If someone set your house on fire, you weren’t likely to notice that they also trampled your vegetable garden. In the time of Trump, the fires came hot and fast. Daily, Americans woke to wonder if the president’s early morning tweets had brought the nation closer to nuclear war with North Korea or Iran. Daily they debated if a vault deep in the Kremlin contained a tape of Trump consorting with Russian prostitutes. Nightly they marveled that somehow the rivets of the republic held, despite the tweetstorms hurled against its sides, the threats of impeachment, the shouted anxieties that the end of the American project was finally at hand.
And would it survive yet another day after that? You couldn’t know a thing like that, not anymore, so you went to bed queasy with dread, already expecting the next morning’s tweets, the crisis that would come on a Wednesday afternoon, which in another time, under another president, might have passed without a single breaking news alert.
But if this was all a crisis for some, it was an opening for others, namely those who considered public service a means to private enrichment. There were all too many such people in the Trump administration, who saw the daily firestorms engendered by the president as a perfect opportunity to engage in sustained campaigns of unbridled corruption, to plunder the house as it burned. There were such people in every presidential administration, because avarice never had a political lean. Only, never before had such people been so emboldened. Never before had they felt so free.
Three cabinet members stood out in this respect: Steve Mnuchin (Treasury), Ben Carson (Housing and Urban Development), and Wilbur Ross (Commerce). If history is to remember them at all, it will be only for the shame they brought on the offices they held. They were the “attendant lords” the poet T. S. Eliot savaged in his most widely known work, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” men who were, in Eliot’s perfectly cutting words, “Deferential, glad to be of use,” even if they were faintly aware that they were “almost ridiculous.”
All three were graduates of Yale College. Yearning to surround himself with men from “central casting,” which often meant men with Ivy League degrees, Trump inadvertently exploded the notion of noblesse oblige, the idea that anyone who came to Washington from one of the preserves of eastern wealth would only do so to serve the American people. Thanks to the infelicitous trio from New Haven, the correlation between an elite education and a fitness for public service may be uncoupled for generations to come.
Trump represented a curious relationship to the power elite of the twenty-first century, which was a slightly more meritocratic version of the power elite that had ruled the twentieth. He claimed to speak for ordinary men, yet for his cabinet he hired men of high birth and great wealth. The very notion of expertise seemed to repulse Trump, most likely because he was threatened by people—women, minorities—who knew more than he did, who had chosen to accumulate knowledge and wisdom while he had chosen to accumulate money and fame.
Trump best liked men such as Ross and Mnuchin, whose wealth was either inherited or aggressively taken from others. This was in keeping with Trump’s interest in genetics, in so far as that science, in his understanding, selectively conferred natural superiority. A sizable bank account was the best proof such superiority could have.
Wilbur Ross came to Yale the way many used to: in his father’s footsteps. Wilbur L. Ross Sr., a Yale man, was a lawyer in the New Jersey suburbs. His son, a champion rifle-shooter at his Catholic school in Manhattan, arrived at Yale in 1955. Ross showed some inclination for the literary arts, but one English course he took demanded he write a thousand words per day. He dropped the class, which Ross later liked to smugly declare “probably saved me from a life of poverty.” He took a summer internship on Wall Street and decided that finance was for him.
Mnuchin was also the son of a Yale graduate. He was among the wealthiest of Trump’s cabinet members and, despite the fact that he was Jewish, closely resembled a traditional member of the Anglo-Saxon establishment. His father, Robert E. Mnuchin, was raised in the wealthy New York suburb of Scarsdale. He went to Yale, then to Goldman Sachs, paving the very road that his son would tread. Steve Mnuchin arrived at Yale in 1980. He joined Skull and Bones, the secret society, and drove a Porsche. He was not liked. When Mnuchin informed a classmate that he planned to go into finance, that classmate quipped, “You put the ‘douche’ in ‘fiduciary.’”
Carson’s story was the most compelling. He was raised in Detroit by a religious mother in a middle-class household, in a tidy house on South Deacon Street (though nothing lavish, it was hardly part of the inner-city hellscape of “poverty” and “mean streets” Carson would disingenuously evoke in a 2015 campaign ad). No one in his family had gone to Yale; Carson got to New Haven because of his stellar scores on standardized tests. He spent his time there in diligent study. In interviews with Yale student publication the New Journal in 2017, classmates described him as serious and well-meaning, if also pompous. “I had a distinct impression of him saying things that he thought were really brilliant, that other people didn’t think were very good,” one of those classmates recalled. After finishing his studies at Yale in 1973, Carson entered medical school at the University of Michigan, on his way to becoming a pediatric neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.
Decades after they had all left New Haven, this trio stood together in the Oval Office for a photo of Trump and eighteen of his cabinet members on March 13, 2017. One could have regarded them as evidence that an elite class remained intact, that power still traveled along secret swales, accessible only to those who went to the right schools, which were the same schools where the men in Kennedy’s administration had gone. (The two other Ivies represented in Trump’s cabinet were, as of mid-2018, Dartmouth and Harvard.)
Two years later, all that could be said about Carson, Mnuchin, and Ross is that they had managed to survive. The survival was not a function of achievement, or even loyalty. It was rather that there was always someone a little more incompetent, a little greedier, who demanded Trump’s attention. They survived only because men like Pruitt and Price did not.
That survival came at a price.
Once celebrated as a resplendent example of the success America makes possible, Carson had his reputation irrevocably damaged by his service to Trump. That, however, was not the president’s fault. Carson would have been better off remaining a private citizen, so that journalists and adversaries would never have reason to scrutinize his fraudulent self-mythology. Instead he entered politics as a conservative critic of President Obama and his health law. He became a Fox News contributor in 2013 and announced his presidential run two years later.
It quickly became apparent that the stories Carson told about himself in his autobiography Gifted Hands, at public events, and on television were at least partly fiction. He claimed that he had been a young man prone to violence, only to have mastered that impulse on the road to New Haven. It was a nice story, only the people who had known Carson in Detroit said it was untrue: there had never been any violent impulses to overcome. He said he had turned down admission “on full scholarship” to West Point. This, too, had never happened, and was a bad lie to begin with, since the military academy is basically free. And he claimed to have been named the “most honest” student at Yale. How ironic that he lied about this as well.
Trump did need diversity in his cabinet. And Bannon was a fan of the graying doctor, claiming that if Trump had not entered the Republican primary, “Carson was going to be the one” for the Breitbart crowd. But he proved a strikingly poor choice for Housing and Urban Development, which he quickly turned into one of the most incompetently managed agencies in the federal government, the administrative state not deconstructed so much as scrambled into incoherence.
The beachhead team at HUD, which preceded Carson, was the first ill omen for the agency. One senior HUD official remembered that the transition officials asked “very basic questions” and seemed to have only an “elementary understanding” of federal housing policy. “It wasn’t clear what they were seeking to do,” said the official, who left in September 2017.
Another high-ranking HUD official, who had joined the Obama administration in 2012, reported that he had “zero” interaction with Trump’s beachhead team. As far as that official knew, Carson did not meet with the man he was succeeding, Julián Castro. Among career officials, there was the widespread belief that “Carson was not at all qualified to run HUD.”
Carson would do nothing to allay these fears. In his first address to HUD employees on March 6, 2017, Carson compared enslaved Africans to the immigrants who came willingly to America. “There were other immigrants,” Carson said, “who came here in the bottom of slave ships, worked even longer, even harder, for less. But they too had a dream that one day their sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, great-grandsons, great-granddaughters, might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land.” Not only did the remark stun many of those present, it earned a rebuke from the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect, which was not accustomed to chiding senior American statesmen.
The speech hinted at Carson’s unique ability to play the malevolent incompetent, one who was equal parts mean-spirited and clueless. He often had the comportment of a man who no longer cared to hide the more unseemly aspects of his personality. His mouth would widen into the watery smile of an uncle sliding into senility. When those lips parted, out came a stream of sanctimony and self-regard, all of it delivered in the somnolent drawl of someone who was not sure of what he was saying but was impelled to say it all the same.
Much as he offended his own staffers, much as he insulted the residents of public housing, Carson was terrified of Trump. That fear translated into institutional paralysis. “A lot of things stalled out,” said the senior HUD official who left in September 2017. “They would just sit on things. They weren’t empowered by the White House.” During the Obama administration, that official worked on programs that would help protect public housing against the detrimental effects of climate change. Now, her office “could not get anyone to give a crap.”
It was not as if the new administration came in with a different vision. There was no vision at all, which was a vision of its own. “There was just silence,” the senior official said, which was “actually worse than being told ‘no,’ in some ways.”
In the spring of 2017, Carson undertook a tour of the nation’s public housing stock, the most memorable moment of which had Carson getting stuck in an elevator in a Miami housing project. That did not faze him, and some days later the secretary offered that public housing should not become “a comfortable setting that would make somebody want to say: ‘I’ll just stay here. They will take care of me.’”
Like many of his peers in the Trump cabinet, Carson seemed pathologically incapable of compassion. Empirical evidence was anathema as well, whether of poverty or climate change or racial injustice. In an interview that May with his adviser and enabler Armstrong Williams, the cabinet secretary responsible for providing shelter to the nation’s indigent had this to say: “I think poverty to a large extent is also a state of mind. You take somebody that has the right mind-set, you can take everything from them and put them on the street, and I guarantee in a little while they’ll be right back up there.”
He was determined on punishing the 2 million Americans who lived in public housing, as well as the 4.7 million in subsidized Section 8 housing, for they did not conform to his narrative of personal redemption. In 2018, Carson proposed raising rent on people in subsidized housing from 30 to 35 percent of their income. As for the very poorest people, the ones living in the projects, they would see their rents triple, from $50 to $150 (he eventually scrapped that proposal).
Carson preached parsimony but did not practice it himself. To redecorate his office at HUD headquarters, Carson bought a $31,000 mahogany dining room set. A cabinet secretary was allowed $5,000 to redecorate, but as one of Carson’s more forthright associates explained to a career HUD staffer, “$5,000 will not even buy a decent chair.” And in true Pruitt fashion, responsibility was summarily deflected. Carson tried to blame his wife, Candy, even as email evidence showed that Carson himself authorized the exorbitant expenditure.
Carson’s son Benjamin S. Carson Jr., known as B.J., presented another problem. B. J. Carson ran a private equity firm in Baltimore and remained a close adviser to his father once Carson became HUD secretary, despite the ethical issues this raised. Carson allowed B.J. to organize a “listening tour” of Baltimore, which had Carson the elder meet with business and civic leaders who were also associates of B.J. HUD staffers warned against the listening tour; Carson responded by calling his son “the largest employer in Maryland,” which was not even remotely true.
People who once revered Carson were appalled. At the Archbishop Borders School in Baltimore—the city where Carson became famous as a Johns Hopkins surgeon—a portrait of the HUD secretary came down. “He was starting to become offensive,” the principal explained. The Detroit school board voted to rename the Benjamin Carson High School of Science and Medicine because, as one of those board members said, Carson’s name was “synonymous with having Trump’s name on our school in blackface.”
To his credit, Wilbur Ross never tried to be a role model to anyone. Ever since his graduation from Harvard Business School in 1961, he wanted to be rich. And by the time he entered the Trump cabinet, he had managed to satisfy that unwavering desire. Whereas Mnuchin was known as the “foreclosure king,” for his role in the 2008 housing and financial crisis, Ross was called “the king of bankruptcy” for the vulpine form of capitalism he practiced, which involved buying troubled companies, restructuring them, and selling them at a great profit.
“I’m going to be the guy on trade,” Ross declared upon becoming the commerce secretary, according to someone intimately involved in the presidential transition. But the best he could do was a trade deal that opened China to American beef, in exchange for China selling cooked chicken in the United States. Ross acted as if this were a monumental achievement, but nobody else saw it that way.
It did not help Ross’s image that he was prone to napping during meetings. While sleeping, he drooled. When he woke, he wiped himself with whatever expensive tie he happened to be wearing that day. This was not the “killer” Trump once celebrated.
“You’ve got to be hard,” Bannon would say in late 2018, as Ross was hanging on to his job by the thinnest of threads. “Wilbur comes back to that fucking beef deal and Trump goes nuts. He just got deals Trump doesn’t like.”
Ross’s attempts to act as a pitchman and sell Trump’s trade policies to the American public proved equally pathetic. In March 2018, as the president prepared to impose tariffs on some goods from China, Ross went on CNBC to make his case. He did so by displaying a can of soup. He explained that in a “can of Campbell’s soup, there’s about 2.6 cents’, 2.6 pennies’, worth of steel. So if that goes up by 25 percent, that’s about six-tenths of one cent on the price of the can of Campbell’s soup.” Ross offered the soup can as proof that the brouhaha over tariffs was nonsensical. “So who in the world is going to be too bothered by six-tenths of a cent?” This was exactly the kind of bumbling media appearance to make Trump furious.
If there was a case to be made for a tough stance on trade—and there were Democrats making that case alongside Trump—Ross was the wrong person to make it. Everyone understood this, including the president. Throughout 2018, Ross saw his role on trade diminished, along with his White House influence. Mick Mulvaney, the Tea Party ideologue running the White House Office of Management and Budget, was said in the fall of 2018 to covet the title of commerce secretary (after John Kelly left, Mulvaney accepted the White House chief of staff position on an acting basis).
Much like Carson, Ross proved a victim of his own mythology. He’d claimed to be worth $3.7 billion, but Dan Alexander, a writer for Forbes who spent months unraveling Ross’s deceptions, claimed that at least $2 billion of that worth was fictitious. And a good part of whatever wealth Ross did have was ill gotten, according to Alexander. He reported that Ross bilked his own financial partners out of as much as $120 million over the years, thus making him, in Alexander’s estimation, “among the biggest grifters in American history.” Once again, a cabinet member whose good work was to redound on Trump was embarrassing the president. At least Ross owned a private jet, so there were no travel-related scandals.
Even as his reputation and influence were both plummeting, Ross saw the potential to advance the Trump agenda—and curry favor with the White House—on another, lesser-known front: the census. Conducted every ten years, the count of the nation’s population had been part of the Commerce Department since its creation at the turn of the twentieth century. Far more than just a nationwide headcount, the census had political implications because its findings about how populations have grown, shrunk, or shifted were used in subsequent congressional redistricting efforts, as well as in funding formulas for government programs.
Although the number of U.S. senators was fixed at two per state, states could lose or gain House seats based on population fluctuations. New York once had forty-five seats in the House, but its population had been shrinking, and after the 2020 census, it stood to lose one more seat, leaving it with only twenty-six. The census also helped determine who would hold those seats, because state legislators would use its demographic data to redraw congressional and state legislative districts. Unless a state used a bipartisan or nonpartisan redistricting commission, the party in power could—and likely would—gerrymander those district lines to squeeze out the maximum number of congressional representatives.
Ross seized on the census as a pet project. In March 2018, he announced that the 2020 census would ask respondents if they were citizens of the United States. Article 1, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution called for an “enumeration,” but made no mention of citizenship. The census had once asked about citizenship, but stopped having all Americans answer the question in 1950. A few Americans did see the citizenship question in subsequent iterations of the census, but only if they were among those selected to answer a longer list of questions, known as the long form. The long form was replaced in 2005 by the American Community Survey, which continues to ask the citizenship question.
The White House said that the citizenship question would help the federal government “better comply with the Voting Rights Act.” But this was a cynical, flimsy excuse: the Voting Rights Act was passed to protect disenfranchised African Americans in the segregated South. Noncitizens were unable to vote in the first place, so questions of Voting Rights Act compliance would be entirely immaterial.
Asking the citizenship question would likely scare off immigrants, however, and that may have been the whole point. Immigrants, legal and otherwise, were already frightened by Trump’s nativist rhetoric. Now, they might simply ignore the census altogether because of the new citizenship question. That would lead to a lower response rate than otherwise expected. Given where immigrants tended to live—big cities, for example—an undercount caused by the citizenship question would almost certainly lead to lower population results in Democratic areas. That would lead to blue states likely losing seats in Congress, and also to losing federal social program funding tied to population counts. Perhaps most important, state legislators could redraw—gerrymander—district lines in a way that favored their party. The party that would benefit both locally and nationally from an undercount would almost certainly be the GOP.
Ross was hot for the citizenship question from the moment he was sworn in, so that only four months into his time in the new administration, he was already getting impatient: “I am mystified,” he wrote in May 2017, “why nothing has been done in response to my months old request that we include the citizenship question. Why not?” Ross worked on the citizenship question with Steve Bannon and Kris Kobach, the anti-immigration advocate who was then the Kansas secretary of state. He also consulted with John Gore, the voter suppression specialist who had been installed in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice.
Nobody at the Census Bureau was fooled by what Ross was doing and why. His citizenship question ploy dismayed career employees who feared that they had become the tools of the Republican Party. “We are a data agency, a factual agency,” said Johnny Zuagar, who headed the Census Bureau’s chapter of the American Federation of Government Employees. People came into his office and told him bluntly, “I don’t want to participate in this.” For the first time, they were working for a department chief who was not merely incompetent but malicious.
“You have to talk people off the ledge a little bit,” Zuagar said.
The Census Bureau had no permanent leadership after its head, John H. Thompson, left in May 2017. Many people worked from home. “They’re not in the building like they used to be,” Zuagar said. As across so much of the federal bureaucracy, there was silence at the Census Bureau.
A number of organizations—including one tied to Obama attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr.—filed suit over the citizenship question in 2018. Congress started asking questions. In the face of these questions, Ross showed the courage of a field mouse. He tried to blame Gore, but emails were made public clearly showing that he, not anyone else, was pushing for the citizenship question. In January 2019, federal judge Jesse M. Furman of New York issued a ruling that shredded every reason Ross had proffered. Furman wrote that Ross “failed to consider several important aspects of the problem; alternately ignored, cherry-picked, or badly misconstrued the evidence in the record before him; acted irrationally both in light of that evidence and his own stated decisional criteria; and failed to justify significant departures from past policies and practices.” More than a mere loss, it was a humiliation.
This served to make Ross even more irrelevant to the Trump administration than he had already become, though he had become mightily irrelevant in the preceding months. When the president went to the G20 in Buenos Aires in late November 2018, Ross was not with him. He was instead dispatched to Vandenberg Air Force Base, where he learned about the military’s space programs. It was as clear a sign as could be that Wilbur Ross’s short, unremarkable career as a public servant was coming to an end.
To his credit, Steve Mnuchin was not nearly as pernicious as Ross or Carson. He had few allies in the White House, but also few genuine enemies. “Just an errand boy for Steve Schwarzman,” Bannon called him, referring to Stephen A. Schwarzman, a politically influential Manhattan billionaire who briefly served as a Trump economic adviser. Mnuchin was nobody’s first choice, but since nobody’s first choice was intent on joining the Trump administration, and Mnuchin had been a loyal (if not exactly effective) fund-raiser throughout the campaign, the job fell to him. “I thought Wall Street would go through fucking conniptions because he’s not a heavyweight,” Bannon acknowledged, “but he had been a good soldier.” A good soldier, Mnuchin would remain, even if he would never be more than that.
He “played things well,” one West Winger put it, content with remaining inconsequential. He appeared to enjoy his own irrelevance, for he was not forced to cede any of the trappings that came with power, even as he relinquished what power he had. It mattered little. A summer 2018 cover story on Mnuchin in Bloomberg Businessweek showed him in an unflattering profile, in front of a background composed of a mantra repeated eight times in large white print: “Everything Is Fine.” And everything was fine, relatively speaking. In his rare public appearances, Mnuchin retained his wide, feline smile.
He was only marginally involved in the tax-cut effort that consumed much of the end of 2017 for the Trump administration, after the failed attempts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. That effort was led by Gary Cohn, the former Goldman Sachs chief executive, as well as allies outside the White House. Mnuchin had no connections to Congress, nor much of an ability to relate to ordinary people, to explain to them how cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthy could help those who were not titans of industry or born into wealth.
To explain the plan, Mnuchin had Treasury produce a single-page document. An expert with the right-leaning Tax Foundation dismissed it as a “thought experiment,” while an official with the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget called the analysis a “mockery.” And those were among the more kind reviews of Mnuchin’s plan.
The economy, though, was not Mnuchin’s primary concern. He decided that he would act as Trump’s public crisis manager, somehow imagining that he was the one to soothe Americans’ inflamed feelings about the president. More likely, he just wanted to impress Trump with displays of loyalty. These led Lawrence H. Summers, the former Harvard president and economics professor—who regularly embarrassed Mnuchin by criticizing his expertise in public—to muse that “Steven Mnuchin may be the greatest sycophant in Cabinet history.” There was good reason to believe that Summers was correct. For even if there was an especially high number of bootlickers in the Trump administration, no one licked boots quite like Steve Mnuchin.
In August 2017, many Americans were horrified by the shows of racism and anti-Semitism on display in Charlottesville, Virginia, during a white supremacist rally that left three dead. Their horror was compounded by Trump’s assertion that among the frothing hatemongers who descended on Charlottesville were “some very fine people.” Mnuchin was not among the dismayed. When his Yale classmates asked him to resign in protest over the sanctioned ugliness in Charlottesville, Mnuchin lectured them haughtily: “As someone who is Jewish, I believe I understand the long history of violence and hatred against the Jews (and other minorities) and circumstances that give rise to these sentiments and actions,” he wrote.
The following month, Trump tweeted angrily about the kneeling protests in the National Football League. Some thought the president was trying to exacerbate racial divisions. Mnuchin rushed to his defense, while criticizing the protesting athletes. “They can do free speech on their own time,” he said.
That same September, Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, a crisis made worse by a slow federal response. Most everyone took issue with Trump’s response, which vacillated from uninterested to annoyed. Mnuchin was right there to defend him. On television, the treasury secretary praised the federal government’s response as “terrific,” although much of the island lacked potable water and electricity, with the storm having come and gone many days before.
Mnuchin also defended Trump himself, who had gone on Twitter to attack Carmen Yulín Cruz, the mayor of Puerto Rico’s capital city, San Juan. She had pleaded on CNN for more federal assistance and disputed Trump’s optimistic description of the relief efforts. Trump responded exactly as one might predict: via Twitter. “Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help,” the leader of the free world said in a two-part tweet sent from his golf club in New Jersey. “They want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort.” Several other tweets followed before some adult wrested the phone away and ushered the president back out onto the links.
Some were alarmed by Trump’s approach to North Korea (the productive summit with Kim Jong-un in Singapore was at the time many months away). Mnuchin was not. “This is not about personalities; this is not personal,” he said of Trump’s taunts of the North Korean leader, whom he had taken to calling “Rocket Man.”
Mnuchin grasped that his boss demanded public praise, that he needed it the way a whale needed plankton. That allowed him to survive even as other cabinet members succumbed to their own worst impulses. As 2018 came to its end, Mnuchin, Ross, and Carson remained in the administration, too, but that was only because Trump had simply forgotten about them. And that was no great oversight, since they had done so little worth remembering.