How the Swamp Drained Trump
On a drizzly January afternoon one year ago, a newly sworn in President Donald J. Trump stood on the steps of the United States Capitol, doing his best to terrify America’s ruling class.
“Today, we are not merely transferring power from one administration to another, or from one party to another,” Trump declared, peering out at a sea of supporters, “but we are transferring power from Washington, D.C., and giving it back to you, the people.”
From Washington to Wall Street and beyond, a deep sense of unease permeated gatherings of high-status respectables at the dawn of the Trump presidency. The situation seemed dire: A madman had been swept into office in a wave of populist rage directed at them—and in that hallucinatory moment, it felt as if he was capable of anything. Would he tank their stock portfolios with a single tweet? Imprison their favorite New York Times columnists? Start a trade war with China, or a nuclear war with North Korea? And what to make of this mysterious movement he now marshaled?
Elites were tormented by visions of torches and pitchforks on the horizon—red-capped zealots encircling their co-ops, crashing through their gated subdivisions, banging down the doors of their brownstones. At a dinner party early in Trump’s first term, I heard a well-appointed Washingtonian fret that the #MAGA army might literally march on the nation’s capital to visit violence and destruction on its inhabitants. At another event, a top executive at a Fortune 500 company pitched me on monetizing the insights I’d gleaned from covering Trump by becoming a consultant for corporate America. “I’m telling you, there are CEOs and boards all over the country right now that are terrified of Trump’s Twitter feed,” he said with great enthusiasm. “They’re trying to figure out how to stay on his good side and get what they want out of him.”
A year later, it seems clear they didn’t need my services—they figured Trump out all on their own.
For all his anti-establishment bluster, Trump has proven to be a paper tiger as president. Instead of cracking down on Wall Street plutocrats, he’s appointed them to his cabinet and given them tax cuts. Insteadreporters and book-writing dandies from Manhattan. And while he hobnobs in Davos with the globalist glitterati, the ragtag team of loyal lieutenants who set out in 2016 to upturn the established order with Trump has been largely shoved to the sidelines or purged altogether from his White House.