For President Trump, the United States is little more than his personal playground, Mar-a-Lago gone national.
In his mind, the nation has become his private property, and he is entitled to do with it what he pleases. Accordingly, Trump seems to lack any sense of obligation or responsibility to the broader public. His chaotic and haphazard policymaking — if you can even call it that — is as disrespectful to the American people as any imaginable insult.
Just consider the disregard one must have for the lives of those in your care — for the lives of those who have cloaked you in the power of the world’s highest office — to carelessly destroy their livelihoods with ruinous tariffs or send their children to attack another country because you thought it would look good on cable television.
Ask not what you can do for your country, Trump might say. Ask what you can do for me.
In practice, as we have seen, the president’s disdain for responsibility (as well as any semblance of republican virtue) cashes out to a total rejection of democratic accountability and a sweeping assertion of absolute impunity (backed, in some cases, by the Supreme Court).
The president’s sense of his total impunity extends beyond him to his allies and agents. Nowhere is this more apparent than with the roving bands of immigration agents tasked with seizing anyone deemed “illegal.” In cities across the country, masked men and women are snatching people off the streets, forcing them into unmarked cars to be detained, without offering arrestees the chance to contact family members or a lawyer. Just last week, bystanders captured footage of Narciso Barranco, a landscaper, being pinned down and battered by a group of masked agents. His son reported that Barranco was working when several masked men approached him. When he quite understandably ran away, his son said, he was pepper sprayed and beaten.
Tricia McLaughlin, an assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, told The Los Angeles Times that “the agents took appropriate action and followed their training to use the minimum amount of force necessary to resolve the situation in a manner that prioritizes the safety of the public and our officers. He is now in ICE custody.”
As for the masks? According to Todd Lyons, the acting director of ICE, “officers wear masks for personal protection and to prevent doxxing.” Lyons also wrote, in a letter to The Washington Post, that ICE officers “have seen a staggering 413 percent increase in assaults against them,” but no one has been able to substantiate that number with actual evidence.
In any case, the point is that according to this line of thinking, ICE officers must wear masks so that the public can’t identify them. That is also what it means to “dox” someone — to reveal his identity and address on the internet. But an ICE officer isn’t an anonymous commentator on a social network; he is a representative of the state, acting on its behalf and empowered to use force if necessary. As a federal agent, an ICE officer is a public servant whose ultimate responsibility lies with the people. And the people have the right to know who is operating in their government. If an ICE officer does not want to risk identification — if he does not want the public he serves to hold him accountable for his actions — then he can choose another line of work.
That ICE has claimed this right to anonymity — which is to say, the right to evade responsibility for its actions in the field — is a testament to the ways that Trump has, in his pursuit of impunity, warped and undermined the idea of a public trust.
“A public office is a public trust,” the 19th-century jurist Thomas M. Cooley wrote. “The incumbent has a property right in it, but the office is conferred, not for his benefit, but for the benefit of political society.” And as Dorman Bridgman Eaton, a pivotal figure in the effort to end the spoils system and reform the American civil service, observed in an 1878 essay for The Atlantic Monthly, the holder of such a trust is obligated to “bestow upon his public duties his paramount attention, and to sacrifice whatever is not consistent with discharging them in a just, efficient, and economical manner.”
Everyone engaged in public service, from the president to an officer of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is bound by the nature of a public office to act with some fidelity to the public interest. At a minimum, they must be accountable to the people they serve, ready to accept responsibility when they abuse their power or violate the trust of the public.
What Trump has done, building on decades of near-impunity for wrongdoing among American officeholders, is completely invert this dynamic in the most egregious way imaginable. Accountability separates those who govern from those who rule, and Trump, of course, intends to rule.
It is fitting that on the other side of the president’s authoritarian contempt for responsibility, accountability and the public trust is his demand for total compliance from ordinary people, under threat of state scrutiny and harassment.
Last month, my newsroom colleagues Sheera Frenkel and Aaron Krolik reported on the president’s effort to potentially build a “master list of personal information on Americans that could give him untold surveillance power.” Working with Palantir — a data analysis and technology firm, named for one of the “seeing stones” in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” series that enabled the fallen wizard Saruman to observe the world around him — the administration hopes to collapse the barriers separating the data collected by various federal agencies on virtually every American. (Interestingly, in the “Lord of the Rings,” the palantír misleads and deceives as much as it shows and reveals.)
Under existing structures, this information is siloed. Only the Social Security Administration can access Social Security data; only the Department of Veterans Affairs can access veterans’ data; only the I.R.S. can access taxpayer data — you get the idea. The White House ostensibly wants to merge all this into a single repository for the purpose of developing individualized profiles of every American. As my colleagues note, “Mr. Trump could potentially use such information to advance his political agenda by policing immigrants and punishing critics.”
You, ordinary citizen, may not know the identity of the ICE officers who took your co-worker or your neighbor or your spouse or your child. But Trump will know everything about you, so that he can pursue his goals, which may have nothing to do with your welfare or the welfare of the nation at large. The administration has already arrested legal residents for their political views and has already turned to social media to scrutinize those it wants to remove from the country. Who is to say that citizens aren’t next?
The sometimes narrow focus on whether Trump is really an authoritarian — or whether the United States is truly going down the path of authoritarianism — often misses the extent to which there is more to authoritarianism than the character of the leadership of the regime. Successful authoritarian governments cultivate authoritarian cultures. Key to that project is the rejection of accountability, the embrace of impunity and the demand that ordinary people stand ready to be scrutinized by the state for any reason it deems necessary.
The attempt to foster an openly authoritarian culture in the United States isn’t as flashy as some of the most overt expressions of despotism we’ve seen from the Trump administration, but it is very much part of the package. And if there is anything that might endure past Trump, it is whatever might come out of that effort.
The sad fact is that it is difficult to extricate a nation from authoritarian habits of mind and reorient a people toward liberty and equality. It takes time and effort to dismantle a democracy, but if you can bend citizens into subjects, then you’ve already won the most important battle, if not the war.
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Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va., and Washington. @jbouie
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