Robert Reich

Last week marked the start of the slide that ended in the catastrophe of Trump.

On August 23, 1971, less than two months before he was nominated to serve as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, Lewis F. Powell Jr. wrote a memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

It was titled “Attack On American Free Enterprise System” and it outlined ways in which corporate America should defend and counter attack against “disquieting voices” — environmentalists, consumer advocates, and labor unions. Powell warned that their voices were growing louder and their influence was gaining in the halls of Congress.

I remember the time very well. The nation was witnessing a flowering of reform. Just as the “muckrakers” of the first years of the 20th century had spawned the Progressive Era in response to the wide inequalities and corruption of the first Gilded Age and its “robber barons,” the reformers of the 1960s were on the verge of spawning another progressive era that would rebalance the American economy in favor of all its stakeholders.

Louis Powell thought so, too, but he was deeply alarmed by it. He told corporate America that businesses must pour money into political campaigns, public relations campaigns, and litigation all aimed at putting an end to this wave of reform.

Corporate America duly followed Powell’s advice. An entire corporate-political complex was born, including tens of thousands of lobbyists, lawyers, political operatives, and public relations flacks.

Within a few decades, big corporations became the largest political force in Washington and in most state capitals. The number of corporate political action committees (PACs) mushroomed from under 300 in 1976 to more than 1,200 four years later. Between the late 1970s and the late 1980s, corporate PACs increased their expenditures on congressional races nearly fivefold. Labor union PAC spending rose only about half as fast.

I saw Washington change. When I arrived there in 1974 to work in the Ford administration, it was a rather seedy town. By the time I returned as secretary of labor in 1993, it had been transformed into a glittering center of corporate America — replete with elegant office buildings, fancy restaurants, pricy bistros, five-star hotels, major conference centers, beautiful townhouses, and a booming real estate market that pushed Washington’s poor, most of whom were Black, out of the increasingly upscale Northwest portion of the city and made two of Washington’s adjoining counties among the wealthiest in the nation.

By that time, corporations employed some 61,000 people to lobby for them, including registered lobbyists and lawyers. That came to more than a hundred lobbyists for each member of Congress.

That tsunami of big money from giant corporations and their CEOs, top executives, and major investors was engulfing American politics. It not only sank reform; it began to rig the entire system in favor of the moneyed interests and against average working people.

In subsequent years, the Supreme Court opened the floodgates, ruling absurdly that money was speech under the First Amendment and corporations were people.

And America is in a second Gilded Age of near-record inequality and corruption, featuring robber barons like Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and the biggest robber of them all, Trump.

What’s the answer? No easy one, of course, but we have to get big money out of politics. Start with campaign finance reform — public funds matching small-donor contributions to candidates who agree to limit their campaign spending.

Here’s a video my talented team and I created about all this:

- YouTubeyoutu.be

Should you wish for more detail — and to understand how the Powell memo fit into subsequent decades of widening inequality and mounting corruption and what we must do to reverse course — you might want to read my new book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America. You can support local bookstores by ordering it at bookshop.org.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/

Monica Crowley, a former Fox News personality who is now Trump’s chief of protocol, apparently left behind in a public area of an Alaskan hotel documents describing confidential planned movements of Trump and Putin during their Friday meeting in Alaska.

That’s nothing compared to Emil Bove, Trump’s new nominee for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, who reputedly told subordinates at the Department of Justice that they should tell the courts “f--k you” and ignore any court order blocking the deportations of Venezuelan migrants declared to be gang members.

Then there’s Billy Long, a former auctioneer and Republican congressman who Trump nominated less than two months ago to head the Internal Revenue Service, with little background in tax policy beyond promoting a fraud-riddled tax credit. Long has already been fired after clashing with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Long was the seventh person to head the IRS this year.

Let’s not forget E.J. Antoni, whom Trump just nominated to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics after firing former BLS chief Erika McEntarfer for presiding over a disappointing jobs report earlier this month.

Antoni is that rarity who has drawn harsh criticism from economists on the right as well as the mainstream for being ignorant, unprincipled, and incompetent. He recently called it “good news” that “all of the net job growth over the last 12 months has gone to native-born Americans.”

I haven’t even mentioned the towering ineptitude of Trump’s Cabinet picks, such as Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Kristi Noem. Or the flagrant cruelty and wild negligence of Trump assistants Russell Vought and Stephen Miller.

How to explain the rise of so many inept and unprincipled people?

Easy. They could never succeed on their own merits. As soon as their brainless incompetence became apparent — likely as soon as they took the first job that required some degree of intelligence and integrity — they were fired.

So they learned that, if they wanted to be rewarded with promotions, money, and power, they could not rely on the normal processes and systems of recognition for jobs well done. If they were to make anything of themselves, they must instead become a---lickers, lapdogs, and sycophants.

They must latch onto someone who values loyalty above integrity or competence, someone for whom fawning obsequiousness is the most important criterion for being hired and promoted, ideally someone who cannot tell the difference between a groveling toady and a knowledgeable adviser.

Enter Trump.

History is strewn with the wreckage of dictatorships that have attracted and promoted incompetent lapdogs lacking talent or integrity. As Hannah Arendt explained in her classic The Origins of Totalitarianism:

Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.

Early in his career, Trump apprenticed himself to Roy Cohn, an unprincipled lawyer who taught the young Donald how to gain wealth and influence through ruthless bullying, profane braggadocio, opportunistic bigotry, baseless lawsuits, lying, and more lying.

Yet as Trump’s “fixer” with politicians, judges, and mob bosses, Cohn remained utterly loyal to Trump and his father, Fred.

Years later, in his first and bestselling book, The Art of the Deal, Trump drew a distinction between integrity and loyalty. He preferred the latter, and for him, Roy Cohn exemplified it. Trump contrasted Cohn with "all the hundreds of ‘respectable’ guys who made careers out of boasting about their uncompromising integrity but have absolutely no loyalty …. What I liked most about Roy Cohn was that he would do just the opposite."

Cohn died a disgrace, disbarred by the New York State Bar for unethical conduct after attempting to defraud a dying client by forcing him to sign a will amendment leaving Cohn his fortune.

People who climb upward by sacrificing their integrity to slavish subservience almost always fall on their faces eventually. Blind ambition trips them up. They cannot explain or defend their behavior by relying on principled competence because, like Roy Cohn, they are unprincipled and incompetent to their cores.

The people they latch onto meet similar fates but for a different reason.

Leaders who value loyalty above all else find themselves surrounded by sycophantic crackpots and fools who will not provide leaders objective or useful feedback about their actions — no warnings beforehand and no criticism afterward. All they get are ass-licking commendations —“Wonderful idea, sir!” “Brilliant execution, sir!”

These cocoons of flattery seal off such leaders from the real-world consequences of what they do — which inevitably leads them to make grave mistakes. Some of those mistakes eventually cause their downfalls.

This perverse symmetry — the certain demise of grovelers because they’re incompetent and unprincipled, and the inevitable downfall of those to whom they grovel because they never receive useful and accurate feedback — marks the endpoint of all totalitarian systems. It’s the path on which Trump now treads.

This is not necessarily cause for hope. If history is any guide, many innocent people will suffer before the incompetent grovelers and the vain objects of their groveling meet their inevitable fates. America and the world are already suffering.

• Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com