Untitled Flashcards Set

EVERY YEAR SINCE 1947, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a magazine founded by members of the Manhattan Project, gathers a group of Nobel laureates and other luminaries to update the Doomsday Clock, a symbolic gauge of our distance from wrecking civilization. In January 2017, less than a week after Trump’s inauguration, the panel announced that it had moved the clock to two minutes and thirty seconds—the closest to Doomsday since the first U.S. hydrogen bomb test, in 1952. “Never before has the Bulletin decided to advance the clock largely because of the statements of a single person,” the organizers explained. “But when that person is the new president of the United States, his words matter.” Even before Trump won the White House, the sheer fact of his candidacy had raised an awareness of catastrophic potential. Americans who had adequate resources embarked on steps to protect themselves. Steve Huffman, the cofounder and CEO of Reddit, which was valued at $600 million, had been nearsighted until November 2015, when he arranged to have laser eye surgery. He underwent the procedure not for the sake of convenience or appearance but, rather, for a reason he didn’t usually talk much about: he hoped that it would improve his odds of surviving a disaster, whether natural or man-made. “If the world ends—and not even if the world ends, but if we have trouble—getting contacts or glasses is going to be a huge pain in the ass,” he told me. “Without them, I’m fucked.” Huffman, who lived in San Francisco, said he was less concerned with any specific threat—a pandemic, a dirty bomb, a coup—than he was with the potential aftermath, “the temporary collapse of our government and structures,” as he put it. That was the scenario that survivalist blogs call WROL, “without rule of law.” At Burning Man, the annual clothing-optional festival in the Nevada desert, he had embraced one of its core principles, “radical self-reliance,” which he took to mean “happy to help others, but not wanting to require others.” (Among survivalists, or “preppers,” FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, stood for “Foolishly Expecting Meaningful Aid.”) In addition to his eye surgery, Huffman said, “I own a couple of motorcycles. I have a bunch of guns and ammo. Food. I figure that, with that, I can hole up in my house for some amount of time.” He had come to believe that contemporary life rested on a fragile consensus. “I think, to some degree, we all collectively take it on faith that our country works, that our currency is valuable, the peaceful transfer of power—that all of these things that we hold dear work because we believe they work. While I do believe they’re quite resilient, and we’ve been through a lot, certainly we’re going to go through a lot more.” The sense that America’s long, clattering experiment with democracy might be heading toward chaos was not entirely new. In 1923, D. H. Lawrence diagnosed a specific strain of dread in America’s brief history. “Doom!” he wrote. “Something seems to whisper it in the very dark trees of America.” The urge to hedge against disaster fluctuated over the decades, but it started to grow steadily among conservatives after the oil shock of the 1970s, especially in the years that President Reagan sanctified a pioneer’s spirit of self-reliance. In one of his favorite laugh lines, he said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’” The survivalist spirit had surged again since September 11, including, quietly, in affluent quarters of the United States, where people accustomed to control of their lives confronted a realm of vulnerability they had not foreseen. Robert A. Johnson, a former managing director at the hedge fund Soros Fund Management who had lived in Greenwich, listened to neighbors debate various strategies of escape in the event of other assaults. “More and more were saying, ‘You’ve got to have a private plane,’” he told me. “You have to assure that the pilot’s family will be taken care of, too. They have to be on the plane.’” In the years since September 11, wealthy survivalists had joined private Facebook groups and meet-ups where they took the concept of the combat mindset and honed it to maximum advantage; they swapped tips on cryptocurrencies, foreign passports, and locations safe from the effects of climate change. One member, the head of an investment firm, told me, “I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system.” He said that his preparations probably put him at the “extreme” end among his peers. But he added, “A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. That’s not too rare anymore.” The discussion was especially lively in finance and technology circles, where people were trained to detect, and capitalize on, emerging trends in society and the economy. During the financial crisis, Huffman had picked up precursors of the coming catastrophe from users’ comments on Reddit: “People were starting to whisper about mortgages. They were worried about student debt. They were worried about debt in general. There was a lot of, ‘This is too good to be true. This doesn’t smell right.’” He knew that social media could magnify public fear and suspicion. “It’s easier for people to panic when they’re together,” but it also alerted people to emerging risks. He said, “There’s probably some false positives in there as well, but, in general, I think we’re a pretty good gauge of public sentiment. When we’re talking about a faith-based collapse, you’re going to start to see the chips in the foundation on social media first.” How many wealthy Americans were taking steps to survive a catastrophe? That was hard to know exactly; a lot of people didn’t like to talk about it. (“Anonymity is priceless,” one hedge-fund manager told me, declining an interview.) Reid Hoffman, the cofounder of LinkedIn and a prominent investor, called it “apocalypse insurance.” He told me, “Saying you’re ‘buying a house in New Zealand’ is kind of a wink, wink, say no more. Once you’ve done the Masonic handshake, they’ll be, like, ‘Oh, you know, I have a broker who sells old ICBM silos, and they’re nuclearhardened, and they kind of look like they would be interesting to live in.’” I asked Hoffman to estimate what share of fellow Silicon Valley billionaires had acquired some level of “apocalypse insurance” in the form of a hideaway in the United States or abroad. “I would guess fifty-plus percent,” he said, “but that’s parallel with the decision to buy a vacation home. Human motivation is complex, and I think people can say, ‘I now have a safety blanket for this thing that scares me.’” The fears varied, but many worried that, as artificial intelligence took away a growing share of jobs, there would be a backlash against Silicon Valley, America’s second-highest concentration of wealth. (The Gold Coast of Connecticut was first.) “I’ve heard this theme from a bunch of people,” Hoffman said. “Is the country going to turn against the wealthy? Is it going to turn against technological innovation? Is it going to turn into civil disorder?” Trump’s election had sent elite anxieties into a new phase, one that cut across political lines. Robert H. Dugger, a former partner in the Greenwich hedge fund Tudor Investment Corporation, told me that even some financiers who supported Trump for president, hoping that he would cut taxes and regulations, were unnerved at the ways his campaign had hastened a collapse of respect for established institutions. Dugger said, “The media is under attack now. They wonder, is the court system next?” He went on, “Do we go from ‘fake news’ to ‘fake evidence’? For people whose existence depends on enforceable contracts, this is life or death.” One measure of the rise in survivalist thinking was that some people were starting to speak out against it. Max Levchin, a founder of PayPal and of Affirm, a lending startup, told me, “It’s one of the few things about Silicon Valley that I actively dislike—the sense that we are superior giants who move the needle and, even if it’s our own failure, must be spared.” In that view, elite survivalism was not a step toward prevention; it was an act of withdrawal. Philanthropy in the United States was still three times as large, as a share of GDP, as philanthropy in the next closest country (the United Kingdom), but it was accompanied by a deeper disinvestment from some of America’s most successful and powerful people. Faced with evidence of frailty in the American project, in the institutions and norms from which they had benefited, some were permitting themselves to imagine failure, so long as the winners would find a way to keep winning. To Levchin, prepping for survival was a moral miscalculation; he preferred to “shut down party conversations” on the topic. “I typically ask people, ‘So you’re worried about the pitchforks. How much money have you donated to your local homeless shelter?’ This connects the most, in my mind, to the realities of the income gap. All the other forms of fear that people bring up are artificial.” In his view, this is the time to invest in solutions, not escape. “At the moment, we’re actually at a relatively benign point of the economy. When the economy heads south, you will have a bunch of people that are in really bad shape. What do we expect then?” In Washington, the Trump presidency introduced its own version of radical self-reliance. Steve Bannon, the campaign chief, called it the “deconstruction of the administrative state”—the undoing of institutions, regulations, and taxes that he believed constrained American power in the name of a false promise of communitarian good. It was a goal that reached back decades, from Goldwater and Ayn Rand to Reagan, Limbaugh, Santelli, the Kochs, and the Hanleys. The new administration regarded the federal system not as a machine that could implement its vision but as a vanquished foe—a defeated empire in need of occupation. The administration embarked on a wholesale reduction in federal function. Nancy McEldowney, who retired not long into Trump’s term after thirty years in the Foreign Service, told me that she recognized the process from her years abroad. “In the anatomy of a hostile takeover and occupation, there are textbook elements—you decapitate the leadership, you compartmentalize the power centers, you engender fear and suspicion,” she said. “They did all those things.” Since the Great Depression, the government had expanded the ranks of civil servants to administer growing programs on health, welfare, science, the environment, and financial regulation. Advocates of limited government mocked the civil service as a “snivel service” of Ivy Leaguers, “a bureaucracy of short-haired women and long-haired men, bent on replacing the traditional American family,” as the historian Landon R. Y. Storrs put it. In 1951, Washington Confidential, a bestseller by two journalists working for the conservative press mogul William Randolph Hearst, presented the federal workforce as a domain of “mediocrity and virtual anonymity” in a city of “economic parasites.” The modern conservative movement aspired to slash away at what it considered a bloated, meddling civil service, and privatize the management of social and political problems. Richard Nixon’s aides produced an eighty-page manual on the removal of “undesirable” careerists, which proffered a system for grading civil servants on political “dependability,” ranging from “L” (for “Let’s watch this fellow”) to “O” (for “Out”). To marginalize the troublesome ones, it suggested a “New Activity Technique”: create an “apparently meaningful, but essentially meaningless, new activity to which they are all transferred.” Such an activity, Nixon’s aides wrote, could serve as “a single barrel into which you can dump a large number of widely located bad apples.” After the manual became public, during the Watergate hearings, Congress passed a law to prohibit discrimination against federal workers for “political affiliation, race, color, religion, national origin, sex, marital status, age, or handicapping condition.” But presidents retained broad latitude to reshuffle civil servants without breaking the law in obvious ways. That would prove indispensable for the Trump administration as it set out to “deconstruct the administrative state.” Trump left no illusion that he privileged loyalty over expertise. At a campaign rally in 2016, he mocked the notion of independent expertise. “Oh, we need an expert,” he said, and the crowd tittered. “They say, ‘Donald Trump needs a foreign-policy adviser.’ Supposing I didn’t have one?” In office, Trump made a point to challenge the integrity of government agencies that were known for independence, including the FBI (“reputation is in tatters”) and the Department of Justice (“embarrassment to our country”). His relationship with the State Department was especially vexed. In January 2017, when he issued an executive order that barred travelers from seven Muslim countries, more than a thousand U.S. diplomats criticized it in an official dissent cable. In response, Sean Spicer, the press secretary, said that public servants should “either get with the program or they can go.” Every president expects devotion. (Lyndon Johnson wished for an aide who would “kiss my ass in Macy’s window at high noon and tell me it smells like roses.” He said, “I want his pecker in my pocket.”) Trump liked his advisers to demonstrate their fealty in public. As cameras rolled at his first cabinet meeting, a beaming Sonny Perdue, the secretary of agriculture, told Trump and other department heads, “I just got back from Mississippi. They love you there.” Kellyanne Conway, one of the president’s most abject attendants, took to referring reverently to the “October 8th coalition,” the stalwarts who remained at Trump’s side even after the world listened to the recording of him boasting about grabbing women by the genitals. Trump refused to consider Democrats, or even Republicans who had signed letters against him as a candidate, so the White House turned to an array of novices. As an assistant to the secretary of energy, the administration installed Sid Bowdidge, whose recent employment had included managing a Meineke Car Care branch in Seabrook, New Hampshire. (Bowdidge departed after it emerged that he had called Muslims “maggots.”) Matthew Spencer Petersen, a nominee to the federal bench, became a brief online sensation when Senator John Kennedy, a Republican from Louisiana, asked him a series of basic law-school questions, and his answers revealed that Petersen had never argued a motion, tried a case, or taken a deposition by himself. Over time, a culture of fealty compounds itself; conformists thrive, and dissenters depart or refuse to join. The president’s advisers competed to be the most explicitly quiescent. Peter Navarro, the head of the White House National Trade Council, told an interviewer, “My function, really, as an economist is to try to provide the underlying analytics that confirm his intuition. And his intuition is always right in these matters.” After scarcely more than a year, Trump was on his sixth communications director and his third national security advisor, John Bolton, whom Trump knew so slightly that he sometimes referred to him as “Mike Bolton.” The White House left hundreds of critical jobs unfilled. That was deliberate. As a candidate, Trump had promised to “cut so much your head will spin.” In addition, large numbers of employees were opting to leave the government rather than serve it. In Trump’s first nine months, more than 79,000 full-time workers quit or retired—a 42 percent increase over that period in Obama’s presidency. “We’ve never seen vacancies at this scale,” said Max Stier, the president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan group that works to make the government more effective. “Not anything close.” After nearly two years of attacking his own government, Trump took his campaign to hobble the federal government a step further: he forced it to shut down unless he received $5.7 billion in federal funds for his border wall. Three days before Christmas, more than three quarters of a million employees across the country were furloughed or forced to work for free. Some were unable to meet rent and buy groceries, so they resorted to waiting on line at food banks. Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary with a net worth of $2.9 billion, was puzzled. “There’s no real reason why they shouldn’t be able to get a loan,” he said. The president’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump called it “a little bit of pain.” In January 2019, when FBI agents arrested Trump’s longtime associate Roger Stone, who once oversaw the Reagan campaign in Greenwich, the agents were working without pay. Eventually, with air traffic controllers so scarce that planes were being grounded in New York, Trump abandoned the shutdown, empty-handed. It had lasted thirty-five days, the longest in history, costing the American economy at least $11 billion. The next month, he instead declared a national emergency so that he could use military funds to build the wall. In physical terms, Trump took to operating as if he were facing hostile terrain. In Washington, only 4 percent of residents voted for him, and, to avoid unwelcome protests, the president hewed to a narrow patch of trusted terrain: he rarely ventured beyond his home, his hotel, his golf course, and his plane, taking Air Force One to Mar-a-Lago and to occasional appearances before devoted supporters. He never attended a performance at the Kennedy Center or dined in a restaurant that was not on his own property. The more the administration retreated into the comfort of its own mythology, the more it reminded me of another experience in regime change I’d observed. As a reporter, I arrived in Baghdad in April 2003, and covered Iraq off and on for two years. At the time, the U.S. occupation was led from the Green Zone, a fortified enclave where Americans lived and worked in a sanctum of swimming pools and black-market scotch. The Green Zone— officially the home of the Coalition Provisional Authority—functioned as an extension of George W. Bush’s White House, led by political appointees, staffed by civil servants, and attended by waiters in bow ties and paper hats. Before long, the Green Zone had acquired another connotation, as a byword for dysfunction: the failure to stop looters or to restore Iraq’s electricity, the decision to disband the Iraqi Army, the blindness to a growing resistance to the occupation. As problems accumulated, the Bush administration turned, more than ever, to loyalists. The rebuilding of the stock market was entrusted to a twenty-four-year-old. A cohort of recent college grads, recruited because they had applied for jobs at the Heritage Foundation, were put in charge of Iraq’s national budget. Inside the Green Zone, rhetoric prevailed over reality (“Mission Accomplished!”), and appearances became a stand-in for facts. Those who recognized the self-delusion and incompetence began referring to the Green Zone as the Emerald City. Trump’s White House was becoming his Emerald City: isolated, fortified against nonbelievers, entranced by its mythmaker, and constantly vulnerable to the risks of reality. In the war on Washington, one of Trump’s most ardent lieutenants was Ryan Zinke. He gloried in the role. Six foot two, with broad shoulders and a cleft chin, Zinke was a fifth-generation Montanan who was recruited as a linebacker at the University of Oregon and spent twenty-three years in the Navy SEALs. In 2008, he entered politics, in the Montana state senate. After one term in Congress, he was appointed secretary of the interior, and arrived for his first day of work on horseback, riding down C Street in a ten-gallon hat and jeans. After that, Zinke attracted attention mostly for his zealous promotion of Trump’s energy agenda. He opened up America’s coasts to offshore oil and gas drilling; overturned a moratorium on new leases for coal mines on public land; and recommended shrinking national monuments in Utah by two million acres, the largest reduction of protected lands in American history. Within the department, Zinke adopted the president’s approach to expertise, loyalty, and dissent. Early in his term, Zinke received a briefing from a scientist named Joel Clement, the director of the department’s Office of Policy Analysis. Clement noticed that Zinke had redecorated the office with a grizzly bear, mounted on its hind legs, and a collection of knives. Zinke had no professional experience in geology, but he described himself as a “geologist” because he majored in geology in college. Clement told me, “He comes over and sits down, and he says, ‘Okay, what are we here for?’” To keep Zinke’s attention, staff hewed to subjects related to his personal experience. “I briefed him on invasive species,” Clement said. “It was one issue where it looked like we might actually get a little traction, because in Montana they had just discovered mussels that could really screw up the agricultural economy.” The strategy failed. “He didn’t understand what we were talking about. He started talking about other species—ravens and coyotes. He was filling the intellectual vacuum with nonsense. It’s amazing that he has such confidence, given his level of ignorance.” A couple of months later, Zinke ordered the involuntary reassignment of dozens of the department’s most senior civil servants. In Washington, the tactic of marooning civil servants in obscure assignments is known as sending them to the “turkey farm.” (An Asia specialist assigned to the turkey farm explained the experience as akin to a Japanese tradition in which unwanted workers are relegated to a “banishment room,” to encourage them to resign out of boredom and shame.) Clement, who had been his agency’s public face on issues related to climate change, was assigned to the accounting office that handles royalty checks for oil and gas and coal extraction. His new job had no duties and appeared on no organizational chart. He quit. “I really didn’t feel like I had a choice,” he told me. “I wanted to keep my voice more than I wanted to keep the job.” Like his commander in chief, Zinke made no secret of his distrust. “I got thirty percent of the crew that’s not loyal to the flag,” he said in late 2017 to an advisory board dominated by oil and gas executives. He likened his leadership of the department to capturing a ship at sea, and vowed to prevail over resistant employees. Zinke’s comment drew a rebuke from fifteen former Interior appointees, in Republican and Democratic administrations, who appealed to him to let public servants “do their jobs without fear of retaliation on political grounds.” In a private mutiny, some of his staff printed T-shirts that read “30% DISLOYAL” and took to calling themselves “the disloyals.” Zinke eventually left the administration in 2018, under pressure from more than a dozen investigations into his conduct, including scrutiny of a land deal involving a foundation he led. But the administration’s commitment to fossil-fuel companies was undimmed. At the Department of Energy, appointees adopted a vocabulary of nearly divine faith in natural gas, which they called “freedom gas.” The department hired, as a special adviser, Douglas Matheney, who had worked for the National Mining Association and the Koch brothers’ political organization. Matheney promptly headed to West Virginia for a coal-industry conference and told the crowd, “I went to Washington, D.C., for one purpose, and that was to help create coal jobs in the United States. That’s my total purpose for being there. I’m not a researcher. I’m not a scientist. I’m an advocate for the coal industry.” With a smile, he nodded to Reagan’s famous quip and said: “The good news is I’m with the federal government, and I’m here to help.” The administration was not just gutting the federal government; it was empowering it in the name of private interests. In West Virginia, it accelerated a boom in the natural gas industry that had begun under Obama; employers needed people for construction, driving, warehouses, oil fields, and laying pipelines. In Trump’s first three years, West Virginia recorded the fastest per capita labor-force growth of any state. At the hotels on the edge of Clarksburg, parking lots filled up with workers coming in. David Efaw, the coal miner who had cast a wary vote for Trump, was impressed. “I’ll have to admit, Trump has done a better job than I thought he would, honestly,” he told me. Since at least 1950, when the first records were kept, West Virginia had the lowest labor-force participation rate in America, but by 2020 it had surpassed Mississippi and was approaching several other states. After years of frustration, people without college degrees were getting hired for wages of up to $30 an hour. State unemployment fell to some of its lowest levels in decades. But the gas boom was also underscoring the underlying frailties in West Virginia’s political culture—widening the gap in power between the state’s corporate elite and everyone else. In 2018, Evan Hansen, the environmental consultant I traveled with during the water crisis, won a seat in the state House of Delegates. He started making the drive back and forth from his home in Morgantown, in the north of the state, to the legislature in Charleston. After years of pressing the government from the outside, he was startled to discover the full scope of ways that powerful energy companies shaped politics on the inside. In one case, the House Energy Committee debated a bill to expedite permits for fracking. “Then the next word out of the chairman’s mouth was, ‘Don’t forget that lunch is provided tomorrow by Dominion’”—one of the energy companies that stood to gain from the bill. “Without any sense of irony or impropriety or anything,” he said. “It was just so normal.” Signs of political capture were everywhere. When Hansen met some staff attorneys who drafted the technical language of legislation, they apologized about a new rule. “They were like, ‘I’m really sorry, but we can no longer accept bills from lobbyists without your signature to say that you want to cosponsor the bill.’ I’m like, ‘You’re apologizing to me that an elected representative needs to sign a bill to indicate they’re cosponsoring it?” He told me, “Lobbyists used to be able to hand them a bill, and say, ‘This delegate and this one told me they’re on it.’ It’s just the way it’s been done for decades.” But nothing frustrated Hansen more than observing the extent to which coal companies used their clout to hedge against their own economic doomsday. “We’ve known for decades that the coal industry was going to steeply decline. There was a report that my company put out in 2010 that laid it all out.” They were losing the competition to cheap natural gas, and by the end of 2018, five more U.S. coal companies had declared bankruptcy in three years. As they failed, they asked the state to prop them up. To survive, the industry lobbied successfully for a tax cut that would save it $60 million a year. In an unsubtle political move, Murray Energy, a coal company, bused in miners to fill seats in the legislature’s gallery. “The economists said it might create a hundred jobs. So it’s costing us six hundred thousand dollars a job,” Hansen said. “And that’s what it might do. It’s probably not going to create any.” When the coal industry succeeded in winning a tax cut, other industries lined up—including natural gas, limestone, and sandstone. To Hansen, the giveaways represented a delusional faith in the dismantling of the administrative state. More deeply, it marked a failure of democracy’s basic function: to deliberate over the shared problems of a people and to convert their public assets into the public goods they need in order to flourish. He said, “At a time when we really need to be investing in roads, and teachers, and things that will actually bring people here, we’re dumping the money into places that are not going to be productive over the long term.” He said, “It’s going to line their pockets, and it’s going to go out of the state.” At its core, the campaign to subdue the administrative state could not succeed without a major assault on taxes. Trump had campaigned on the promise of a colossal tax cut, and in a moment of candor, Congressman Chris Collins, a New York Republican, told reporters, “My donors are basically saying: ‘Get it done or don’t ever call me again.’” In the end, the donors were well served. Three days before Christmas 2017, Trump signed a $1.5 trillion tax cut, one of the largest in the nation’s history. He called it a gift to “the folks who work in the mail rooms and the machine shops of America.” That was impressively false, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a nonpartisan think tank. On average, a household in the bottom 20 percent of American income received a cut of $120; a household in the top 1 percent received $48,000. The new rules cut the corporate tax rate by 14 percentage points and made it easier to avoid the estate tax; they also introduced a range of new tax breaks, including some specifically for the commercial-real-estate industry and for wealthy heirs. At opposite ends of America’s income ladder, the tax cuts, and the resulting cuts to government service, played out as near mirror images—as if they represented alternative definitions of a government “here to help.” In Chicago, the Illinois Policy Institute, a conservative think tank, hailed Trump’s corporate tax cut as an instrument to “attract global headquarters and high-paying corporate jobs.” But for people who would not get high-paying corporate jobs, the benefits were scarce. Some employers, such as Home Depot, announced bonuses “up to $1,000,” but bonuses, unlike raises, are one-off payments, and many companies simply moved up bonuses they would have given later. The administration proposed its sharpest cuts to social agencies such as the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which primarily serves the poor. Trump’s 2018 budget aimed to slash $6.2 billion from HUD’s budget—more than a fifth of its funding—and the effects would trickle down across the country. Cook County, home to Chicago, prepared to cut spending on sheltering homeless people and cut off rental assistance to 800 households, which the director of the program called a “doomsday scenario” for people who depended on it. (Another 6,000 households were on a waiting list.) When the director of HUD, Ben Carson, visited Chicago in January 2018, he was shouted down by protesters. A woman yelled, “You’re taking homes from people like me!” (Faced with a growing outcry, Congress intervened to prevent the cuts.) But by then, Chicago had become almost entirely symbolic for Trump. Since activists shut down his rally, he had not set foot in the city again. And yet it only continued to grow as a symbol in his imagery of lawlessness and violence. “Seven people shot and killed yesterday in Chicago,” Trump tweeted in early 2017. “What is going on there - totally out of control. Chicago needs help!” The help he envisioned was not to generate jobs or repair schools or expand public transit. He suggested sending the National Guard. He told Bill O’Reilly that Chicago police should get “very much tougher,” and he invoked a conversation with an unnamed cop, a “top police officer,” Trump called him, who said he could stop the violence in “one week” if he was given a freer hand. Every town in America had its story of what changed after Trump came to power. In Greenwich, his era had begun almost instantly. A few weeks after the election, a town employee reported to police that Christopher von Keyserling, a well-known member of the Representative Town Meeting—the town council—had touched her groin after saying, “I love this new world. I no longer have to be politically correct.” Lynn Mason, the accuser, warned von Keyserling not to touch her again, to which he allegedly replied, “It would be your word against mine, and nobody will believe you.” After the town government contacted von Keyserling about the complaint, he said that Mason had overreacted to a “little pinch,” according to court records. He was charged with misdemeanor sexual assault. He pleaded not guilty and awaited trial. The combination of Trump and the von Keyserling incident caused an immediate reaction in local politics: women signed up to run for office, and in the fall of 2017 more than fifty won seats on the town council. “A lot of us just woke up,” Joanna Swomley, a retired lawyer who entered the race, said. “We were horrified.” Democrats also won control of the town finance board for the first time in recorded history, and the following year, they picked up seats in the state legislature that no Democrat had occupied since Herbert Hoover was in the White House. But the local blue wave subsided. In 2019, Republicans reclaimed control of the finance board and elected as first selectman (the equivalent of mayor) a local businessman and state lawmaker who had voted for Trump. On election day, Swomley had sensed a change in the atmosphere. “I was holding a Democrat’s sign, and a Republican yelled out, ‘Oh, hell no!’ It was not the embarrassment, the quietness that you saw in 2017. It was ‘I am going to own this. I like this.’” Claire Tisne Haft, a Greenwich Time columnist who lived in town with her husband and three kids, was appalled by Trump, and she initially assumed that her neighbors were, too. She got her first indication to the contrary at a dance recital for her daughter, when another mother told her how excited she was to “see what Trump can do.” Not long afterward, Tisne Haft and her husband had dinner with friends, and the conversation turned to politics. “We realized halfway through the meal that we had to adjust our tone,” she told me. The moderate Republicans who once defined the local political culture were increasingly out of favor. Christopher Shays had been elected eleven times to represent Greenwich and the Gold Coast in Congress, from 1987 to 2009. When he appeared in the press now and then, in the Trump years, conservatives mocked him as a RINO—a Republican in name only. “When Sean Hannity calls someone like me a RINO, I want to punch him in the nose,” Shays told me. “I got elected as a Republican for thirty-four effing years, and Hannity has never gotten elected for anything.” When Shays talked to former staff and constituents in Connecticut, he came to recognize the delicate language of accommodation: “I was talking to a guy I know well, after some pathetic thing that Trump did, and his response was ‘Yes, but he’s selecting the right Supreme Court justices.’ I started to laugh at him, because I know for a fact that’s a minor issue for him.” Shays believed that many Americans quietly shared Trump’s desire to reduce immigration and cut social-welfare programs for the poor. “He’s saying what people think, and they appreciate that,” Shays said. “But not many are going to admit that’s why they support him.” Trump signs remained scarce in Greenwich, but his supporters were easy to find. In addition to the first selectman and local residents who had joined the administration, there was the chairman of the Greenwich finance board, as well as an ardent backer who served in the state House of Representatives. Leora Levy, who had called him vulgar in the local paper, took to applauding his “leadership” and quoting him on Twitter, where she adopted some of his rhetorical style. “AMERICA WILL NEVER BE A SOCIALIST COUNTRY!!!” she posted. “WE ARE BORN FREE AND WILL STAY FREE!!!” Eventually, Trump nominated her to be the U.S. ambassador to Chile. But the fuller impact of Trump’s era ran far deeper than just the jockeying for proximity to power. The more Trump conducted the presidency around the combat mindset, the more it seemed to seep into the national groundwater —into the ways people perceived their connections to one another. In early 2019, a powerful Greenwich attorney named Gordon Caplan, cochairman of the law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher, was indicted for paying $75,000 for a test proctor to fix his daughter’s ACT exam. Caplan was one of fifty-three defendants in the college admissions scandal, a list dotted with addresses in Atherton and Bel Air. In phone calls recorded by the FBI, Rick Singer, the consultant behind the scam, had explained to Caplan that his daughter would never know that her family had cheated on her behalf: “She will think that she’s really super smart and she got lucky on a test.” Caplan uttered one of the scandal’s indelible expressions: “To be honest, I’m not worried about the moral issue here.” Caplan pleaded guilty and served a month in prison. After the scandal broke, Tisne Haft, at Greenwich Time, wrote that the case brought up “a whole lot of uncomfortable in a town like Greenwich.” It exposed how far some of America’s most powerful, educated, and prosperous people were going to give their families an advantage in a life already full of them. She sensed that some people in town had become so cynical about the workings of power that they had lost their moral footing. “A friend said, ‘You know those kids whose parents gave libraries to their colleges? How is that so different than pushing the boundaries of the truth about your kid?’” she told me. “I just had to look at this person and say, ‘Hang on. Someone photoshopped a kid’s head onto a picture.’ I feel like we jumped off a cliff there somewhere and didn’t notice.” The Americans who broke the law to get their kids into better schools had provided unwitting testimony on the full scale of America’s crisis of inequality; the gap between elites and the rest had grown so large that parents panicked at the prospect that their offspring might land on the wrong side of the divide. Their reasoning reminded me of the rationale I kept hearing for looking past Trump’s behavior toward women, minorities, immigrants, war heroes, democracy, and the truth: a conviction that, ultimately, nothing mattered more than cutting taxes and regulations and slowing immigration. Places like Greenwich took pride in their commitment to civility and decency, but Caplan’s indifference to the “moral issue,” as he put it, bespoke the kind of quiet compromises that a person makes in the privacy of a phone call, or a voting booth. For years, Americans who could invest in hedging against catastrophe had imagined a range of scenarios that might subject them to a world “without rule of law.” But they could have dispensed with the science fiction. Rule of law, it turned out, could founder anytime, if enough people used their power to escape it