Donald Trump and Elizabeth Warren are profoundly different people and politicians, but they use similar language to describe barriers to the popular will that are baked into our system. Trump loves to talk about the “deep state,” the “rigged system,” and “draining the swamp,” while Warren’s new overriding campaign theme is “corruption.” Are they right, and are they talking about the same thing?
Hardly.
If you deconstruct Trump’s thought patterns (a frightening task, to be sure), it runs something like this:
1. I was elected by a majority of real Americans;
2. The will of the people should be respected in a democracy; therefore
3. Anything I do as the representative of the people is sacrosanct, and any barriers to their will should be eliminated.
In the real world, of course, what he means by this is that people who obey the law and longstanding liberal democratic norms are getting in his way, and need to go. That’s a description of a banana republic, not the United States of America.
For her part, Warren’s real concern is that the wealthy have too much access to power in this country. She is disguising an attack on the First Amendment rights of wealthy people by illogically associating them with Trump’s innumerable misdeeds in office. Trump’s corruption is sui generis; it ought to be treated that way.