| THE FIFTH RISK Michael Lewis New York: W. W. Norton & Company, October 2018 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-1-324-00264-2 | ||||
| ISBN-10 1-324-00264-6 | 219pp. | HC | $26.95 | |
These are the books about Trump and his administration I've read previously:
All those books provide lengthy rosters of bad actors, and a wealth of detail about the webs of misconduct in which Trump has ensnared himself and his family, going back long years before he sought and won the presidency of the United States. Any one of them contains enough evidence to convince any objective observer that Trump is absolutely unfit for the Oval Office. Yet none of them conveys the message as effectively as this book by Michael Lewis.
The reason is that Lewis goes straight to the heart. I mean that both literally and figuratively. He goes to the heart of the matter: the core of the duty of elected officials, which is to listen to and serve the people; to promote the general welfare, as the Preamble to the Constitution puts it. He goes to the heart: the seat of human empathy and compassion: qualities without which no one can hope to fulfill the Constitution's mandate. And he goes to the heart: that blood-pumping organ which can be so damaged by poor nutrition or lack of medical care.
The Trump administration Lewis portrays in this book is one that follows the lead of its nominal head. That is to say it has no concern for the details of governing, no regard for the truths of science, economics, law, or even politics; and no empathy for the poor, the sick, the unemployed, the homeless, the seekers of asylum — the "forgotten people" Trump claims to be helping.
Everyone who paid attention to Trump's campaign, of course, and who was not blinded by personal resentment, was already well aware of who and what he was. But enough people were blinded, for whatever reason, that he eked out a legal victory. Some hoped he would grow into the job, would "become presidential." It is an understandable hope, but one which a greater number of people understood to be forlorn. So it has turned out. No improvement of Trump is in prospect; the only hope for improvement of America's internal functioning, or of its international standing, is curtailment of Trump's influence. To that end, the more people who understand clearly why this is so, the sooner that becomes possible. The Fifth Risk is a big step toward that goal.
What I want to do here is present condensed versions of some transition tales from the book. Text from the book is shown in blue. Quotations from Trump are in orange.
Patterned after DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, ARPA-E is the federal government "skunk works" for energy innovation. Run by the Department of Energy, it was established during the George W. Bush administration. With its relatively small budget of $500 million, it provides grants to people with promising ideas. The author describes its mission this way:
"At any given time in America, there are lots of seriously smart people with bold ideas that might change life as we know it—it may be the most delightful distinguishing feature of our society. The idea behind ARPA-E was to find the best of these ideas that the free market had declined to finance and make sure they were given a chance. Competition for the grants has been fierce; only two out of every hundred have been approved. The people who do the approving come from the energy industry and academia. They do brief tours of duty in government, then return to Intel and Harvard." – Page 78 |
Arun Majumdar was director of ARPA-E at its creation. Immediately, he started taking flak from right-wing groups. In 2011, the Heritage Foundation even ginned up its own budget proposal with no funds for ARPA-E. Dr. Majumdar invited the budgeteers over to see what they would destroy. They never did visit, the author tells us, but they took Dr. Majumdar to lunch. "They were very gracious," he said, but they didn't know anything. They were not scientists in any sense. They were ideologues. Their point was: the market should take care of everything." One of their group was a woman whose son had been saved by DARPA-developed Kevlar in Iraq. Learning that ARPA-E was like DARPA, she became a big fan. The next faux budget from the Heritage Foundation included funding for ARPA-E.
No one showed up that first day after the election, or the next. This was strange: the day after he was elected, Obama had sent his people into the USDA, as had Bush. At the end of the second day, the folks at the Department of Agriculture called the White House to ask what was going on. "The White House said they'd be here Monday, recalled one. On Monday morning they worked themselves up all over again into a welcoming spirit. Again, no one showed. Not that entire week. On November 22, Leftwich made a cameo appearance for about an hour. "We had thought, Rural America is what got Trump elected, so he'd have to make us a priority," said the transition planner, but then nothing happened."
More than a month after the election, the Trump transition team finally appeared. But it wasn't a team; it was just one guy, named Brian Klippenstein. He came from his job running an organization called Protect the Harvest. Protect the Harvest was founded by a Trump supporter, an Indiana oilman and rancher named Forrest Lucas. Its stated purpose was "to protect your right to hunt, fish, farm, eat meat, and own animals." In practice it mainly demonized organizations, like the Humane Society, that sought to prevent people who owned animals from doing terrible things to them.
One of USDA's many duties was to police conflicts between people and animals. It brought legal action against people who abused animals, and so maybe it wasn't the best place to insert a man who was preternaturally unconcerned with their welfare. The department maintained its composure—no nasty leaks to the press, no resignations in protest—even as Klippenstein focused, bizarrely, on a single issue. Not animal abuse but climate change. "He came in and wanted to know all about the office on climate change," says a former USDA employee. "That's what he wanted to focus on. He wanted the names of the people doing the work."
The Department of Agriculture normally closes for business on Inauguration Day. It's the only federal agency with an office building on the Mall, which, once upon a time, had been the site of an experimental farm. The building is now used as a staging post during the inaugural by the National Guard and the Secret Service. Just before the inauguration, a Trump representative called the USDA and said he wanted the building to remain open, as he was sending thirty-something new people in. Why the sudden rush? Why force the government to turn on the lights and staff the cafeteria and go to the rest of the trouble to animate a federal building on a day no one was working? Even getting people into the building would be difficult, with snipers on the roof and the Metro station closed.
Nine months later, Politico published an eye-popping account about these new appointees. Jenny Hopkinson, a Politico reporter, obtained the curricula vitae of the new Trump people. Into USDA jobs, some of which paid nearly $80,000 a year, the Trump team had inserted a long-haul truck driver, a clerk at AT&T, a gas-company meter reader, a country-club cabana attendant, a Republican National Committee intern, and the owner of a scented-candle company, with skills like "pleasant demeanor" listed on their résumés.
What these people had in common, she pointed out, was loyalty to Donald Trump.
Nine months after they'd arrived, a man I'd been told was the best informed of all the department's career employees about the haphazard transition couldn't tell me how many of these people were still roaming the halls. The few fingerprints they'd left were characteristically bizarre. They sent certified letters to several senior career civil servants perceived to be close to the Obama administration, telling them they were being reassigned—from jobs they were good at to jobs they knew little about. They instructed the staff to stop using the phrase "climate change." They removed the inspection reports on businesses that abused animals—roadside circuses, puppy mills, research labs—from the department's website. When reporters from National Geographic contacted the USDA to ask what was going on with animal-abuse issues, "they told us all of this information was public, except now you had to FOIA it," said Rachael Bale. "We asked for the files, and they sent us seventeen hundred completely blanked-out pages." (pages 91-93)I confess to a worry that I might have overdone it: that I quoted too many episodes here. Still, I gave you only minor parts of these individual stories; only reading them entire conveys the full travesty of what the Trumpeteers are doing. And these stories are a miniscule part of the book's larger narrative.
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