Should we trust the forthcoming book “Disloyal: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump” by Michael Cohen [@cohentrump] on Trump? I think we should. It is not because Cohen is the most honest man in the world — he pleaded guilty to lying to Congress — nor because Trump trusted Cohen with his life to confess all his wrongdoings (Trump might have said so to Cohen, but if Trump has no real friend as Cohen claims, he is uncapable of trusting anyone). Rather it is because we can trust the book without trusting its author and its sole subject the book is focused on. Here is why. Let us go back to when Trump and Cohen first met. At that point things were totally driven by convenience. Trump needed Cohen like a golfer needed a caddie throughout the entire golf course. Cohen was there initially out of necessity. But as time went on, he saw — and later helped to make — everything happen. The more secrets Cohen knew about Trump, the higher the cost for Trump to keep, rather than to reveal, his secrets to Cohen. In the meantime, the more Cohen knew, the more he will let down Trump’s guard and show his true color. Pretty soon Cohen became the man Trump could not go around without, as revealed by the seemingly trivial details like the two men sharing and syncing the same contacts.
Democracy & Con Men
In his book Cohen calls Trump “a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man.” It is clear that for Cohen, Trump is the least moral or the most unethical president of this country.
Here comes the big question: Why and how did all this happen? That is, why arguably the greatest democracy in the world could not prevent a con man from entering the most powerful office in the world? Some may argue that democracy is not about selecting the most ethical office holders but selecting them in the fairest way possible. That might be true, but it is also true that in mature democracies, voters do seem to care about candidates’ ethical level, otherwise why would political campaigns all tried or trying so hard to shake off all scandals related to their candidates? This seems to imply that we need to explain why con men had won the offices in the past and perhaps will win in the future.
Selecting presidential candidates may not be as important a concern as providing checks and balances to presidential power. I like the view from David Frum of the Atlantic [@TestofTrump]: “The story of Trump years is a story of institutions that failed.” It offered great insights by linking Trump to the quality of our political institutions. I wonder how many had read the article and pondered the question of how “The System Failed the Test of Trump” as his title suggested.
To be sure, the system did not fail completely. As Frum correctly pointed out, we still have the 2020 election, which is clearly in many Americans’ minds. I was listening to Google News in the morning the other day and heard one lady saying that “It’s good that we have elections and they don’t”, referring to China in the latter part of the sentence.
But election is just another democratic institution, albeit one of the most significant, most fundamental and the best knowns. If we attribute to or bet everything on institutions, we may be disappointed because there is still a chance for Trump to win the re-election.
From “Test of Trump” to “Game of Trump”
The “Test of Trump” is purely institutional and a univariate model with institutions the only causal variable on the right hand side. Had Trump been a successful president and a decent human being, the test would give credits to political institutions, otherwise an institutional failure. But such a test is highly limited and too simple. It effectively eliminates forces of all citizens, all external shocks, all non-political forces and all individual variations that can impact the outcomes just as much as institutions. The Supreme Court is a legal institution, but each individual justice, his/her choices and decisions, are a part of preinstitutions. Chief Justice John Roberts for example has been a conservative but has recently ruled with the liberals.
The other weakness of the test is that under which we can only rely on institutional forces (e.g., courts, Congress) for a change. Or else we must wait until November 2020.
To overcome these weaknesses, we need to have a “Game of Trump” that is far more flexible and far more active than the Test of Trump. The key to build a Game of Trump is to combine institutions and preinstitutional and take both into account. We still have to wait till November to see the final outcome, but can do everything in our capacity to actively influence the outcome.
The advantage of Game of Trump is to allow all forces to play, directly or indirectly, actively or passively, consciously or unconsciously. The game outcome is not entirely determined by institutions. But before we proceed, we must understand what institutions are.
Defining Institutions
Douglass North, the late Nobel laureate in Economics, calls institutions “rules of the game” in a society. Institutional economics has been focusing on these rules ever since North. But this definition does not exactly match what came to our minds when we hear the term institutions. David Frum for example was talking about the failures of department of justice, of inspector general, of Congress oversight, of national security agencies and of the courts. He is not alone as most people would equate institutions with establishments and agencies, the well known or named, tangible, concrete agencies. North’s definition is more abstract, highlighting the soul from inside the tangible agencies. This works well for historians, who often need not just narratives but abstract ideas pulling out of the history.
North may be expanded by adding organizations (e.g., governmental agencies), rituals and events (e.g., elections), to the institutions. There is something common behind all these elements: Institutions are anything transparent, predictable or fixed.
But a game is more than things predictable and fixed. In fact, for any sports fans, a game is fun exactly because no one can predict its outcome with certainty, unlike low quality movies or TV dramas. This is why I was never satisfied with institutional economics. If we reduce all games to institutions, we can never fully understand games, which must also contain preinstitutions that are everything not fixed, not stable or predictable. The central point of my theory of preinstitutions is that we have to combine institutions with preinstitutions in order to understand games in real life.
What Can We Learn from Hamilton?
Yesterday I watched the popular musical called “Hamilton.” I have to admit that at first I was a bit surprised to see dark skinned George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. It did not bother me too much though, because I was quickly attracted to the show itself than to its cast. I knew very little of American history back to the revolutionary war period — other than a few familiar names. So this show gives me a lighthearted way of learning US history.
It came to me while I was watching the movie: This show is a good piece to explain the idea of prestitutions, as it dramatizes how the American game was played by the Founding Fathers. Like any shows, Hamilton contains historical facts as well as fictions. The compromise of 1790 has been dramatized by Lin-Manuel Miranda in the song “The Room Where It Happens” (John Bolton used it as his title for the recent book) as a secret event that no one knew what really happened. The lyrics of the song says:
No one really knows how the game is played;
The art of the trade;
How the sausage gets made;
We just assume that it happens.
Historical fact however was that The compromise of 1790 was a draw and both sides – Hamilton won the assumption act to allow federal government to take over the state debts, thus granting the financial power and strength to the federal government as we know it today – but Jefferson and Madison also won to keep the nation’s capital to the South rather than to metropolitan New York. I checked online and found that Thomas Jefferson, the meeting host, had revealed some crucial details of the meeting, so the event was not completely a mystery. But my point is that compromises are a crucial, and not so rare, part of any real games, a part that is hard to explain by institutions or rule of the game. In a football or basketball game if the scores are tied between two teams the rule says we should have the game extended until one side wins and the other loses.
Hamilton offers an excellent opportunity to illustrate why “preinstitutions” is the right term to my theory. The show tells us how rules of the game arose as a result of bargaining and compromise. But bargaining, competing and compromise are nothing but preinstitutions. Therefore, the name preinstitutions tellus us that they are a prerequisite to institutions.
A few quick examples may help us get a sense of what preinstitutions are. Laws are institutions but lawsuits are preinstitutions. Preinstitutions are about game players, which sometimes matter even more than rules of the game. What makes the American games special is the concerned citizens who have taken the streets to protest police brutality even though they themselves were not the direct victims. It is also interesting that a federal judge ordered Michael Cohen to stay in home confinement after the government tried to return him to the custody — as a retaliation for his tell-all book plan.
Seeing the country as a game field and people as game players helps open our minds, which in turn helps connect dots. Do sports games have anything to do with political games? Absolutely. It is the same culture and spirits of organized competitions that drive both. Furthermore, political games are just like sports games in that we do not know the outcomes or end-results until the end of the game. Do programs like Head Start, especially its expansion to children from birth to 3 in 1994, have anything to do with the George Floyd tragedy? Absolutely. Had there been more programs like Head Start, with higher number of enrollments (above and beyond the currently one million) and more diversified teaching, this country could see significantly reduced cases of adult violence. Ultimately, do game players impact game rules? Absolutely. Frum again said it better than anyone else. He was asking why the Congress did not act to prevent Trump from lying and contempting, and his own answer was that “But there is no ‘Congress.’ There are only the two parties in Congress.” He then cited the words from Republican Representative Ted Yoho from Florida, saying that he “works for the president; he answers to the president.” Of course, with mentality like this, how could anyone expect the Congress exercising its power to hold Trump accountable?
Reference
Frum, David. 2020. “The System Failed the Test of Trump.” https://www.theatlantic.com/ ideas/archive/2020/05/system-failed-test/611911/. Karni, Annie. 2020. “In Tell-All Foreword, Cohen Promises Sordid Tales Trump ‘Does Not Want You to Read’.” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/13/us/politics/michaelcohen- memoir-trump.html. 6