Читать книгу Shell-Shocked - Bonnie Honig - Страница 11

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The President’s House Is Empty

Inauguration Day

A detail stood out when, after the November 2016 presidential election but before his inauguration, Donald Trump announced that his family would not live in the White House. His wife, Melania, and son Barron preferred to live in New York, he said. At the time, no one objected. The assumption seemed to be that this was simply a matter of personal choice for which the country would bear the costs. But “personal choice” is part of an ideology of neoliberalism that includes patriarchy and is elastic enough to cover even for this unconventional arrangement of twin households and wifely independence.

Melania and Barron ultimately moved to the White House on June 12, 2017, but the costs of the Trump family’s two households were billed to the public. The additional security necessitated by the decision to maintain a second household in New York City is expensive. Security alone is estimated to be about $24 million.¹ And there were other costs, too: repeated presidential flights to New York, motorcades in and out of midtown Manhattan and, throughout Trump’s term, to Florida airports and Palm Springs. In office, Trump made numerous trips to golf on his own courses, at a cost of about $3 million per trip. Many of them have been to his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, which he likes to call his “winter White House,” while nonetheless billing his security detail as much as 650 dollars a night for each of the rooms they are obliged to stay in to protect him.²

From the start, many of those costs, racked up on Trump properties, were paid right into the president’s own pockets. For example, according to the New York Post, in addition to “the cost of agents, staff and equipment and barriers that are normal in such cases,” security services protecting Trump’s family in New York were obliged to rent space in Trump Tower at a cost of more than $3 million a year, to be paid to the president’s own corporation.³ Secret Service agents protecting Trump in Florida and also in New Jersey were billed—we, the public, were billed—for their use of golf carts to follow him on his rounds. Although Politico reported that Trump footed the bill for Japanese prime minister Shinzō Abe’s stay at Mar-a-Lago (waived the bill might be more accurate), it was also reported that Trump promised to donate all money spent by foreign governments at his hotels to the Treasury so that he would not violate the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause. But there is no sign such donations have been made. On May 16, 2017, congressional Democrats introduced legislation that would order Trump to reimburse the federal government for any public money spent on trips to his private resorts. The bill went nowhere, and the bipartisan congressional budget of that same month guaranteed the federal government would pay New York for costs incurred protecting Melania’s Trump Tower household.

This is galling, because we already pay for a secure home and office for the president of the United States and his family. It is called the White House. The White House is a public thing to be used by the president and his or her family while in public office. The White House has an infrastructure of security that provides presidents and their families with the protection they need. Trump and his family opted out of that public thing. They chose to go private. And in so doing, they incurred costs that they then passed on to the public. Their “free choice” was subsidized by the public, as are so many of the supposedly “free” choices exercised by others (charter schools, gated neighborhoods, Humvees, private airplanes).

The public thing, the White House, enables certain efficiencies in the provision of security and administrative support, but these are lost when the private option is preferred. A president, or his family, who lives at private home(s) requires a mobile security apparatus and governance infrastructure that the White House does not. The American public even provides the president with a holiday home, Camp David, which, because of its long use by past presidents, also has in place the necessary infrastructure. However, Trump has spurned this home as well: “Have you seen it?” he said of Camp David, as if to explain his preference for his own commercial golf resort, Mar-a-Lago. Is it not obvious that if a president disdains the homes the public provides for him, and thus forgoes their efficiencies, the resulting costs should be borne by him (he is the one who has opted out) and not by the very public whose public thing he has spurned? Trump’s family may be free to not use the residence provided by the public, but they should be personally responsible for assuming the costs of that choice rather than passing them on to us. Attending to this neglected detail highlights the extent to which mainstream American political media have absorbed neoliberal assumptions and are no longer critical of them.

Beyond the monetary costs of the Trump opt-out, there are symbolic costs, as well. Here there may even be a lesson for Trump. Faced with the refusal of Mexico to pay for the much-promised border wall, Trump has said he expects U.S. taxpayers to pay for it (promising vaguely that Mexico will pay us back). But taxpayers have lost the habit of happily paying for public things, and Trump, the one opting out, is in no position to revivify the habit. After years of neoliberalization, the reservoir of love for public things in the U.S. is diminished.⁴ Neoliberalism means many things to many people, but the one trait by which it is always distinguished is its approval of the opt-out and a willingness to turn a blind eye to its hidden costs.

Everything is optional for the neoliberal; this is how neoliberalism defines freedom. Neoliberals opt out of any collective thing they can afford to opt out of. They believe everyone should be free to send their children to private or charter schools, to live in private gated communities, to hire private transport rather than take the school bus, to walk around without a mask in a pandemic. “Choice” is their watchword, and choice is synonymous with freedom.

The hidden costs of opting out are not their problem, neoliberals say. But they are ours. If the well-to-do do not use the public school system, the community is deprived of their energies and contributions. If they do not use city roads and sewage, the well-to-do come to resent having to pay for the upkeep of infrastructure. If fewer and fewer children take the school bus, it soon becomes an added expense to the public purse that cannot be justified, and suddenly there is no bus service, even if some need it; or else it costs extra, and only its users are asked to pay for it, which raises costs for some and singles some people out in a supposedly “public” system. And, of course, those who refuse to wear masks endanger everyone. These issues ran through debates about repealing the Affordable Care Act as well, early in 2017. Some congressmen asked why the healthy should “subsidize” the sick, thus betraying little understanding of the workings of insurance (in which those who are healthy now pay to indemnify themselves against the contingency of one day becoming sick) and of the very idea of democracy (in which redistributions are made to underwrite social equilibria that benefit everyone and public health is a public good that all of us enjoy together, just as we all suffer—though not necessarily equally, since we are not equally vulnerable or exposed—when there is a public pandemic).

But there is a still worse cost here—to democracy as such. The democratic experiment involves living cheek by jowl with others, sharing classrooms, roads, and buses, paying for them together, complaining about them together, and sometimes even praising and enjoying them together, as picnickers will do on a sunny afternoon in Central Park. One of the many sad ironies here is that Central Park—landscape architecture’s ode to the power of democratic beauty—is just a stone’s throw away from where barricades encircled Trump Tower from January to June 2017 to protect Melania. That a meme began, calling to “free Melania,” shows just how absorptive neoliberal culture is, capable of turning a precious gothic detail that highlights a world of misogynist injustice into a pet theme freed of the original’s powers of perception and prescription. She does not need freeing.

Opting out usually depends on the public purse it pretends to circumvent. Charter schools and voucher programs invite locals to opt out of public schools while drawing on public funds that might have improved the public education system rather than provide an alternative to it. Someone is making money on charter schools and vouchers, and it is not the community. Also, and more importantly—as Senator Maggie Hassan pointed out to Betsy DeVos at her confirmation hearing to become secretary of education—charter schools and voucher programs are not governed by public education’s democratic mandate to educate all students. Like the Affordable Care Act, which mandates providing health care coverage to those with preexisting conditions, a properly democratic education system mandates providing education to those with preexisting conditions, too, such as poverty, recent immigration, and physical and learning disabilities, as well as other challenges that may make learning difficult or require special attention. This democratic mandate to educate everyone is what charters and voucher systems opt out of. Such mandates are the last, dying breath of the public thing.

The latest and most public opt-outs under this presidency—wear a mask or don’t, it is your choice!—show just how costly opt-outs are. They derail collective action and destroy the public thing, as is evidenced by the Trump First Family’s cavalier attitude toward the White House, a reminder of the emptiness of this presidency that cannot be obscured, not even by full-body huggings of the flag.