Trump may be brilliant at assaulting us with his daily distractions, but Democrats need to relentlessly target his corruption because that may be his weak spot. He is running the government in a pre-modern way—like it's his own personal piggy bank. And he has replaced rules-oriented bureaucrats with mostly incompetent loyalists who are only there to do his bidding. Meanwhile, Christianity could help heal the country's partisan polarization if it returns to the teachings of Jesus instead of the gospel of Donald Trump. Plus, the constant burden of having to fight the cognitive warfare and sensory overload coming out of the White House. Brookings’ Jonathan Rauch joins Tim Miller.joins Tim Miller. show notes Jon's piece on Trump's patrimonialism Jon's predictions in 2022 about a Trump second term A Chris Murphy Senate floor speech on Trump's corruption Mark Hertling piece on the Russian and Ukrainian armies that Tim referenced Jon's new book, "Cross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy" Jon's book, "The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50" The opening scene of The Godfather
Chapter 1: What are the key themes discussed in this episode?
I was trying to check. I went and re-listened to that this morning. So it's a welcome back, not a welcome. Appreciate you. And I want to get to the new book in a bit, I promise. But I feel like I have to pick your brain about what's happening in D.C. first. You wrote a column for years called, what's called Social Studies. Is that right? Yeah.
On kind of how government and society interact and function and So looking at the first three months of this administration, do you ever imagine the social studies will look anything like this?
No, no. You know, I'm in the same boat a lot of people are. I'm astonished, bewildered, disoriented, dismayed, distressed, distracted, sometimes depressed. You know, everything that begins with a D. In the dumps. Is what I am. We're seeing everyday things that were unimaginable in the America that I grew up in, or at least thought I grew up in. So there's that. And you know, this is on purpose.
This is a campaign of cognitive warfare to essentially create sensory overload. And a sense of futility. Demoralization is the goal because demoralization is demobilization. And then we stay home and don't resist. So that's what we're fighting.
It makes sense to be demoralized in some cases. And I think about, on the other hand, there is some political gravity that still exists. We see yesterday... Elon is maybe getting pushed out of, or maybe leaving Doge, maybe not. We'll kind of see how it goes.
But I obviously at least feel some pressure to indicate that he may, both from Tesla shareholders and maybe from people inside the government. Trump's backing down on Doge. on some of the tariff threats with China yesterday.
As somebody who's analyzed this, particularly with regards to Elon, I kind of wonder how you assess what they've been up to, what they have been effective at doing, what is counterable.
Well, I have... always been someone who thought it might be useful to shake things up in a rational way. And I guess we're all in that camp. I have also been someone who has always thought, I wrote a book about this actually 30 plus years ago. It was called Demosclerosis, the silent killer of American government.
It's about how interest groups and subsidies and regulations and programs build up over time to serve vested interests and make government profitable. calcified and maladaptive and unable to solve problems. And that's where we are. And that's created a lot of grief. The public's very unhappy about it.
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Chapter 2: How does Jonathan Rauch define patrimonialism?
We were talking about this with Michael Steele yesterday, right? Like a good Nazi, like a good authoritarian would... It was using the scientists to the ends of the state rather than firing all the scientists and jailing some of them in immigration detention centers and stopping all the research. It's breaking everything down rather than using it for the purpose of the state.
Nazism was notoriously bureaucratic. You can go to the camps and look at the offices where they kept the bureaucrats, kept the meticulous records of everything they're doing. Patrimonialism is just, it's way more ad hoc. It's okay, I'm going to fire the people who are there and I'm going to replace them with personal loyalists. And you can go through the whole government, do that.
What you do is you snip the tendons of the institutional state, what they call the deep state. But that's the rule-based authorities where you do regulation by formal rulemaking. And you replace that with regulation is whatever I say it is today. That's why we have chaos in trade. The new rule under patrimonialism, the government belongs to the head of state.
It's his personal business, and he's decided this morning that he wants to raise tariffs. Tomorrow he'll decide to lower tariffs. Nothing bureaucratic, nothing systematic, nothing institutional. So that's what they're doing. We see this around the world. It does have two fatal flaws, and that's how you get at it. You focus on those flaws.
The Trump-Mussolini comparison did always kind of fall flat for me, right? But for this very reason that you're getting at, is it just like, Trump doesn't want the trains to run on time, really. Like, Trump is not... does not have all the same qualities. Like many people, I've been going back and reading 1930s diaries and books to try to gain some insight. And there's some parallels, right?
But then there's some other elements that are like, Trump does not share some of these fascistic tendencies. And so when I was reading your article about the patrimonialism
And, you know, you quote John Bolton, who actually in an interview he's doing on Shield of the Republic, which is our foreign policy podcast, where he says that Trump can't tell the difference between his own personal interest and the national interest, if he even understands what the national interest is.
And like that, like really, like feels right to me that like this description of Trump, you know, as
as as somebody who wants to run the government as his own personal piggy bank kind of like a mob boss like like feels more on the nose and and like once you've identified it i think then you know kind of these these flaws come into focus so i don't know if you have anything more to say about trump in particular on that front well i think that's about right you know a pretty good guide to what we're seeing is the opening scene of the godfather
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Chapter 3: What are the inherent flaws of a patrimonial government?
But it takes time for this to sink in. But the American public did come to understand that That Nixon's corruption was political corruption, not financial corruption. It wasn't money in the bank for Nixon. What he was doing was repurposing the system, the government, for his own political gain. And Trump is doing that. He's doing it in a very big way.
He's shaking down law firms for a slush fund that he can play around with. So, you can frame that story that way. You can, I mean, one of the interesting data points that I stumbled across is that the amount that they want to cut taxes, largely for rich people, is the amount that would be necessary to keep social security solvent indefinitely instead of going, I think the date's what, 2035 now.
So, You know, Trump's corruption is going to take your Social Security money and put it in the pocket of his rich pals. So there are lots of these stories that you can weave. But you've got to build that larger narrative. The guy who knows how to do this, someone who's figured this out, is Senator Murphy.
Yeah, he's doing well.
Chris Murphy, who went on the floor. And, you know, he had the whole chart, and maybe it was too complicated and there are too many steps. But he just started rolling through it, corruption, corruption, corruption, example, example, example. The problem is there's only one of that.
And you need a whole rotation of Democratic senators who are on and off the floor every day, corruption, corruption, corruption. And I think that breaks through after a while. And yeah, there are a lot of people who think they're all corrupt. All politicians are corrupt.
And there are people who give Trump a pass because they think he's somehow authentic and maybe less corrupt than the others, or he's already super rich. Wolf in wolf's clothing. Yeah, a wolf in wolf's clothing. Exactly. But you remember here, the goal of this campaign is not to win MAGA voters because that's hopeless.
This country is basically, you know, you got 40 to 45% of the country that's just going to vote for the Democrat or for the Republican, no matter who that person is. What you're going after are those votes in the middle that you can get. And those are people who think that Trump is somehow authentic. And corruption can drive a wedge there by saying, no, this guy isn't for you.
This guy's for himself. He's turning the whole government into something for himself. And what you want to do, I mean, Sarah said this many times, but she's right. What you want to do is drive his approvals into the 30s and keep him there. And I think corruption is your best bet for doing that as an overarching message. Am I wrong?
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Chapter 4: How can targeting corruption impact political change?
or nothing, or the move towards other less nutritious sources of community. And maybe that is underscoring some of the social discohesion that we have right now.
There's a part of me during that conversation was saying to him, I was like, I don't know, man, isn't this just a couple of like globalists, you know, upper middle class, upper class, you know, people like trying to come up with an answer for something that like we don't really get. Aren't we just like grasping for a solution for some cultural problems that like, you
have other explanations, be that economic or phones, technology? What would you say to that?
I'd say that this is something I think that I misunderstood. I come from exactly where you were. I'm very secular. I was on board with the project of thinking society would be better off without superstitious nonsense. And I think one answer to that is that I was empirically wrong. And
The second answer that's more fundamental, which is that I have come to think that faith, and in America that means Christianity. Let's not beat around the bush. That's what we're talking about in this conversation. And it means predominantly white Protestant Christianity. That's our founding faith and still the predominant form of faith.
That it has answers to questions that secularism can't really provide. And one of those questions is, why am I here? What's the purpose of my life on this planet? Am I more than just a random, you know, accumulation of cells that will blink in and out of existence? That's just not a satisfying way of thinking for most people. I'm okay with it. I seem to manage with it.
But a lot of people need more and faith provides it. And the second question is the question of what's the basis of good and evil that's bigger than just the personal preferences, you know, the Nietzschean world that Mago lives in. or that the postmodern left lives in, that also comes from faith and in our society, Christianity.
And then finally, I would avert to the founders who told us in as many words that the constitution and the system they were giving us is not self-sustaining. that it relies on a bedrock of what they call Republican virtues. And that those have to come from civil society by which they meant, you know, family, community, schools, but they also very largely meant Christianity.
And that doesn't mean it's a Christian country. You have to be Christian to be a citizen or, you know, they deliberately kept any reference to any faith out of the founding documents, which was controversial at the time. But it does mean that they understood that if you don't have a healthy faith sector that's socializing people into these civic values and giving them some sense of purpose...
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Chapter 5: What historical examples illustrate the role of corruption in politics?
And that's because as it substituted the figure of, you know, if they substituted partisan politics for the witness of Jesus Christ, people kind of figure out, well, I don't need to give up a Sunday morning for that.
As Russell Moore, the editor of Christianity Today has said, the reason, if you want to know why young people are fleeing the church, it might be because if all you offer them is a choice between secularization and paganization, they'll choose one or the other. So the point here is, yeah, there's a church of fear, but it's shrinking. It's not growing. It is proving unattractive.
So Tim, the core of this book is not Christianity, yay, we need more of it. It's the teachings of Jesus Christ, the core doctrines of Christianity. We need more of that.
And that what we find again and again in America, but also throughout history, when the church gets corrupt, when it substitutes the gospel of power and life in this world from the gospel of truth and life in the next world, it gets into trouble. Because the appeal of Christianity, it's a counter-cultural religion, it's a radical religion, but it asks people to do three things.
The first is not be afraid. The second is imitate Jesus. And the third is forgive each other. And those are three things that James Madison and the founders also needed people to do for the sake of liberalism. Don't be afraid means it's not the end of the world if you lose an election. Have some faith in the system. You'll learn something from being out of power. You'll come back stronger.
You won't try to steal the election or lie about the election. Imitate Jesus translates into forgive. Treat every person as an end unto themselves, not a means unto an end. Every person has dignity. Treat them with dignity, especially the least of these, especially the minorities. There are some things that government should just never do to minorities and to the weak.
Like, I don't know, grab them off the street and send them to a dungeon in El Salvador for no reason. And the third, forgive each other. That means politics is not about... to use a phrase, retribution. It's not about demolishing and crushing the other side. They're still citizens. They're still your countrymen. You share the country after you win an election.
Those are the cores of Republican virtue. So my claim in this book is Christianity would be a as a religion and also could do a lot more to heal the country if it returned to its own Christian roots. A strange thing for a, you know, atheist gay Jew to tell the church. Interestingly, this is kind of resonating more with Christians than it is with secular.
Secular people are, a lot of people say what you say, which is, you know, they, they just still kind of think, wouldn't we be better off if we could be a secular country and make that work? But a lot of Christians are saying, um, Yeah, being more Christ-like is something that the church should do.
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Chapter 6: How does media influence perceptions of corruption?
That is not something that I concern myself with. But I understand it. I understand that impulse. And I understand that there are a lot of people that are Christians out there that are drawn to the church that want to believe, that want to have a community, but that feel rejected.
alone right that feel like that that the church has left them that like the the big churches that have the energy right now are ones that they don't like connect to there's some exceptions to this obviously but like i i understand that sort of yearning for trying to bring back something that they can connect with
I just wonder if those folks are the types of folks that need to be reached or whether they're going to be able to find fulfillment elsewhere, whether the people that need to be reached are the people that are being sucked into other more damaging associations, if you will.
Yeah, and that I don't know the answer to. As much as I disagree with the so-called post-liberals who you alluded to earlier, these are the people like Adrian Vermeule and Patrick Deneen who think liberalism is over and we need to go back to a kind of traditionalism.
I don't think that's right, but there's a core truth in the idea that it is really hard to be a person of faith in a modern secular society where you're dealing with cell phones and consumerism and You know, if you're conservative, you're hearing on Fox News that your kids are going to come back transgender from school and you won't even be told about it.
So all of that creates a challenging environment. And I don't know if Christians can recover the teachings of Jesus at a large enough scale to win people back. And I can't promise that moving back to Christlike witness will revive the church. I can only say that what they've been doing, basically turning the white evangelical church into a Republican Party auxiliary, has not worked. It has failed.
It is shrinking the church, and it is tarring the church with the brush of hypocrisy. There is nothing Christlike at all about the person and movement that white evangelicals have elevated and embraced.
And I think their odds, at least, of winning back a following to Christianity and to democracy would be better if they followed the gospel of Jesus Christ instead of the gospel of, say, Donald Trump.
That's a low bar. That's a low bar that we've crossed. I'm with you on that, Jonathan. Okay, we're getting into a bleak place contemplating our sociocultural future. So, can we end with something happier? Can we end with a happier item? Is that allowed?
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