Nonprofit Influences on Trump Deserve Condemnation

To the Editor:

I fear that your recent opinion piece Conservative Nonprofits Were Behind Many of the Successes of the Trump Era (November 30) is part of a broader trend underway to normalize the abominations of the past four years; it is certainly in the interest of those who participated in or benefited from the Trump administration’s corruption, grift, and law breaking to do so. Fortunately for those who would struggle to redeem themselves on their own — some of whom, in light of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, are resigning from the administration and otherwise distancing themselves from what they’ve wrought — this op-ed, written by well-intentioned scholars, begins to do the job for them.

Let’s start with the title. To say that there were successes in the Trump Era is to invite the obvious question: Whose successes, exactly?

The authors seem to imply, for instance, that Trump’s environmental policies, influenced by nonprofits that are thinly veiled fronts for industries that benefit from the perilous status quo, were something to be applauded. It is laughable, however, to think that the Competitive Enterprise Institute was acting in the public’s interest when it advocated for rolling back energy-efficiency standards and otherwise ignoring climate change — at precisely the time many parts of the world were literally on fire.

According to SourceWatch, CEI has “long ties to climate change denial.”

Do the authors wish us to cheer the fact that Trump and his cronies dealt blow after blow — withdrawing from the Paris agreement, erasing or loosening “nearly 100 rules and regulations on pollution,” etc. — to humanity’s efforts to protect itself from the worst impacts of global warming?

Of course not. And yet, any rational assessment of environmental rollbacks will conclude that they were about rewarding campaign donors and the super wealthy and not, as the authors and CEI might argue, about spurring free-market innovation or the ideals of limited government.

Similarly, the authors highlight the effectiveness of the Federalist Society. While there is no doubt that they succeeded in installing hundreds of right-wing judges, the authors fail to take into account the context: At least one, if not two, of the Supreme Court seats were stolen (Merrick Garland, anyone?), and dozens of the judges the society recommended were deemed not qualified by the American Bar Association. Why is the society pushing for these judges? Even worse, the authors acknowledge Senator Whitehouse’s exposé of the dark money behind the society’s work — perhaps said money can shed some light on the baffling trend of pushing unqualified judges — but leave it at that. Isn’t this the very problem, that nonprofits such as the society and the CEI are fronting for powerful, monied interests? The authors posit that these groups are advancing “minority views” (Whose minority views? Are big businesses marginalized?) and that, in so doing, they are also “strengthening democracy.”

If climate denialism and ramming through unqualified, extremist judges makes for a better democracy, we could perhaps claim that the president’s refusal to accept the results of an election and encourage his loyalists to violently overtake the Capitol (just because his attempt at a coup is comically inept does not make it any less dangerous or any less an attempted coup) also makes us a better nation. Is this not a minority viewpoint as well?

The authors do make the distinction between hate groups and organizations that advocate for certain conservative policies. This is the least they could do. But it is nearly as absurd to argue that it is possible to disentangle the obviously despicable actions of the Trump era from the merely damaging ones.

A legitimate policy discussion might pose the question of what kind of tax incentive will most effectively stir small business growth or whether the best way to address climate change is through cap-and-trade or a carbon tax. But we cannot have normal political discourse when one side is not acting in good faith, when the question of what benefits the majority of Americans is drowned out by the lobbying of the 1 percent and big business.

Consider that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 has led to a massive increase in the budget deficit and, in 2018, “the 400 wealthiest families in America … paying a lower tax rate than the bottom 50 percent of households.” The nonwealthy will be paying for this giveaway for decades — a giveaway that, according to the Tax Policy Center, has not, and will not, benefit the broader economy or pay for itself. And how could legislation that was written by more than 6,000 lobbyists and rushed through Congress have resulted in sound public policy?

Nor is tackling climate change necessarily good for the powerful, which is why they are so often behind climate denialism. Do we want the uber-wealthy and powerful to write tax and climate policy while hiding behind the reputation of the nonprofit sector to give themselves moral cover?

We normalize the Trump era at our grave peril. If we pretend that anything about the past four years was acceptable — the children in cages, the Ukraine scandal, the pressuring of governors to overturn the election results, the tear gassing of protestors for a photo op, the bigotry and cruelty, the policy making driven by blatant self-dealing, the attempted coup — we leave the door open for the next would-be authoritarian. If we do not face these hard facts; if we give a free pass to those who pushed us to the edge; if we pretend that there are two sides to every argument, even when one side is based in a denial of reality and a rejection of our most basic democratic norms, we pave the way for more erosions of the freedoms the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Federalist Society purport to espouse.

The vast majority of nonprofits, regardless of their political leanings, are doing the hard work of fighting for a better America. It is to the detriment of the entire sector to conflate corruption and grift with a difference of opinion. That the organizations highlighted by the authors achieved so many “victories’’ in the midst of an orgy of lawlessness proves that in a political system awash in money, it’s all too easy for nonprofits to serve as moral launderers — putting a charitable gloss on minoritarian, anti-democratic policies that are neither in the interest of the American people nor the institutions on which we depend for a stable, robust, and healthy democracy. This merits condemnation, not approbation.

Andy Posner
CEO
The Capital Good Fund