Donald Trump is using the idea of stopping “waste, fraud, and abuse” as an excuse for drastic austerity. The rhetorical strategy has a long history in the US — stretching back to Southern elites’ push to delegitimize Reconstruction as a cash grab.
“Waste, fraud, and abuse” is a phrase we’re going to hear frequently as the Trump administration slashes the administrative state. In light of that, we should be clear what the president and his allies really mean when they use those words. We all know that there are ways our government could become more efficient or more effective. But this project isn’t really about trimming the fat — it’s about cutting you loose.
Austerity has long been an aim among right-wing leaders who want the government to spend less and tax less. Their end goal is to overturn what they view as a wealth grab by those who benefit from publicly funded programs. But that’s a losing message in a democracy, and particularly in one plagued by high levels of income insecurity. Just look at the popularity of Social Security, which conservatives have been looking to kill from its inception. Nearly 90 percent of Americans — regardless of political persuasion — support the program.
Instead of outward hostility toward the have-nots, right-wing rhetoric for most of the past several generations has been about independence and self-help. Milton Friedman, in making the case for Barry Goldwater’s presidential candidacy in 1964, argued that although it may be tempting to use government “to do directly for the people what the people seem at the moment not to be able to or to want to do for themselves,” such efforts would only weaken “the capacity of the ordinary man to provide for his own needs.” Friedman acolyte Ronald Reagan, himself a master rhetorician, made a similar argument two decades later: “Government is not the solution to our problem,” Reagan told the American people in his 1981 inaugural address, “government is the problem.” Two years later, he framed the move toward austerity as an embrace of “personal responsibility,” which he identified as a “bedrock” national value alongside faith in God.
For as long as most of us can remember, this was the Republican Party’s brand. The nanny state was undermining our freedom, and we all needed to begin holding ourselves accountable. Occasionally someone would err and say the quiet part out loud. Mitt Romney, for instance, famously claimed during a 2012 campaign fundraiser that roughly half of Americans were sponging off the other half. “I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives,” Romney said. So why bother to get their votes? As Romney found out, however, you can’t win elections without them; he was trounced that November by Barack Obama.
Like Romney, Donald Trump made his leap into politics after amassing a personal fortune. But Trump has fashioned himself a populist, and even the more palatable versions of the makers vs takers dichotomy don’t fit particularly well with that brand. Trump’s base includes many of the people Mitt Romney disparaged without so much as a euphemism — people who believe, as Romney complained, that they are entitled to things like jobs, food, and housing. Consequently, the president has dusted off an older rationale for cutting government: corruption.
Fighting Reconstruction “Plunder”
Roughly a century before small-government enthusiasts embraced “personal responsibility” as their calling card, advocates for austerity used accusations of venality to sell their vision. Their specific concern, in the wake of the Civil War, was that increasingly representative forms of government would undermine historical patterns of power and wealth. “They who lay the taxes do not pay them, and . . . they who are to pay them have no voice in the laying of them,” asserted the leader of a “Tax-Payers Convention.” With postwar reconstruction expanding voting rights to previously enslaved people, the fortunes of the Southern elite were threatened as never before by the specter of democracy. It was impossible for such elites to imagine “a greater wrong or greater tyranny in republican government.”
Enter claims of corruption. Those of us who remember only a little from these pages in our American history textbooks likely will recall reading about Northern “carpetbaggers” who sought to enrich themselves in the former Confederacy. As Southern apologist Horace Greeley put it, they “crawled down South on the track of our armies . . . stealing and plundering.” With the cooperation of “unprincipled scalawags from the South,” carpetbaggers ostensibly manipulated the newly freed black population to seize control of state governments and in turn line their pockets. Waste. Fraud. Abuse.
Did it actually happen? Evidence suggests that the terms “carpetbagger” and “scalawag” were rhetorical weapons created with the explicit aim of discrediting Reconstruction. According to historian Ted Tunnell, these terms emerged “at the exact moment that the radical conventions began drafting organic law giving ex-slaves the basic civil and political rights of full-fledged citizenship.” Charges of corruption were leveled most enthusiastically at black political leaders, who were accused of all manner of moral and political crimes. Yet as W. E. B. Du Bois explained in Black Reconstruction in America, “the center of the corruption charge . . . was in fact that poor men were ruling and taxing rich men.” According to Du Bois, the move to “redeem” the South — from misgovernance, vice, and the undue influence of northerners and blacks — was really a push “to reestablish the dominion of property in Southern politics.” The problem in question was too much democracy.
The Trumpian Gambit
Donald Trump is not likely to call for a new era of personal responsibility or to accuse working people of dependency. After all, the key demographic powering the MAGA movement is white voters without college degrees, and Trump made major inroads among voters who feel economically vulnerable. They see Trump as an antiestablishment independent, an image he has worked hard to cultivate. But anyone who believes that Trump is an economic populist simply isn’t paying attention. His plan at this point is clear: to strip the federal government down to its skeleton, regardless of the consequences for ordinary Americans.
Cutting taxes may play well with Trump’s base; that’s par for the course in the Republican Party. But cutting services is a different matter. Most MAGA supporters are not ideologically motivated elites, nor are they members of the affluent class. Whatever their fealty to the president, many of them rely on federal subsidies and public programs. They may not always know that, since much of that support is channeled through the apparatus of government rather than in the form of welfare checks. The US Department of Education, for instance, provides $18 billion annually to public schools serving students from low-income backgrounds, many of whom live in rural areas. But other forms of support, like Medicaid, which the Republican Party appears poised to slash, go directly to individuals. As Steve Bannon recently argued, “A lot of MAGA’s on Medicaid. . . . You can’t just take a meat axe to it.”
This is where waste, fraud, and abuse come in. It worked to turn people against Reconstruction after the Civil War, and it appears to be working once more, at least among those who view Trump as a straight-talking outsider come to drain the swamp. The president will put that image to use for as long as he can. Meanwhile, however, he’ll be doing what Mitt Romney only wished he had the chance to do — taking a chain saw to every element of the modern welfare state that advances the interests of “takers” at the expense of “makers.”
Democracy has always posed a problem for the wealthy and the powerful. If people have a say in how they are governed, they’ll use that say to improve their lives. They’ll do things like lay taxes on the fortunes of the few to provide opportunity for the many.
The trick, then, is to convince them otherwise.
The rhetoric of “personal responsibility” worked for decades. But imagine telling someone whose job has been outsourced to another country to take a little accountability; you might get punched in the face. Warning them of waste, fraud, and abuse, on the other hand? That just might work.