Opinion ‘Trumpery’ damaged our democracy. Here are some ways to overcome it.
Former president Donald Trump speaks to supporters during a rally on May 1 in Greenwood, Neb. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)
In an invaluable Brookings Institution paper last year, Norm Eisen, counsel to various people and groups litigating on behalf of democracy (and to the Trump impeachment managers), helped compile a list of the “fixes” needed to repair the Trump era’s systemic damage. Now, Eisen and contributing authors have turned the report into a more comprehensive analysis: “Overcoming Trumpery: How to Restore Ethics, the Rule of Law, and Democracy.”
I recently interviewed Eisen about the new book, which provides an exhaustive to-do list of institutional guardrails, including ethics reform, bolstered congressional oversight and depoliticization of the Justice Department. This transcript has been edited lightly for length, style and clarity.
Jennifer Rubin: What’s “Trumpery,” and why is this different than corruption we’ve seen in the past?
Norm Eisen: The book is the first to analyze Trump’s lying and corrupt style in office as a philosophy of governing: Trumpery. It has seven features, the seven deadly sins of Trumpery. That’s different from anything we’ve seen in U.S. history — even with the most corrupt presidents — because Trumpery rejects the core principles that make us a democratic republic and instead moves us towards autocracy.
The logical culmination of four years of Trumpery was his attempted coup to stay in power, and instead of backing away from that “big lie”-driven criminal conspiracy, many in the GOP have embraced Trumpery, and many more tolerate it. Indeed, adherents like Gov. Ron DeSantis [Fla.], Sen. Josh Hawley [R-Mo.] or Congressman Jim Jordan [R-Ohio] are taking it to new depths.
But the good news is Trumpery was defeated once and there are many solutions to defeat it again, which we also lay out. So, there is hope!
Rubin: Democrats cannot get any of your reforms passed without filibuster reform, which they don’t have the votes to pass. What do they do?
Eisen: “Overcoming Trumpery” not only documents the evolution of Trumpery (even I was shocked when I saw it all in one place!). It also offers solutions, many of which are still available. Yes, we could have been inoculated against Trumpery by the comprehensive democratic reforms that passed the House and should have passed the Senate. And I was, of course, disappointed that we fell two votes shy of the filibuster reform that the book calls for. But as we explain in the volume, important steps to counter Trumpery are still possible at the federal level and at the state and local levels.
For example, the Senate is considering “Electoral Count Act-plus” reform: changing federal law to definitively reject the bizarre legal theories that Trump advanced to try to effectuate his coup in Congress. The “plus” consists of other possible federal responses to the “big lie”-driven assaults on elections and election officials that are still going on from coast to coast. We outline what that federal package might look like in the book. And almost every other democracy, rule-of-law and ethics reform in “Overcoming Trumpery” can also be adapted and adopted at the state and local level. So, there’s a lot!
Rubin: How much of this is the fault of voters? They know what Republicans are and keep voting for them.
Eisen: When voters had a chance to react to Trump’s style of governance, they definitively rejected it in 2018 and again in 2020. But Republicans learned from that, and, like a virus, Trumpery is evolving to present a more appealing face. That’s what makes DeSantis so dangerous — he’s practicing Trumpery 2.0. When you see things like his creation of a new election police force, and you think about the attempted coup that we avoided after the 2020 election, you can’t help but be chilled. We also know that autocracy cannot succeed without complicity, and that’s what voters are choosing every time they vote for any GOP official who does not affirmatively reject Trumpery.
Rubin: What’s your take on the role of social media in the erosion of democracy, and what do we do about it?
Eisen: I do think social media is a big part of the problem — and we are in the process of figuring out how to make it a part of the solution as well. The spread of disinformation and how to fight that with truth is something we work on a lot at the States United Democracy Center, which I co-chair with former GOP governor Christine Todd Whitman. As I note in “Overcoming Trumpery,” I’m fundamentally optimistic that we will succeed if we do the hard work of preserving democracy together, just as we did in 2020.