The Managerial Anguish of Democratic Leaders

There’s a new Beltway consensus in the making: After a decade of self-dealing, executive-sanctioned thuggery, pardon-auctioning, and donor-appeasement in the sanctums of MAGA power, the electorate is at long last wising up. Whether it’s the White House’s campaign of lying about every facet of the Iran War, Donald Trump’s series of lawsuits against the IRS, his use of the Department of Justice to enrich himself at taxpayer expense, or the Versailles-on-ketamine reveries of a billion-dollar ballroom where the East Wing of the White House used to be, voters are becoming outraged over an authoritarian regime that no longer bothers to offer any more than phoned-in rationales for its corruption. 

As The Bulwark’s Mona Charen argues, popular opinion has shifted from the cynical view that the venality of high-office holding was pretty much priced into the Trumpist model of power. “Voters in 2024 made a bargain,” she writes. “Though they knew Trump was corrupt, they bet that he would bring them the kind of economy they’d enjoyed in 2018.” Yet with the cost of living skyrocketing and the tariffs-subsidized “golden age” that Trump hawked a demonstrable bust, that bargain is now null and void:

Economic conditions are now worse than they were in 2024. Nor can Trump rely on partisanship to come to his rescue because it isn’t the Democrats who are making the case about corruption, it’s Trump himself and his allies. It is Trump who used the assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner to make the case for his garish ballroom. It is Senate Republicans who are adding the insult of demanding taxpayers pay $1 billion for this monument to Trump’s ego. It is Trump, not his opposition, who instructs voters that they should be happy with fewer dolls at Christmas. It is Trump who accepts gold bars from the Swiss delegation and adorns the Oval Office in a style that could be called neo-Saddam.

Unfortunately, though, there are several obstacles in the path of a straightforward kick-the-bums-out case against Trump’s corruptionism in the upcoming midterms cycle. First, the MAGA right has been trafficking in its own theology of maximal Democratic and deep-state corruption over the past decade—the claim that Trump is a suffering servant targeted by his political foes is at the heart of the IRS and DoJ suits, as well as the rationale for allied abuses of law-enforcement power such as the ongoing effort to prosecute former FBI Director James Comey for unspecified vibes-driven offenses and DoJ’s enlistment in a challenge to the $83 million civil action against Trump for assaulting E. Jean Carroll. (The acting head of the Justice Department, Todd Blanche, is Trump’s former personal attorney, so this sort of prostration is presumably second nature to him.) It’s a debased and self-serving political narrative, since no presidency in our history has been more corrupt than Trump’s, but it’s a narrative that’s proven effective across several election cycles and countless frivolous but vindictively targeted  legal actions. 

But the biggest challenge to an effective political case against Trump’s reign of self-dealing comes in Charen’s rushed disclaimer that this round of abuses of the presidency can’t be dismissed as partisan hackery since “it isn’t the Democrats who are making the case about corruption.” That aside contains a universe of failed political initiative, as any patient student of the right’s congressional inquisitions, from the Benghazi hearings to the long regress of Hunter Biden spectacles to the impeachment of Biden’s DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, can instantly confirm. For every ideological witch hunt unleashed by the Jim Jordans and the Trey Gowdys of the right, there’s a lumbering and self-undermining Merrick Garland inquiry into a matter of actual legal substance that went precisely nowhere. 

That’s because Democrats subscribe to an institutionalist, rather than a self-evidently personal, theory of political corruption. What stands out in their treatment of abuses of executive power is that they are, first and foremost, a procedural affront—a defilement of the precious norms that are the foundational principle of good governance and not a more telling and visceral failing of moral character. For three dreary election cycles, the chief Democratic anti-Trump message is that the MAGA movement is a threat to our revered public institutions—not that Donald Trump is stealing you blind and leveraging all the arms of the federal government into his graft-seeking business model, in precisely the way a Mafia don would. (As I typed these words, I realized that “Mafia Don” has been sitting right there as an ideal Democratic epithet for the occupant of the Oval Office, and yet the party has continued to leave it …  sitting right there.) 

The Democrats’ diffidence on this front is more than simple myopia; it’s a class blindspot. Party leaders see themselves as the credentialed gatekeepers of both the institutions now under threat of total MAGA takeover and of the public discourse writ large. They are, in short, managers, by both training and temperament—and like any rule-enforcing managers, they’re aghast when their authority is disregarded. That leads to a rhetorical style grounded chiefly on scolding (when the self-evident directives of institutional sovereignty get rudely shoved aside) and befuddlement (when, again and again, Democrats’ appeals to norms, managerial politesse and “who we are” as a nation are derided, mocked, and steamrolled). 

You can see this style on full display in this week’s New Yorker—our country’s most reliable outlet for elite venting over transgressed norms. A long profile of Trump’s immediate predecessor, Barack Obama, dilates on his exasperation over the rapid pace of institutional derangement on Trump’s watch—while the former president also frets that he can’t relinquish his statesmanlike role as a “political leader” for that of a mere “commentator.” The natural outcome of this high-managerial anguish is a long recitation of set pieces like this:

In the past year, Obama has watched with disbelief as Trump has used his office to enrich himself and his family, and almost daily commits some sort of travesty. At times, often late at night, Obama will fire off a text or e-mail to a friend about “some dumbass thing Trump did,” Ben Rhodes, who served as Obama’s deputy national security adviser and is now a consultant to him, said. “What drives him insane is the double standard: ‘What if I took a Qatari jet?’ It’s not even sour grapes. It’s objectively insane. If Barack Obama did any of these things, he’d be obliterated on sight.”

As courtroom litigators are fond of saying: true, true, and irrelevant. Complaints of double-standards and hypocrisy are nonstarters in ideological discourse, since they presuppose a noninterested arbitration of claims to power where none exists. That’s especially the case when a ruling party is pillaging the government in pursuit of personal gain and political vendettas. The point isn’t that one standard holds for other presidents and doesn’t for Trump—it’s that Trump is rendering standards of all kinds meaningless as he reinvents the presidency as an instrument of personal plunder. But that core message gets a muffled hearing at best in Democratic leadership circles—in large part because, like Obama, party leaders remain immobilized “with disbelief” before the specter of Trumpist corruption.

Among other things, that posture is a response that comes far too late in the cycle of MAGA government-by-graft to connect effectively with the real public disenchantment with Trump’s second term. After mounting ineffective bids to impeach Trump for flagrant abuses of power in his first term—including a literal effort to install himself as a dictator by fomenting a coup—Democrats have mostly retreated to a defensive crouch, intoning the mantra that they are focusing on “kitchen-table issues” instead of waging the political fight to hold Trump and his cabinet of handpicked cronies accountable for their crimes. 

Yet particularly in Trump’s second term, this is a distinction without a difference: The administration’s forays into corruption have also entailed enormous spikes in everyday living expenses, from Trump’s imperious and unconstitutional tariffs regime to the oil shocks touched off by the illegal war with Iran to the failure of the red-state farm economy. Unhinged authoritarian leaders despoil all of public life—and the economy is a premier first casualty in this strategy, not a depoliticized sphere delivering off-stage verdicts on the regime’s performance and continued fitness for office. 

Indeed, key arenas of Trumpist economic influence, such as the crypto and AI sectors, are also principal theaters of Trump-family corruption, so it makes no sense to seek to disaggregate the effects of corruption in office from its economic causes. In the same vein, the Trump administration’s throttling of the international order is inseparable from the economic interests of White House players like Jared Kushner and Ben Witkoff, but Democratic leaders treat this executive branch malady as an outgrowth of Trump’s petulance and contempt for institutional protocols. Here yet again, the Democratic Party’s devotion to its managerialist ethos has prevented it from drawing the crucial lines of economic causation that any basic grasp of politics mandates.

Indeed, it’s striking that the source of constitutional corruption that’s been hiding in plain sight throughout both Trump terms—his flagrant defiance of the Emoluments Clause forbidding the president from realizing any personal gain from foreign powers during his tenure in office—has never commanded serious attention from Democratic leaders. Cynics might protest that the kind of corruption forbidden under the Emoluments Clause is increasingly the business model for both major parties—the crypto industry, which doubles as a money-laundering front for foreign bribes was, after all, one of the biggest sources of campaign contributions to both Republican and Democratic candidates over the last election cycle. But I’d submit that the Democrats don’t dally with the Emoluments Clause because it’s too personal and vulgar an abuse of power—it essentially proscribes bribery, and bribery leaves no place for managers to chide us about our tragically forsaken public norms. Voters can see it with their own eyes, just as they can register the folly of the White House ballroom, which is now polling behind a belief in ghosts and telepathy in CNN opinion surveys. But you can at least rest assured that in the dead of night Barack Obama has fired off a few outraged texts and emails about it.

From illegal war on Iran to an inhumane fuel blockade of Cuba, from AI weapons to crypto corruption, this is a time of staggering chaos, cruelty, and violence. 

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Chris Lehmann

Chris Lehmann is the DC Bureau chief for The Nation and a contributing editor at The Baffler. He was formerly editor of The Baffler and The New Republic, and is the author, most recently, of The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream (Melville House, 2016).

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