Yesterday I wrote about Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, and made some unflattering observations about him. So it might be worth mentioning a new incident, reported by Politico. Apparently Bessent confronted Bill Pulte, head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency — a piece of work himself — at a fancy dinner, accusing Pulte of bad-mouthing him to the president:
“Why the fuck are you talking to the president about me? Fuck you,” Bessent told Pulte. “I’m gonna punch you in your fucking face.”
Apparently Bessent’s surface suavity is even more of a Potemkin persona than I realized.
Now on to my main subject. Let me start with a couple of incidents that illustrate the great political puzzle we now face.
Incident 1: On Thursday a number of tech billionaires had dinner with Donald Trump. They were nauseatingly obsequious — and completely insincere. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg was asked how much money he plans to invest in the U.S. and replied $600 billion. Shortly afterward, he was caught on a hot mic telling Trump “Sorry, I wasn’t ready … I wasn’t sure what number you wanted to go with.”
Incident 2: On Sunday Trump attended the U.S. Open. When his face appeared on the Jumbotron, this was the crowd’s reaction:
OK, this was in New York, not exactly MAGA country, but it wasn’t that much of an outlier. As G. Elliott Morris points out in Strength in Numbers, what stands out in Trump’s polling isn’t just that a majority of Americans disapprove of Trump, but that almost half the country strongly disapproves:
The Trump administration is obviously attempting to follow the familiar playbook by which autocracies consolidate their power, effectively turning America into a one-party state where almost everyone accepts that resistance to the regime is futile and is afraid to show any signs of opposition.
And by and large America’s elites have offered no more resistance to authoritarian consolidation than a wet Kleenex. But historically, anti-democratic parties that establish lasting autocracies have done so with considerable initial support from the broader public. At least at first, they’re actually popular, especially because they deliver, or seem to deliver, major economic gains.
That’s not happening for Trump, at all. And the big question — to which I don’t know the answer — is whether a regime that inherited a good economy but ruined it and whose non-economic policies are deeply unpopular can still consolidate autocratic rule.
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