; and a Housing and Urban Development Secretary (Ben Carson) who believes public programs such as federally financed housing foster dependency.
To be sure, not all of Trump’s cabinet picks have been right-wing Republican ideologues. He has also shown a fondness for retired generals such as Mike Flynn (national-security adviser); James (Mad Dog) Mattis (Defense); and John Kelly (Homeland Security); plus gazillionaires such as Steve Mnuchin (Treasury); Wilbur Ross (Commerce); and Linda McMahon (Small Business Administration). On Thursday and Friday, Trump added two more rich white guys to his list, letting it be known that Andrew Puzder, the chief executive of a big fast-food-franchise company, would serve as his Labor Secretary, and Gary Cohn, the president of Goldman Sachs (and a former colleague of Mnuchin) had been offered the job of heading the National Economic Council in the White House.
Like DeVos, Puzder, whose company owns Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr., appears to have satisfied two of the criteria that Trump’s transition team is using to evaluate candidates for top jobs in the Administration. He is mega-rich and he is implacably opposed to the mission of the agency he is slated to run, which is supposed to protect the interests of workers. Not only does Puzder oppose raising the minimum wage but he’s also a champion of robots. In an interview earlier this year, he said of automated customer-service systems, “They’re always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there’s never a slip-and-fall, or an age-, sex-, or race-discrimination case.”
What is going on here?
Some of Trump’s supporters may have believed they were electing a pragmatic businessman who wouldn’t be restricted by obligations to either party or other powerful interest groups. But he is putting together a cabinet that looks almost exactly like the modern Republican Party: older, white, anti-government, and extremely conservative on virtually every issue. It could have been constructed by the Heritage Foundation, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, or one of the other corporate-funded institutes that have helped drag the G.O.P. so far to the right on issues ranging from taxation to environmental regulation to charter schools.
We haven’t seen anything like this since the end of 1980, when Ronald Reagan picked James Watt, a nineteen-seventies version of Pruitt, to head the Interior Department; the young ideologue David Stockman to head the Office of Management and Budget; and the Cold Warrior Jeane Kirkpatrick to be his Ambassador to the United Nations. But even Reagan had some moderate Republicans around him, including his Vice-President, George H. W. Bush, and his chief of staff, James Baker.
Who will be the moderating influences on Trump? Reince Priebus? He’ll serve in the same job Baker did, but he emerged from the same hard-line conservative Wisconsin G.O.P. that gave us Scott Walker and Paul Ryan. What about Trump’s daughter Ivanka, who reportedly helped arrange the Trump Tower meetings with Gore and DiCaprio? We have just seen how much a difference those meetings made. Steve Bannon, then? O.K., now I’m joking.
Many have wondered recently why conservative leaders such as Ryan haven’t been more critical of Trump’s conduct since the election, and, in particular, his barrage of controversial tweets, including one in which he suggested that millions of people voted illegally on November 8th. But the answer is clear enough. So far, Ryan and his colleagues have had every reason to believe that Trump will allow them to pass large parts of a conservative agenda that they have been putting forward for years but that they have never been able to persuade a majority of Americans to support. As long as Trump goes along with this agenda, orthodox Republicans have every reason to downplay his outbursts on social media, as Ryan did earlier this week, and even to put up with some of his more heretical antics, such as his criticism of free trade and his browbeating of corporations that move jobs abroad or irritate him in some other way.
The more intriguing question is why Trump is tilting so far to the right with his cabinet picks. Perhaps he has been a movement conservative this whole time, keeping his devotion to Ayn Rand largely under wraps for the first seventy years of his life, even through a Presidential campaign, only to reveal them now. A more plausible explanation is that the President-elect has already gotten bored with the details of putting together a government, and—other than dealing with high-profile appointments, such as Mattis and whomever he picks as Secretary of State—he is letting Pence, Priebus, and his other advisers run things. Or, at least, he is allowing them to shape the choices he is making.
The narrative being offered to the media, of course, is that Trump is fully engaged and hands-on in the transition. He certainly seems to be carrying out a lot of interviews. But why is he empowering “wingers” like DeVos, Price, and Pruitt?
My own theory is that Trump is being pragmatic, but not in a policy sense. He’s pragmatically promoting his own interests, which, at this stage, are best served by throwing some large bones to the Republican Party. During the campaign, Trump needed the Party’s support to raise money, identify voters, and get them to the polls. In part, what he is doing now can be seen as payback—but I suspect it is more than that.
The one immediate political danger facing Trump is the possibility of a Republican revolt over his refusal to sell off his businesses and resolve the blatant conflicts of interest he’ll have in the Oval Office. (He has indicated all along that the most he would do is hand over day-to-day control of his companies to members of his family.) With the G.O.P. holding just a two-seat majority in the Senate, it would only take a handful of dissident Republicans to make life very tricky for him. The prospect of ongoing dissent from members of his own party, and maybe even public hearings about his business dealings, would cast a huge shadow over his Inauguration.
What’s the best way to keep today’s Republican Party in line? By setting before it the prospect of repealing Obamacare, defunding Planned Parenthood, gutting environmental regulations, upending the Paris climate-change agreement, greatly expanding school vouchers and charter schools, crippling the labor movement, further undermining the Voting Rights Act, and, possibly, even privatizing Medicare and Social Security. The deal doesn’t need to be explicit to be clear. The G.O.P. gets its legislative “revolution.” Trump gets to keep his businesses and further enrich himself.
Original Article
Source: newyorker.com/
Author: John Cassidy
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