Dead
Last
Authoritarian rule
always entails corruption. With Donald Trump in office, watch your wallet.
November 10, 2024
If nothing else, it was an insult to
historians.
At the change of each Administration,
C-SPAN conducts a broad
survey of Presidential scholars, asking them to rank every Commander-in-Chief
across ten aspects of leadership. The 2021 survey, published less than six
months after the January 6th mob attack on Congress, ranked Donald Trump among
the worst Presidents in U.S. history. Never before had a modern President had
his name down in the dregs among feckless forgotten Whigs (poor William Henry
Harrison’s term lasted only thirty-two days) and impeached scoundrels like
Andrew Johnson.
Given the shocking, violent end of
Trump’s first term, that scalding snap judgment in 2021 was no surprise. The
following year, the Siena College survey of Presidential scholars also listed
Trump among the worst Presidents ever. In this past June’s debate between Trump
and President Joe Biden, Biden cited another academic survey—the 2024
“Presidential Greatness Project”—in which a hundred and fifty-four scholars and
historians ranked Trump dead last, even below James Buchanan, whose disastrous
Presidency dragged the nation into the bloody maw of the Civil War.
Two hundred and forty-eight years is a
long throw for a constitutional republic, and throughout the course of it we’ve
had our share of stinkers in the Oval Office. Still, when hundreds of experts
in multiple surveys put a man in strong contention for the title of the Worst
President in the Nation’s History, it says something about our respect for
expertise that we decided to give the man another go.
Even if history hasn’t been a guiding
light for voters in this election, it may yet offer some hints about what to
expect next: in short, watch your wallet. If history is a guide, it might be
worth remembering that America’s most ambitious and accomplished demagogues
have also all been crooks.
In 1939, the U.S. Justice Department
sent prosecutors to Louisiana to clean up the Huey Long political machine,
which was still chugging along four years after Long’s murder. Part of Long’s
legacy in the state was a magnificent Louisiana grift that became known as the
“hot oil” scam. Long’s puppet governor and the bagman who used to collect
Long’s cash bribes from state contractors each took a personal financial cut of
every barrel of off-the-books (so-called “hot”) oil produced in the state.
One middleman testified about sending
an express-mail package of forty-eight thousand dollars in one-thousand-dollar
bills to Long’s bribe collector. The governor admitted that in his one term in
office he pocketed almost five hundred thousand dollars (more than ten million
in today’s dollars). The governor and the bagman went to prison, but the judge
hearing the hot-oil case expressed doubt about whether any of the lower-level
functionaries who had been press-ganged into the scheme really had a choice.
“It is a matter of general and common knowledge that the state of Louisiana was
more or less under a dictatorship,” he said.
If there was a rival for Long’s
oratorical skill and demagogic power in the nineteen-thirties, it was Father
Charles E. Coughlin, whose tens of millions of weekly radio listeners were
treated to his frequent harangues against the “filthy gold standard,” which he
ascribed to Jews and communists. Coughlin instead preached the virtues of what
he called “Gentile silver.”
Although Coughlin never betrayed any
personal stake in this line of pseudo-theological monetary invective, a U.S.
Treasury audit in 1934 found that, alongside entities like Chase National Bank
of Manhattan, one of the largest single holders of silver in the United States
was an unmarried secretary in Royal Oak, Michigan: Miss Amy Collins. Collins
turned out to be Coughlin’s secretary.
Coughlin’s office soon released a
letter in Collins’s name, insisting that the purchase of those half a million
ounces of silver was her own idea, pursued at her own initiative, and that
“Neither Father Coughlin nor any other officer except myself” had anything to
do with it.
One of the underappreciated demagogues
of the second half of the twentieth century was Vice-President Spiro Agnew,
whose meteoric rise from local Maryland politics to the White House was aided
more than anything by admiration, among Nixon’s advisers, for his relentless
invective against protesters and civil-rights groups. As Nixon’s
Vice-President, Agnew developed his own zealous national following by training
rhetorical fire on the press and, when he fell under criminal investigation, on
the legal system.
In 1973, Agnew, facing the prospect of
a forty-count felony indictment, was allowed to plead nolo contendere to a
single count and escaped all the other charges in exchange for his resignation.
Because Agnew’s nolo count was a tax-related charge, it’s sometimes forgotten
that the bill of particulars against him described not run-of-the-mill tax
fiddling but the sitting Vice-President of the United States literally taking
envelopes full of cash at the White House and stuffing them into his desk.
In our own time, Alexei Navalny’s
Anti-Corruption Foundation has done more than anyone, anywhere, to remind us
that authoritarian rule always entails thievery. Three years ago, as Navalny
voluntarily returned to Russia after surviving an assassination attempt, he
released a film titled “Putin’s Palace,” revealing evidence that the Russian
leader had a secret billion-dollar Black Sea lair, which Navalny called “the
biggest bribe in history.” (The Kremlin denied that the palace belonged to
Putin.)
After Navalny’s death in an arctic
Russian prison earlier this year, his foundation released a follow-up video,
which showed hidden-camera footage of the inside of the palace, including plush
bedrooms, a gaudy chapel, and a dirty construction trailer used by workers at
the site. On a wall above a filthy toilet, someone had scrawled, “Lyokha
[Alexei], you were right!”
The banner headline of Navalny’s leadership was his
insistence that opponents of Putin’s regime must not be afraid. If Navalny
himself could deny the regime his fear, as their persecution of him
relentlessly escalated, then surely no one else should lend the regime their
fear either. But the core of Navalny’s work against Putin was exposing his
thievery from the Russian people.
Dictators and demagogues are
thieves—here, there, always, and everywhere.
If history is allowed a word
in this moment, let it be informed by the visionary antifascist and
anti-authoritarian leaders of our time, but also by our own squalid experience
with this kind of guy, the guy we’ve just put back in the White House. He starts
the new gig while being legally barred from serving as an officer or a director
in any New York corporation or from taking out loans with New York banks, and
while the longtime C.F.O. of his company, convicted of tax fraud and perjury,
is still adjusting to life outside jail. Here is a man who took time out of his
Presidential campaign to launch not only a line of watches and sneakers and
commemorative coins but also a new cryptocurrency scheme in which his partners
are the self-proclaimed “dirtbag of the internet” and the entrepreneur behind
Date Hotter Girls, L.L.C.
Let’s not be surprised about where
this is heading.
We’ll shout down our own fear, yes.
But we’ll also expose and humiliate thieves. History is here to help.
Historians may or may not have the ear of the electorate, but the history of
this era, at least, will be told. And, if past is prologue, it’s likely to be
lurid. ♦
