56 APRIL 2020
WHEN
DONALD TRUMP
CAME INTO
OFFICE,
THERE
WAS A SENSE
THAT HE
WOULD BE
OUTMATCHED
BY THE
VA S T
GOVERNMENT
HE HAD
JUST
INHERITED.
Th e new president was impetuous, bottomlessly ignorant, almost
chemically inattentive, while the bureaucrats were seasoned,
shrewd, protective of themselves and their institutions. Th ey
knew where the levers of power lay and how to use them or
prevent the president from doing so. Trump’s White House was
chaotic and vicious, unlike anything in American history, but it
didn’t really matter as long as “the adults” were there to wait out
the president’s impulses and defl ect his worst ideas and discreetly
pocket destructive orders lying around on his desk.
After three years, the adults have all left the room—saying
just about nothing on their way out to alert the country to the
peril—while Trump is still there.
James Baker, the former general counsel of the FBI, and a
target of Trump’s rage against the state, acknowledges that many
government offi cials, not excluding himself, went into the admin-
istration convinced “that they are either smarter than the presi-
dent, or that they can hold their own against the president, or
that they can protect the institution against the president because
they understand the rules and regulations and how it’s supposed
to work, and that they will be able to defend the institution that
they love or served in previously against what they perceive to be,
I will say neutrally, the inappropriate actions of the president. And
I think they are fooling themselves. Th ey’re fooling themselves.
He’s light-years ahead of them.”
Th e adults were too sophisticated to see Trump’s special politi-
cal talents—his instinct for every adversary’s weakness, his fanati-
cal devotion to himself, his knack for imposing his will, his sheer
staying power. Th ey also failed to appreciate the advanced decay
of the Republican Party, which by 2016 was far gone in a nihil-
istic pursuit of power at all costs. Th ey didn’t grasp the readiness
of large numbers of Americans to accept, even relish, Trump’s
contempt for democratic norms and basic decency. It took the
arrival of such a leader to reveal how many things that had always
seemed engraved in monumental stone turned out to depend