Trump/Somoza Presidentialism

The Wall Street Journal, which has been doing a bang-up job covering the administration, has an excellent story on "The MAGA Lobbyists Upending Washington With McDonald's and Bear Hunting." The headline is worth setting out because nicely captures the vulgarity of what the piece describes. To be sure, this is not surprising, matchless vulgarity being the house style of the regime. (Those Democrats who have emulated this style intentionally, and those who actually are vulgar and not just putting on an act, are fools and are dishonoring themselves.) The only problem with the headline is that one might read it as being about lobbyists who have cultivated new friends, as opposed to friends or relatives of the Trump regime who have decided that the best way to monetize their friendships is as lobbyists-- or, as the story ultimately suggests, that it's about people who are unequal measures of both.

At a higher level of abstraction or fatuity, one could obviously say this is nothing new. ("Take a deep breath," as the saying goes, although I will note that the same words are spoken right before a ship sinks.) As the story also suggests, however, that's not really correct. The argument against lobbyists being pure, vulgar influence peddlers has always been that at their best they can provide specialized, knowledgeable information about the value of their industry or the policy they advocate, the consequences of some proposed course of action, and so on, with the assumption, generally warranted under conditions of ordinary government, that many of the the people they are talking to are equally expert and experienced congressional staff and civil servants. The model on display here is the vulgar influence peddler model. The Journal puts it more diplomatically: "Job credentials that mattered in the past are increasingly irrelevant today." The big comers are not those bringing expertise, but those who wield influence-by-acquaintance: "hyper-connected Trump firms," where the connection may or may not include knowing anything useful but definitely includes being a hunting buddy of the president's son. (This piece, by one of the nation's several million play-journalists and "influencers," further illustrates the point. It is utterly credulous but useful in being so...well-connected. It provides a useful account, if one reads between the lines a little.)

This approach to lobbying as a pure, simple matter of proximity to friends and family and other members of the Boss's coterie is hardly new in the United States, as the embarrassing career of Hunter Biden illustrates. But neither is it the norm or the sum total of the activity of lobbying, or at least so one would have said prior to late January. It is, however, standard fare for corrupt authoritarian, personalist (and see here), mercantilist, clientelist, etc. regimes. (Wikipedia sometimes really comes through splendidly: "Personalist dictators typically favor loyalty over competence in their governments and have a general distrust of intelligentsia. Elites in personalist dictatorships often do not have a professional political career and are unqualified for the positions they are given....[P]ersonalist dictatorships are more prone to corruption than other forms of dictatorship.")

Reading the story, I was reminded of the Somoza family in Nicaragua, of Putinism and Peronism, of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Belarus under Lukashenko, of Maduro's Venezuela, and of Nazi Germany. If public law scholars--and judges--want to keep abreast of things, they would do better to read Erica Frantz, Luca Anceschi, and Natasha Ezrow than Story, Blackstone, Coke, or Cooley.