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We shouldn't have to call out lawmakers like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene for encouraging the murder of opponents — and yet here we are, writes Kendall-Taylor.
Kendall-Taylor is the CEO of the FrameWorks Institute, a nonprofit research organization that helps build public sentiment for progressive policies.
Murphy is the director of FixUS, the democracy reform advocacy arm of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a fiscal policy think tank. Murphy is also chief of staff for that organization, and Tomchik is deputy chief of staff.
Donald and Melania Trump board Air Force One for the final time on Wednesday.
As Donald Trump's brazenly chaotic and exhausting presidency comes to an end, he leaves behind this fundamental question:
Did his relentless attacks on our democracy make its festering problems even more malignant than he found them? Or did his unstoppable assault on civic institutions and governing norms succeed in highlighting the system's fragility while also tempering its resilience?
The nation's collective behavior in the years ahead will determine whether American democracy's metaphorical glass has been irreparably emptied or has a sufficient reservoir for survival. For now, the 45th president's infuriated yielding of power on Wednesday allows for a quick countdown of seven ways he rattled the republic the most. Such inventories are a necessary first step for those dedicated to fixing the system — so the next four years under Joe Biden don't come close to replicating the stress and anxiety of the Trump era.
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<p>Commander-in-chief is the only position of public trust Trump ever sought — or held. A real estate promoter and reality television star, he had never so much as served on a small-town zoning board until Jan. 20, 2017. All of his 44 predecessors had been leaders in federal or state government: governors, members of Congress, generals or Cabinet secretaries.<br></p><p>Fans saw his unique measure of inexperience as a badge or honor for the ultimate outsider committed to dismantling business as usual. But skeptics worried his total lack of familiarity with how governments operate, both mechanically and ethically, would be a debilitating if not dangerous liability.</p><p>At the start, much of Trump's norm-busting behavior and disregard for the rule of law came off as a form of willful ignorance that was a part of his unique brand of political theatrics.</p><p>But even Republican allies soon found themselves ascribing his most perplexing and outrageous conduct to someone "still growing" into the presidency's awesome requirements and limits. It was an excuse many kept citing almost to an end marked by his mismanagement of a crippling pandemic and the violence that flowed from his refusal to accept defeat. Those miseries, fueled by his inabilities on the job, will be more prominent parts of his legacy than the achievements for which he claims credit: installing three Supreme Court justices and 54 appeals court judges, pushing a substantial tax cut through Congress, and engineering expansive business and environmental deregulation.</p>President Trump attends a 2018 fundraiser in South Dakota.
Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images
<p>Trump claimed the White House in the second presidential election after the Supreme Court's landmark <a href="https://thefulcrum.us/citizens-united" target="_self">Citizens United</a> decision effectively unlocked the last meaningful shackles impeding the flow of money in politics. He claimed to have spent $66 million of his own money, smashing the record for self-funding by a national candidate, and the grand total for candidate and outside group spending on presidential and congressional races topped $7 billion for the first time.<br></p><p>Four years later, those numbers seem almost quaint. The enormous potential business consequences from Trump's reelection or defeat combined with the political passions of millions of Americans — at all income levels and all along the ideological spectrum — pushed the campaign finance system into overdrive.</p><p>Two billionaires, Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer, each tapped many multiples of their fortunes more than Trump but gave up near the Democratic primary's starting gate.</p><p>More importantly, spending on all federal elections more than doubled, cresting $14 billion for 2020 — the size of West Virginia's budget, Instagram's revenue and Amazon's projected profit for the year. That was because small-dollar donations, contributions by business <a href="https://thefulcrum.us/super-pac" target="_self">super PACs</a>, and money from outside groups backed by billionaire donors and closely tied "<a href="https://thefulcrum.us/dark-money" target="_self">dark money</a>" groups all went through the roof.</p><p>Trump did not single handedly cause the cavalcade of cash, but neither did he make any effort to slow it or assure its minimal regulation was carried out. Most seats on the already weakened and gridlocked Federal Election Commission were kept vacant until the end of his presidency. Only at that point came Trump's unintended but potentially biggest contribution to the cause of campaign finance reform: the wave of companies closing their checkbooks indefinitely to Republicans who backed Trump's effort to overturn the election.</p>President Trump plays a round of golf at his Virginia course in November.
Samuel Corum/Getty Images
<p>If one aspect of Trump's 2016 candidacy made democracy reformers happy, it was his repeated vow to "drain the swamp." But his disregard for that campaign pledge went way beyond shelving his own plans for tightening lobbying regulation, limiting campaign donations from foreign companies and setting congressional term limits.</p><p>Instead, he personally led an unprecedented presidential enhancement of influence for well-heeled private interests — starting with his own. The rasher of pardons at the end of his term, larded with clemency for his own political allies and favor-doers, was only the final example after four years of special and sometimes lucrative treatment for the people and institutions in his familial, financial, social and political orbits.</p><p>The government was compelled to spend millions at Trump's properties — the golf courses where he played most weekends, the D.C. hotel that became a de facto Oval Office waiting room, the Florida resort he made his weekend White House and the hotels around the world where his family stayed. His eponymous real estate business kept pursuing deals with both American allies and adversaries. He sidestepped anti-nepotism rules so his son-in-law Jared Kushner could have a top West Wing post. He used his office to promote companies run by supporters and to steer federal contracts and other government business to allies.</p><p>Beyond that, he named former lobbyists and corporate executives to jobs with oversight of the industries of their former clients, and four of "only the best people" in his original Cabinet were forced out under ethical clouds. He went to the Supreme Court to preserve, at least for his time in office, his distinction as the first president since the 1970s to keep his tax returns a secret.</p><p>Finally, on his last night in the Oval Office, he revoked an executive order, signed days after he took office, that had stopped his appointees' from spinning through the revolving door to lobby for five years after leaving the administration. </p>President Trump meets with Democratic congressional leaders in December 2018.
Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images
President Trump rallies his supporters before they storm the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
<p>No other president has been impeached twice, and Trump would not have been — and just a week before leaving office — but for the shocking seriousness and palpable validity of the alleged offense. The Senate will soon try him on the House's charge of "inciting violence against the government of the United States" in his quest to overturn Biden's election.</p><p>Whether formally convicted or not, and then barred from seeking the presidency again, on his last full day in office he heard Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell affix the blame for the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6. "The mob was fed lies," he said. "They were provoked by the president."</p><p>The damage and injury wrought by the thousands of violent insurrectionists who heard his rhetoric that day as a call to arms, to disrupt the tabulating of the Electoral College results that sealed his defeat, will almost certainly stand as the most tangible evidence of his assault-on-democracy-itself legacy. The memory has been lastingly seared on the global consciousness.</p><p>The riot was quelled and the election result was finalized — albeit with two out of three House Republicans, and one in six GOP senators, voting with the ousted president and against the election that ousted him.</p><p>So does Wednesday's inauguration — a peaceful transfer of power, perhaps, only because 25,000 troops are belatedly standing guard — mean democracy has survived or only that its fragility has been magnified? Are the politicians' fresh declarations after the riot — "This is not who we are" because "We are better than this" — viable exhortations for a recommitment to longstanding virtues or only naive bromides about a past that has rarely been as venerable as described?</p><p>Probably it means the system has proved itself both resilient and more threadbare than ever before.</p>Despite terrible approval ratings for Congress as a whole, individual lawmakers such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are still seen as a trusted source of information at town hall sessions.
Meeker is a fellow working on the Connecting to Congress project at Ohio State University's Institute for Democratic Engagement and Accountability.
