November 20, 2020: The successful Maggie Hassan/Sherrod Brown ticket begins planning to assume the presidency, eager to repair a nation laid waste by four years of paranoid, kleptocratic rulership. In a bland hotel conference room in Bethesda, midlevel members of the transition team, suffering from months of frenetic campaign work, assemble around a table. Weary yet exuberant, and caffeine and/or sleep deficits notwithstanding, they go to work.
“Which appointees would align with our campaign priorities?”
“What is our 100 day plan?”
“Who knows anything about the National Labor Relations Board?”
The ambitious team of 20- and 30-something Ivy League Brahmin–whose names Hassan and Brown have heard once or twice before–dig into the research memos handed to them by slightly less accomplished 20- and 30-somethings–whose names Hassan and Brown have never heard. As the days pass, the same phrases are heard over and over in the room.
“They did what?!”
“This is the first I’ve heard of it.”
“I don’t even know what that means; but how do we fix it?”
This is an imaginary flash forward, a device I’m using as an intro just for fun. But here’s the real world: A lot of Americans fear the looming Trump-Pence administration for a number of obvious and understandable reasons. Today, November 2016, everyone knows what they’ve openly threatened to do if they win.
They’re going to build a wall, which Mexico will pay for.
They’re going to deport everyone without the right paperwork.
They’re going to make Muslims register in a database.
They’re going to wage war with the free press.
They’re going to send the FBI on a national stop-and-frisk crusade.
They’re going to take subsidized healthcare away from poor Americans.
They’re going to roll back LGBTQ rights. (To be fair, Trump hasn’t said much directly hostile to LGBTQ people, but Pence is another story).
They’re going to make heavy-polluting, regulation-flouting industries the backbone of our economy.
They’re going to torture people captured during the War on Terror and kill their families, without regard to complicity.
The list goes on. Donald Trump made a lot of promises on the campaign trail. In my mind at least 80% of his ideas are awful and his temperament may be the worst of all time in a president. But despite the Biffworld-esque nature of Trump’s promised future, most of these will never come to pass. Many promises are practically infeasible due to basic realities about the economy or our society; others are doable but not really that popular and would encounter virulent resistance if Trump tried to make them happen. Although Trump’s platform includes some heinous plans, few of them will actually happen, and no matter what, the opposition is aware and prepared to do their utmost to stop him. His reelection may already be torpedoed due to his inability to deliver on his most high-profile pledges. But those are not the only ideas we need to worry about for the next four years.
Even Trump’s opponents can agree that he has a knack for showmanship and the art of persuading certain types of people to follow him off a cliff. He can make everyone look one way and believe in something while he is actually doing something different that we can’t yet see. His sleight-of-hand technique served him well on the campaign. While the media constantly tried to pin him to statements and actions “beyond the pale,” many of his supporters willingly believed he never said or did the things that he had in fact said or did. And when one controversy took the spotlight, he proved capable of surviving the storm while he was quietly doing something arguably worse that no one talked about.
But what he has no proven skill or experience with is pushing policies through the byzantine labyrinth of Congress or the American regulatory machinery. Further, he does not appear to be well-versed in the intricacies of any specific policy issue whatsoever. If Democrats controlled the Senate, we could rest assured that Trump would face resistance from the legislature for most of his term. Unfortunately, Trump’s presidency will coincide with GOP majorities in both houses of Congress and an early opportunity to restore the Supreme Court to a five-vote majority sympathetic to GOP ideology.
But since Trump lost the popular vote and will soon be the least respected president in modern history, savvy GOP lawmakers will know that there is not really a mandate to run wild with his most controversial proposals. He won’t be the horse they want to bet on. Instead, they will take advantage of Trump’s presidency to push a shadow agenda, benefitting from his unparalleled ability to draw attention away from other issues of importance. Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and other “traditional” Republicans will sit by and let Trump gobble press for his narcissistic vendetta of the week. To save face with their Washington friends on the Sunday shows and moderates in their home jurisdictions, some Republicans might even speak up against Trump on occasion when he says or does something “over the line.” But they won’t go much further than mild rebukes. Meanwhile, Congress will quietly unravel laws and regulations designed to protect average Americans. They will tacitly permit Trump to reap gigantic financial rewards by exploiting the power of his office, despite their generations-long crusade against waste and abuses of federal authority. They will silently push new laws that serve one uniform purpose: enriching the financiers and business owners who have been their ideological soulmates since the Reagan Revolution.
This shadow agenda will rarely get coverage from CNN or the Washington Post. That won’t be because the media is in the tank in favor of changes; it will be because today’s journalists will be so distracted by Trump’s spectacular performance as agitator-in-chief that the limelight will stay on Trump’s promoted, outlandish agenda or gripe of the day while the men in charge behind the curtain pull all the hidden levers.
What am I talking about? Obscure shit, mostly. Things that average Americans haven’t heard of because they don’t fit into digestible capsules like “pro-life or pro-choice,” “Black Lives Matter vs. Police,” “kill ISIS,” or “repeal NAFTA and Obamacare because that’s why we lost our jobs.” Highly technical provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act will get kiboshed with no fanfare. It won’t be easy for Chris Hayes and Matt Yglesias to get thousands of retweets about the overnight elimination of regulations on mortgage service providers. They’ll be fighting Trump tooth and nail on the “Muslim ban” while the CFPB is dismantled bit by bit.
The Supreme Court won’t overturn Roe v. Wade or Planned Parenthood v. Casey in one fell swoop, even if William H. Pryor or Raymond Gruender is Trump’s appointee. But the 115th U.S. Congress won’t raise a finger to amend the Federal Arbitration Act, which lately has been propped up by the Court with such devotion that business now have free reign to force employees and consumers to agree never to bring lawsuits in court. Had Hillary Clinton won, it is possible that the Supreme Court would have ruled as soon as 2017 that the National Labor Relations Act prohibits employers from making their employees sign class action waivers. That probably won’t happen now.
Congress might change the procedural rules applicable to federal lawsuits in order to make it impractical to bring a class action lawsuit against a company that stole 50 cents from each of 1 million customers or shaved overtime pay by a dollar an hour for 50,000 employees. When you find that your cable or cell phone provider is charging you a made-up fee for $3 a month that they won’t refund you for, what are you going to do about it? You’ll find yourself saying “Someone needs to sue them for this” only to be told by an attorney that she can’t take your case because the law now requires plaintiffs to prove early in litigation that 50 people experienced the exact same problem. If you use a wheelchair and can’t stay at the hotel you booked four months in advance because the door to your room isn’t wide enough, don’t be surprised when the lawyer you call says you have no practical case because Congress amended the ADA to give noncompliant businesses 90 days to fix their properties before a plaintiff can file a lawsuit.
These are big, consequential issues hidden in complicated rules and laws that average Americans don’t give much attention to or understand. Many of the proposals I mentioned already have significant support among GOP legislators, but when the veto threat from Obama is gone, the last major obstacle will be gone. Trump will sign off because he either won’t know what he’s doing or won’t want to fight Paul Ryan on minutiae when he feels he has bigger fish to fry. Or he’ll actually agree with the GOP agenda, which wouldn’t surprise anyone, but given his tendency to obfuscate or change his intentions, how could we know? Trump has an innate ability to capture attention for himself while quietly doing something unrelated behind the scenes. He chooses the fields on which to pitch battle and the media happily follows.
This silent war on consumers and working people won’t happen entirely without protest or comment. But compared to foreign wars, border walls, and religious registries, a lot of big issues will end up decidedly under-the-radar. Small interest groups will raise hell, but no one will listen because we’ll be distracted by the larger Trump show.
As I mentioned above, there are a large number of high-profile campaign promises Trump made that give citizens legitimate cause for concern. Most of these won’t happen. Even if they do, they won’t go unnoticed, and opposition to them is sure to be the essential platforms of the 2018 and 2020 Democratic party. And I’ll write another article about the myriad ways in which Trump will exploit the powers of the presidency to obtain profit for himself and his family. The fleecing we’re in for will have no comparator in United States history.
But my suspicion is that when the next president (whether it’s Sherrod Brown, Maggie Hassan, Deval Patrick, or Russ Feingold) finally gets a chance to contemplate what hell hath Trump wrought, the real damage will have been done in the margins.