Donald Trump, accountability, and the familiar playbook of populists

One of the most noticeable things about Donald Trump’s first tempestuous months as President of the United States (US) is how his diehard supporters have not lost an iota of their faith in him. The President has come into office and torn up various treaties; sent US citizens and legal residents to offshore hellholes in violation of law, court orders, and the Constitution; arranged to have judges arrested; tanked the stock market and dangerously destabilised the bond markets; and caused the US to slip into negative growth. From selling prosperity and greatness, Mr Trump’s message has changed now to promising people that their children will have two toys instead of 20, as he said this week. And yet, within Trumpworld, his stature has not diminished one whit.

 

This is noticeable, but it is not extraordinary. Populist leaders of Mr Trump’s stripe are provided the latitude to make multiple mistakes on an epic scale, any individual one of which might have sunk the career of a centrist predecessor. This provides such populists with a built-in advantage in any electoral contest with rational moderates.

 

What is the reason for the fact that populist leaders appear to largely operate with impunity? How is there no accountability for their errors, and how are they allowed to take decisions without worrying about rationality or blowback? There are several possible answers, which apply more or less to all of them.

 

First, they either control the media directly, or through oligarch associates, or through intimidation and fear. Or, at any rate, they ensure that their followers are only exposed to a loyal subset of the media, with the rest of it denigrated as traitorous or corrupt. In Mr Trump’s case, this strategy is obvious: Most mainstream media outlets have found themselves expelled from the White House, for example. Instead his voters listen not just to Fox News but an increasingly extreme set of outlets — “One America News” and the like — of which the rest of us have not heard. Big business’ control over some outlets is also being used to minimise the damage — the recent shakeup at the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post opinion section serves as an example.

 

Leaders such as Viktor Orban have perfected this method. They first enriched oligarchs and then ordered them to take over legacy media outlets, where they replaced editorial teams and transformed these media institutions effectively into state-run outlets. If the reader thinks really, really hard, they may be able to identify one or two other countries where this playbook has been put into effect.

 

Second, they dismantle the party system. Mr Trump can indeed be held to account tomorrow — if a small minority of his Republican party colleagues had the courage or integrity to do so. An even more talented populist, Boris Johnson, was replaced when his party lost its faith in him, and were confident that they personally would escape political consequences by firing him. However, most US Republicans do not feel as comfortable as did Britain’s Tories. Mr Trump’s tariffs are incredibly unpopular with most Republicans; yet only a handful of them voted against them in the Senate this week. Local satraps in the party fear Mr Trump can replace them at will. The replacement of local and state-level leaders as the source of electoral success or failure by one central figure is a sign that accountability is leaving the system. There may be a few other such examples around the world.

 

Third, they battle the courts and independent institutions. Mr Trump’s administration has already started to defy court orders and the President himself has spent years attacking individual judges, particularly those that have overseen his own cases. He has also threatened to fire the head of the US Federal Reserve. The left-wing populist Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who recently ended a difficult term as President of Mexico, spent much of his time trying to push through judicial “reform” that would have forced the legal system towards his preferred interpretations of the law. And Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan famously ordered his central bank to ignore Macroeconomics 101 about interest rates and inflation. This is not uncommon elsewhere, and I will leave it to the reader to consider other examples.

 

Finally, they identify and target ersatz new external adversaries, particularly those that can be identified with domestic “enemies” their voters already hate for ethnic, religious or cultural reasons. Mr Trump has chosen to go after Canada and Europe — not because of any rational reason but because he and his voters find it easy to identify those regions with the liberal coastal population of the US itself, and that population is the primary cultural target of the Trump movement. I cannot say if populists are inherently more or less militarily aggressive than regular politicians. They differ in seeing their foreign policy primarily as an extension of domestic social policy, and prioritise the electoral effect of any choices that they make in that field. There are other instances of this sort of thinking that one might mention, some quite relevant at the current moment.

 

Mr Trump’s missteps are very visible. But he is not alone. All leaders without accountability are dangerous, even within nominal democracies.