Opinion by Dr. Warren J. Blumenfeld • 2h • 7 min read
Attributed to William L. Marcy, “To the victors belong the spoils” is an oft-used phrase meaning that the winner of a conflict, battle, or some form of consequential competition, like a war or a political election, gets all the rewards: the goods or benefits (“spoils”) taken from the defeated. These spoils could include anything from, as in times past, enslavement and/or rape of the defeated or wealth, land, or political power acquired or grabbed by the victors.
In the context of a political battle, the phrase “elections have consequences” becomes crucial, meaning that the winning candidate or party gets the spoils. These include many benefits, like the power to control an overall agenda and the specific policies to enact it. The winners also have the right, usually within some limits imposed by an operative system of checks and balances, to choose the people who fill positions within their offices and administrations.
To Marcy, the phrase meant that the winning side in an election has the right to choose people to fill non-elected political positions. Marcy served as Secretary of War during the Presidency of James K. Polk and as President Franklin Pierce’s Secretary of State.
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Historically in the United States, administrations at least assert, often falsely, that they chose advisors, cabinet secretaries, and civil servants on the basis of merit, meaning those who are best qualified.
During the presidency of Andrew Jackson (1829-1837), however, the pretense of “merit” was scrapped in favor of a “populist” spoils system in which he hired friends and others loyal to him. Jackson based his candidacy on representing “the common man” (only white men could vote at the time) while opposing the power and privilege of the wealthy elite classes.
Jackson’s appeals to the common man were based on a general erosion of trust toward the government and his promise to open his administration to working on concerns of importance to the workers of the country.
This “populism” was fraught with enormous contradictions. Though he expanded suffrage and restructured federal institutions, “Jacksonianism appears as a political impulse tied to slavery,” writes the History Channel, “the subjugation of Native Americans, and the celebration of white supremacy.”
Following Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016, former mayor of New York City and Trump campaign adviser Rudy Giuliani drew a comparison between the 1828 election of Jackson and the 2016 election of Trump: “This is like Andrew Jackson’s victory,” he gloated. “This is the people beating the establishment. And that’s how [Donald Trump] posited right from the beginning, the people are rising up against a government they find to be dysfunctional. And yes, it’s a defeat for the Democrats, but this is a defeat for some Republicans too.”
Though Giuliani did not also make the connections between Jackson’s and Trump’s celebration of and appeals to white supremacy, other historians and political commentators have discussed these clear links.
Historian Richard White stated , “Trump is not a reincarnation of Jackson, but there are disturbing parallels between their Americas.” White shows that “[a] biography of Andrew Jackson recounts a bloody history and reveals disturbing parallels with Trump.”
Both men, for example, were obsessed with the concept of deporting non-white people from areas European Americans had claimed as their own.
Jackson deported indigenous people from the Eastern states to the West on what became known as the “Trail of Tears,” on which many died of disease, injuries, and starvation. At the time, indigenous peoples were barred from citizen rights as they were referred to in oxymoronic terms as “domestic foreigners.”
Trump’s obsessive dehumanization and villainization of undocumented immigrants (whom he refers to as “illegal aliens”) is legendary by now, as is the terrorism of his family separation policies that took place during his first term and his plans to deport up to 30,000 people to the harsh conditions of camps at Guantanamo Bay on the island of Cuba (a plan that has already been set in motion). He threatens to deport literally millions of people out of the U.S.
The political patronage system
Holding to Marcy’s axiom that “To the victor belongs the spoils,” Jackson believed that public office did not require any special intelligence or training to qualify a person for employment. Therefore, he hired friends and other loyalists even though they had little or no background in the positions they filled.
In contradiction to his stated “populist” goals, many of Jackson’s office appointments went to men of great wealth and social prominence.
The great author Mark Twain severely criticized the political patronage system. Speaking at a presidential campaign rally for Rutherford B. Hayes in Hartford, Connecticut in 1876, he said, “We will not hire a blacksmith who never lifted a sledge. We will not hire a school teacher who does not know the alphabet. We will not have a man about us in our business life – in any walk of life, low or high – unless he has served an apprenticeship and can prove that he is capable of doing the work he offers to do. We even require a plumber to know something about his business, so that he shall at least know which side of a pipe is the inside. But when you come to our civil service, we serenely fill great numbers of our minor public offices with ignoramuses.”
Donald Trump, also a so-called “populist” in his stated goals and appeals to working-class voters, has also surrounded himself with the richest people in the United States.
On the topic of “merit,” Trump’s choices for his second cabinet and advisory positions lay bare the myth of meritocracy (“merit-based”) since most of his picks are unqualified for the positions they are to hold (some are tasked with abolishing their departments and agencies) and were chosen either because of their enormous wealth or by their television celebrity on conservative media.
For example, Trump has tapped a record 13 billionaires to work directly with him in his administration. Their “merit” lies primarily in their massive donations to Trump’s campaign and their willingness to continually kiss his ring and bend to him so often that soon they will require hip and knee replacements.
In his highly choreographed inaugural ceremony under the Capitol dome, Trump placed three of the world’s richest people – Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg – in full view of video cameras for all to see.
Trump has chosen a man who spreads vaccine conspiracy theories to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, a woman who cozies up to vicious dictators like Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad to become Director of National Intelligence, an election denier and someone with an enemies list who intends to conduct a massive Stalinesque purge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to run the FBI, a woman who is a professional wrestling magnate to serve as Secretary of Education even though Trump wants to abolish the Federal Department of Education, and so many other utterly unqualified candidates for other offices that they should more fittingly fall into the category of disqualified.
In the case of Kash Patel – who potentially wants to fire thousands of workers in the FBI – and Trump’s unofficial so-called Department of Government Efficiency headed by Elon Musk – who has threatened to shut down some agencies like the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) – their plans violate The Hatch Act of 1939, subtitled “An Act to Prevent Pernicious Political Activities.”
This federal law guarantees that federal programs are managed in a nonpartisan fashion to protect federal employees from political intimidation in the workplace and to ensure that federal employees are promoted based on merit and not based on political association or loyalty.
Virtually the entire Trump administration clown wagon is composed of people whose clown suits and grease-painted faces could never hide their incompetence. These figures, including first and foremost the Clown-in-Chief himself, pose extreme dangers not only to the departments they will lead but, more importantly, they will further undermine our democratic institutions and continue to diminish our standing in the world.
I end with a new term I learned, which seems to sum up the Trump administration’s personnel choices for its leading positions. This is the Dunning–Kruger effect: a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular area or position overestimate their abilities.
Coined by David Dunning and Justin Kruger in 1999, this “effect” could include someone who picks up a musical instrument for the first time and believes they will be playing a sold-out concert at Carnegie Hall within a few months. It could also include someone who announces they are “a stable genius” and “only I can fix it.”
Fasten your seatbelts, everyone.
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