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The Source of America’s Political Chaos

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2023 › 10 › trump-2016-source-chaos › 675643

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Most of America’s current political environment can be traced back to one moment: the election of Donald Trump. The bedlam continues—and, to understand the stakes in 2024, imagine how different the world would look if he’d lost.

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One Single Day

Regret about “what might have been” is not a particularly productive emotion. Counterfactual history, however, is quite useful. I have used it for years in teaching international relations, to help students see that not everything in history is inevitable, that accidents and sudden turns can change the destiny of nations.

Also, as a science-fiction fan, I’m a sucker for the alternate-history genre, the kind of stuff where the Roman empire never rises or America loses the Revolutionary War. I loved NBC’s show Timeless, in which a team—including an academic historian!—has to run around stopping time-terrorists from messing with great events. I even liked Quantum Leap and the idea of one man traveling through the years to fix individual lives rather than alter the grand march of time.

As I continue to watch the GOP flail about—House Republicans have now chosen the execrable Representative Jim Jordan for speaker, replacing Steve Scalise, whose nomination lasted 48 hours—I have been thinking about an alternate history of a United States where Donald Trump lost the 2016 election. I am convinced that the chaos now overtaking much of the American political system was not inevitable: The source of our ongoing political disorder is because of a razor-thin victory in an election in 2016 decided by a relatively tiny number of voters.

I recognize that others will depict Trump’s victory as the inexorable result of long-term trends. Some, perhaps, would identify 1994, when Newt Gingrich proved that political nastiness was an effective campaign strategy, as the Year of No Return, or the election of 2010, when Americans rewarded the flamboyant jerkitude of the Tea Party with seats in Congress.

There’s a lot of truth to such explanations. Long-term trends matter, because over time, they frame debates and shape the choices available to voters. The Republicans have been moving further and further to the right, but I have always argued that 2016 was a fluke, a perfect storm with epochal consequences: The GOP field was fractured and feckless; Trump was a well-known celebrity; the Democrats ran Hillary Clinton instead of supporting Joe Biden for a shot at what would have been Barack Obama’s third term. And it was close, because of the structure of the Electoral College. (The headline of an article by Tina Nguyen, written a few weeks after Trump’s win, captures it nicely: “You Could Fit All the Voters Who Cost Clinton the Election in a Mid-Size Football Stadium.”)

Trump’s win set up a series of cascading failures. Winning in 2016 turbocharged Trump’s claims of leading a movement. His victory encouraged other Republicans to go into survival mode and adopt the protective coloration of Trumpism just to win their primaries, a process that led directly to the crapstorm deluging the House at this very moment. Most Republicans in Congress, as Mitt Romney has told us, hate Trump, and many of them probably wish that someone could jump into the Time Tunnel, go back to 2016, and persuade a few thousand voters in three or four states to come to their senses.

At the least, a Trump loss would have let other Republicans avoid sinking in the populist swamp. Elise Stefanik might be a relentless political opportunist, but without Trump, she and other GOP leaders could have pronounced Trumpian extremism a failure and stayed in something like a center-right lane. On the Earth Where Trump Lost, Fox-addicted voters might still have sent irresponsible performance artists such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz to Congress, but the institutional Republicans would have had every incentive to marginalize them. (Remember, Jordan’s been in the House since 2007, but attaching himself to Trump has helped to put the speaker’s gavel within his reach.)

Had Trump lost, someone might even have bothered to read (and act on) the so-called Republican National Committee “autopsy” of 2013, which argued that the future of the party relies on better appeals to immigrants, women, minorities, and young people. With Trump’s win, that kind of talk went out the window. Instead, the Trump GOP chained itself to the votes of older white Americans—a declining population. Republicans thus had to squeeze more votes out of a shrinking base, and the only way to do that was to build on Trump’s bond with his personality cult and defend him at all costs.

Perhaps most important, a Trump loss would have prevented (or at least delayed) the normalization of violence and authoritarianism in American politics. This is not to say that the Republicans would today be a healthy party, but Trump’s victory confirmed the surrender of the national GOP to a sociopathic autocrat. There’s a difference between a dysfunctional party and a party that has decayed into a mindless countercultural movement, and that rail switch was thrown in November 2016.

An irony in thinking through the 2016 counterfactual case is how many people, including Trump and the herd of sycophants who coalesced around him, would have been better off if Trump had lost. Excellent books by the Washington Post reporter Ben Terris and by my Atlantic colleague Mark Leibovich have described the kind of people who formed up behind Trump, and it is striking how many of them are now facing personal and political ruin. Perhaps someone like Seb Gorka feels that he did well by jumping from academic obscurity to fish-pill sales, but others whose associations with Trump opened the door to greater scrutiny and eventual disaster—think of Matt Schlapp, Peter Navarro, or even the pathetic Rudy Giuliani—would all have been better off had Trump had flamed out.

But no one should wish for the Guardian of Forever to open a gate back to 2016 more than Trump himself. Had he lost, he could have fulfilled what was likely his true wish, to go back to his life in New York as a faux-capitalist fraudster while traveling the country as a pretend president, holding rallies and raking in money from credulous rubes. Instead, he faces humiliation, financial failure, and criminal indictments.

Measures such as impeachment that could have taken Trump out of American political life were destined to fail because of 2016. The 2020 election proved Trump’s toxicity, but by then, too many Republicans had made too many compromises and they could no longer just walk away. Their fates (which for some might include prison) are sealed.

All of this chaos and misery was avoidable—and all of it stemmed from one election and the choices of a tiny number of Americans who could have averted these disasters. As Trump tries to regain his office, voters should remember that nothing is inevitable: Choices matter. Elections matter. A single day can matter.

Today’s News

Palestinians are fleeing northern Gaza after the Israeli military ordered more than 1 million people to evacuate; the United Nations has called the evacuation “impossible … to take place without devastating humanitarian consequences.” Representative Steve Scalise backed out of the race for speaker of the House yesterday. Jim Jordan has been nominated to succeed him. Kaiser Permanente has reached a tentative deal with its health-care workers after a three-day walkout.

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FTX’s Organizational Chaos

found Oct '23 The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2023 › 10 › ftx-ellison-testimony › 675624

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In federal court this week, Caroline Ellison, the former CEO of Alameda Research, testified against her former boss and boyfriend, Sam Bankman-Fried. His two fallen crypto enterprises offer an object lesson in how not to run a start-up.

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Organizational Chaos

“How would you describe the power dynamic of your personal relationship with the defendant?” a prosecutor asked Caroline Ellison in court on Tuesday. Sam Bankman-Fried’s lawyers immediately objected to the question, and the judge sustained the objection. But all of us watching Ellison’s testimony in the federal courthouse heard the question. It hung in the air even as the prosecutor rephrased the inquiry.

At this point, FTX is many things: a company whose founder is on trial; a symbol for the rot underlying the crypto ecosystem; a target of schadenfreude. But before its dramatic implosion, it was also a workplace run by Millennials. And it seems, to hear Ellison describe it, to have been an absolute shitshow. In addition to the fraught power dynamics that came with various leaders’ personal ties, the company relied on shoddy recordkeeping (some of it intentional, Ellison said, to obscure the reality of their financial situation; some of it just apparently sloppy, like using emoji for expense approvals). FTX is an object lesson in how not to run a start-up—featuring major trip wires of the tech industry, including ambiguous responsibilities, disorganization, and hubris. And, of course, the trouble went far deeper: Bankman-Fried, Ellison testified, presided over a culture where lying and stealing were acceptable.

In her testimony, Ellison described Bankman-Fried as a relentless boss who orchestrated extravagant gambits, often from just offstage. Yesterday, Ellison, who is testifying as part of a plea deal, described a somewhat harebrained FTX scheme to convince Chinese officials—with what Ellison believed was “a large bribe”—to unlock an account. One FTX employee, whose own father was a Chinese government official, had protested. Bankman-Fried “yelled at her to shut to fuck up,” Ellison said. Bankman-Fried professed a belief that the only moral rule worth following was that of maximizing utility to create maximum good, Ellison testified. “It made me more willing to do things” like steal, she said, adding that if you had told her when she started working at Alameda that she would soon be preparing doctored balance sheets for lenders or using customer funds, she wouldn’t have believed you. The firm’s culture seemed to have a warping effect on the people who worked there. Many quit before FTX’s collapse; even some of those who stayed loyal to Bankman-Fried are now cooperating with the government.

To be clear, Ellison made choices that led her here: She has pleaded guilty to several federal crimes. But hearing her testify, I got the sense that it was not always pleasant to be Ellison in the FTX work environment. Though she held a lofty title when FTX imploded—CEO of Alameda—she claims that Bankman-Fried continued to call the shots, even after giving up the title himself in part to avoid perceptions that he had conflicts of interest. Ellison said that when she was promoted from trader to co-CEO of Alameda, her salary stayed the same, at $200,000. She was eligible for bonuses, and sometimes received large ones. But though she says that she asked for it, she was not granted equity, or an ownership stake, in Alameda. (She says she did have equity in FTX.). Ellison received a fraction of the compensation that other top FTX executives did. (A lawyer for Ellison did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Bankman-Fried declined to comment.)

Ellison is obviously not a typical woman in tech, given her admissions of fraud. But it seems she did face some measure of the professional and personal disrespect that is rampant for women in the industry. And Bankman-Fried doesn’t seem to be taking her all that seriously in the courtroom, either: Yesterday, in a sidebar with the judge and defense lawyers, a prosecutor complained that Bankman-Fried was laughing and scoffing while Ellison spoke, and that she was concerned this would have an effect on the witness given “the power dynamic, their romantic relationship.” Though a defense lawyer called this claim “ridiculous,” he agreed to talk with the defendant.

FTX was operated by a very ambitious group of friends in their 20s and early 30s, and the company’s operations sound chaotic. Ellison was just a few years out of college when she was making spreadsheets—peppered with internet-speak—outlining the flow of billions of dollars. In a spreadsheet she said she had shared with Bankman-Fried, she calculated the probability of “v bad FTX news” that might affect the business. (Ellison and I attended the same college for a couple of years, and overlapped on a study-abroad program, though I don’t recall meeting her.)

Ellison testified under a cooperation deal, so she stands to benefit if the prosecution finds her helpful. Indeed, her testimony seemed brutal for the defense. “[Bankman-Fried] was originally the CEO of Alameda and then the owner of Alameda, and he directed me to commit these crimes,” she said bluntly at one point. At the crux of the case is whether Alameda stole customer funds from FTX and lied about it. Ellison has testified in no uncertain terms that Alameda did this, and at Bankman-Fried’s direction. Ellison’s cross-examination began late yesterday; more details, including ones that may undermine the government’s case, will emerge in the coming days. But many of the details now on the record about FTX as a workplace are, if not criminal, extremely unflattering.

Ellison and Bankman-Fried shared a close working relationship, and a close personal one. In many workplaces, dating a superior is forbidden, or at least discouraged. But at FTX, which had an in-house psychiatrist but an apparently dysfunctional HR operation, this did not seem to be the case. The fact that the two dated is not just tabloid fodder; it’s also pertinent to understanding the case against FTX, Yesha Yadav, an expert on financial regulation at Vanderbilt Law School, told me over email. “The romance offers insights into the lack of functional separation in practice between Alameda and FTX—meaning that SBF was aware of what was happening at Alameda, potentially controlling it, even if he has contested otherwise,” she said. “The closeness and romance can carry considerable evidentiary weight.” It will be up to the jury to determine whether Ellison and other witnesses are credible. And the big question of whether Bankman-Fried himself will speak remains. As Yadav reminded me, “In a criminal trial, only one juror needs to hold out for the case to fall.”

Today’s News

Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Israel in a strong show of support as part of a diplomacy tour around the region. Democratic Senator Bob Menendez faces a new indictment, including a fourth charge that alleges that he acted as an unregistered agent for the Egyptian government. ACT scores in the United States have dropped to a three-decade low.

Dispatches

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Evening Read

Nikos Economopoulos / Magnum

What Happened to Empathy?

By Xochitl Gonzalez

San Francisco, I realized during a visit to the city this spring, has a people problem. Not a homeless-people problem, or a tech-people problem, but a lack-of-people problem. As I walked from my hotel in SoMa to the Embarcadero on a sunny afternoon, the emptiness of the streets felt nearly apocalyptic. Passing other humans—a fundamental circumstance of urban life elsewhere—here was so rare, it felt oddly menacing. I did pass some people who looked unwell, or dirty from living on the streets, but that’s not why I felt the way I did. The volume and density of humanity are what make cities feel safe. The pleasure and pain of a city is that we are never alone, even when we desperately want to be. That wasn’t the case in San Francisco.

So I was bewildered when I read recently of the city’s experiment with driverless taxicabs. During that visit, I stepped over two people who appeared to be high on fentanyl, stepped past too many boarded-up storefronts to count, and literally stepped into human excrement. Engaging with my living, breathing (and sometimes chatty) taxi and Uber drivers was absolutely the least of my troubles in San Francisco.

Read the full article.