American Resistance by David Rothkopf — managing the Trump horror show

Government institutions are only as strong as the people who work for them. That may not be a particularly penetrating insight, but it is one that is frequently ignored by the political scientists who prefer to focus on the national-level electoral races that make headlines.

But anyone who has lived in a dysfunctional developing-world country, or even a decaying first-world capital, can attest to the consequences of being governed by a bureaucracy that has lost the people’s trust. The young and talented shun government service. Low-level corruption and graft become commonplace. Taxpayers work diligently to evade the taxman.

It becomes a vicious circle. Politicised and crooked bureaucracies become magnets for grifters and patronage cases. The cycle repeats, but only gets worse. As a result, trust in government institutions is nearly impossible to regain once it is lost.

The threat of that kind of politicisation and corruption in the American government is the leitmotif of American Resistance by David Rothkopf, a longtime Washington-based analyst and author.

There were multiple moments when you’d be saying to yourself, ‘I can’t tell, is he actually that clueless?’

Ostensibly, Rothkopf’s book is dedicated to telling the stories of those government workers who did the opposite: in the face of the bald-faced cronyism surrounding then-President Donald Trump during his norm-bending four years in the White House, they stood up for their institutions and made sure they did the important and sometimes difficult work of governing properly.

As examples of these standout civil servants, Rothkopf presents us with many of the names we have already come to know during the Trump era, several of whom are given pages of verbatim quotes to recall their experiences.

There is Anthony Fauci, the US government’s leading infectious disease expert, recalling the workarounds he devised in an often futile attempt to keep the American pandemic response from veering out of control. There is Mark Esper, Trump’s next-to-last defence secretary, telling how he prevented the commander-in-chief from deploying American soldiers against Black Lives Matter protesters. And there is Fiona Hill, the British-born Russia expert on the National Security Council, relating how the so-called adults in the administration attempted to prevent Trump’s devotion to Russia’s Vladimir Putin from warping American foreign policy.

Hill tells Rothkopf how people such as Rex Tillerson, secretary of state and a former chief executive of ExxonMobil, with years of experience dealing with Russia were “very reluctant” to let the president anywhere near the Russians. “So, we tried to find a way we could work, in some way, with his desire, for example, to have an arms control deal, while still kind of keeping his other impulses [for cozying up to Putin] under control, managing how he got information, and how choices were presented to him,” says Hill.

But for all of Rothkopf’s efforts to keep American Resistance focused on those who sustained their institutions in the face of a Trumpian assault, the book — perhaps inevitably — becomes a litany of Trumpian horror stories. These begin with the “Muslim ban” in the first days of his presidency and ends with the January 6 assault on the US Capitol.

Not that these horrors and their exponents are unworthy of recalling, given how close the US government came to losing itself in the Trump years. Accounts of the “dystopian fantasy” of Trump’s longtime anti-immigration aide Stephen Miller about swarms of terrorists entering the US through its southern border and Oval Office discussions about whether deploying alligators in moats or missiles against immigrant caravans was the effective policy response remain chilling to this day.

“There were multiple moments when you’d be saying to yourself, ‘I can’t tell, is he actually that clueless?’” Elizabeth Neumann, an assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, tells Rothkopf. “How does one respond to that with appropriate respect for the office, when inside your brain you’re going, ‘I cannot believe this is happening’.”

The problem for Rothkopf is that many of these horror stories have been told elsewhere, and often with more compelling detail, either in the dozens of preceding books chronicling the Trump years, or in the government’s own investigations into Trump’s various misdeeds, most recently the congressional report on the January 6 insurrection.

In addition, Rothkopf succumbs to a fallacy that often afflicts those who have spent most of their adult lives in Washington: the assumption that, because most of the people he has associated with in the American capital over the decades seem like decent folk, those in the permanent government have been wrongly scapegoated for the nation’s ills.

Rothkopf may well be right that the bravery of a Fiona Hill and the dozens like her whose “resistance” to the whims of a powerful, mercurial commander-in-chief helped mitigate against what could have been ever greater disasters. But he seems to ignore the role the same permanent government played in creating the circumstances where Trump could flourish.

Washington is a clubby town, prone to groupthink and self-satisfying smugness. It is also home to what Mark Leibovich, in his book This Town — an all-too-knowing send-up of official Washington — dubbed the “big, lucrative revolving door between money, media and politics”. (Full disclosure: I have worked with Rothkopf on journalistic ventures in the past.)

When many Americans look at their national capital, they see Leibovich’s Washington, not Rothkopf’s. They see an entrenched, entitled elite that spends much of its effort climbing the American ladder of power while giving only passing regard for the national wellbeing. It is that Washington that has contributed to the rage in the countryside that allowed Trump and his acolytes to flourish.

Rothkopf thinks this critique is unfair, and says as much in American Resistance’s introductory pages. Yet having spent close to 15 years as a correspondent in Washington myself, I find that what makes the Fiona Hills of the American capital so compelling is that they are so rare.

Indeed, in some ways Trump provided a moment of much-needed clarity. When a proto-tyrant arrived on the scene, much of those inside the Capital Beltway — particularly within the Republican party — attempted to find a way to ride his coattails to greater power and influence. That is, after all, the Washington way.

It is to the credit of Hill, Fauci, Esper and a handful of their compatriots that American governmental institutions emerged from the Trump years only damaged and not destroyed — and they deserve Rothkopf’s commendation. But alarmingly for the nation, much of official Washington proved the cynics right during the Trump years. The public’s trust has been further undermined. The cycle will repeat, but only get worse.

American Resistance: The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation by David Rothkopf PublicAffairs £25/$29, 288 pages

Peter Spiegel is the FT’s US managing editor

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