In the 51st Federalist Paper, James Madison mused that “if men were angels, no government would be necessary.” But since men were not saintly, the fledgling democracy would need to hold them accountable. Hence his pitch for checks and balances: “It may be a reflection on human nature that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government.”
Donald Trump, who embodies the worst of human nature, was the kind of candidate that Madison worried about. As I warned on the eve of the 2016 election, Trump’s “authoritarian sensibility” would trigger “a systematic breakdown of our democratic institutions.” I’m no seer; anyone with half a brain, anyone who actually paid attention to his campaign rhetoric, knew what was coming.
And so here we are today. We don’t know whether he’s truly gulping hydroxychloroquine, but we do know that in the last six weeks he has fired five government watchdogs – simply because he loathes oversight almost as much as vegetables.
These watchdogs – known as inspector generals – were created by statute in 1978 as a post-Watergate reform. Their nonpartisan mission is to root out waste, fraud, and abuse in each executive agency, no matter which party controls the White House. By law, their mandate is to be independent. That concept is foreign to Trump, who, like any banana republic despot, thinks that everyone in government should pledge fealty to him.
At this point, having been cleared by servile Senate Republicans in the sham impeachment trial, Trump doesn’t even try to hide his non-angelic nature. Earlier this week, he shrugged off questions about why he fired State Department inspector general Steve Linick. He fired Linick because Secretary of State Mike Pompeo asked him to. Linick was investigating Pompeo’s possible role in an illegal arms sale to Saudi Arabia (circumventing a congressional freeze), and he was investigating whether Pompeo had compelled a State employee to run personal errands for his household. Pompeo says that Linick’s job performance was not “additive” for the State Department.
When Trump was asked on Monday about firing Linick, he played dumb (not a stretch, although it may have been dumb like a fox): “I don’t know. I don’t know anything about him. I don’t know anything other than the State Department, and Mike in particular, I guess they were not happy with the job he’s doing or something…I don’t know anything about it…I don’t think it sounds, like, that important.”
What’s most important is that Linick’s firing fits a recent pattern. Trump has fired Michael Atkinson, the intelligence community’s inspector general; you may recall that Atkinson vetted the whistleblower who exposed Trump’s impeachable acts in Ukraine. Trump has also removed Christi Grimm, the Health and Human Services acting inspector general, who recently made the mistake of issuing an honest report that found “severe” shortages of virus testing supplies and “widespread shortages” of protective equipment at hospitals.
Trump has also yanked two inspector generals – Mitch Behm in the Department of Transportation, and Glenn Fine in the Defense Department – both of whom had been slated to serve on the new Pandemic Response Accountability Committee. The PRAC was created to ensure that the trillions of Covid relief money will be fairly distributed, not earmarked for Trump’s friends and corporate allies. Fine was supposed to lead the PRAC, but Trump has replaced Fine with one of his own toadies. (Fine’s crime: He served presidents of both parties, including eight years under George W. Bush, but he also served under…Obama.)
Authoritarians run wild when people fail to protest, and in Trump’s case – don’t be shocked! – virtually no Republicans on Capitol Hill have uttered a peep about these firings. The sole exception is Mitt Romney: “The firings of multiple Inspectors General is unprecedented. Doing so without good cause chills the independence essential to their purpose. It is a threat to accountable democracy and a fissure in the constitutional balance of power.” (Trump tweeted a succinct response: “LOSER!”)
Two other Republican senators merely furrowed their brows. Susan Collins said she was troubled (as usual), and Charles Grassley – who has long prided himself as a champion of government watchdogs – mustered enough outrage to (gasp) wrote Trump a letter, seeking to explain that inspector generals “help ensure transparency and accountability, both of which are critical for taxpayers to have confidence in their government.” Yeah, that should work. He’d have more luck teaching an ape to play the violin.
Grassley wrote Trump a letter last month, seeking to find out why Michael Atkinson was fired. Trump didn’t bother to respond. To borrow a line from T. S. Eliot, this is how democracy dies – not with a bang, but with a whimper.
Democracy’s big challenge, James Madison wrote, was to constrain the worst impulses of human nature by devising a government that would hold itself accountable, a government that would “oblige it to control itself.” But how should voters respond when the guy on top is out of control? The answer should be obvious.