In the dangerous era of Trumpzi-Putinism: Who will be America's version of Alexei Navalny?

Dead Last: Authoritarian rule always entails corruption. With Donald Trump in office, watch your wallet. By Rachel Maddow

If nothing else, it was an insult to historians.

At the change of each Administration, C-SPAN conducts a broad survey of Presidential scholars, asking them to rank every Commander-in-Chief across ten aspects of leadership. The 2021 survey, published less than six months after the January 6th mob attack on Congress, ranked Donald Trump among the worst Presidents in U.S. history. Never before had a modern President had his name down in the dregs among feckless forgotten Whigs (poor William Henry Harrison’s term lasted only thirty-two days) and impeached scoundrels like Andrew Johnson.

Given the shocking, violent end of Trump’s first term, that scalding snap judgment in 2021 was no surprise. The following year, the Siena College survey of Presidential scholars also listed Trump among the worst Presidents ever. In this past June’s debate between Trump and President Joe Biden, Biden cited another academic survey—the 2024 “Presidential Greatness Project”—in which a hundred and fifty-four scholars and historians ranked Trump dead last, even below James Buchanan, whose disastrous Presidency dragged the nation into the bloody maw of the Civil War.

Two hundred and forty-eight years is a long throw for a constitutional republic, and throughout the course of it we’ve had our share of stinkers in the Oval Office. Still, when hundreds of experts in multiple surveys put a man in strong contention for the title of the Worst President in the Nation’s History, it says something about our respect for expertise that we decided to give the man another go.

Even if history hasn’t been a guiding light for voters in this election, it may yet offer some hints about what to expect next: in short, watch your wallet. If history is a guide, it might be worth remembering that America’s most ambitious and accomplished demagogues have also all been crooks.

In 1939, the U.S. Justice Department sent prosecutors to Louisiana to clean up the Huey Long political machine, which was still chugging along four years after Long’s murder. Part of Long’s legacy in the state was a magnificent Louisiana grift that became known as the “hot oil” scam. Long’s puppet governor and the bagman who used to collect Long’s cash bribes from state contractors each took a personal financial cut of every barrel of off-the-books (so-called “hot”) oil produced in the state.

One middleman testified about sending an express-mail package of forty-eight thousand dollars in one-thousand-dollar bills to Long’s bribe collector. The governor admitted that in his one term in office he pocketed almost five hundred thousand dollars (more than ten million in today’s dollars). The governor and the bagman went to prison, but the judge hearing the hot-oil case expressed doubt about whether any of the lower-level functionaries who had been press-ganged into the scheme really had a choice. “It is a matter of general and common knowledge that the state of Louisiana was more or less under a dictatorship,” he said.

If there was a rival for Long’s oratorical skill and demagogic power in the nineteen-thirties, it was Father Charles E. Coughlin, whose tens of millions of weekly radio listeners were treated to his frequent harangues against the “filthy gold standard,” which he ascribed to Jews and communists. Coughlin instead preached the virtues of what he called “Gentile silver.” (Throughout the 1930s, Charles E. Coughlin was one of the most influential men in the United States. He was a Catholic priest in the metro Detroit Michigan area who became politically active. Foreshadowing modern talk radio and televangelism.)

Although Coughlin never betrayed any personal stake in this line of pseudo-theological monetary invective, a U.S. Treasury audit in 1934 found that, alongside entities like Chase National Bank of Manhattan, one of the largest single holders of silver in the United States was an unmarried secretary in Royal Oak, Michigan: Miss Amy Collins. Collins turned out to be Coughlin’s secretary.

Coughlin’s office soon released a letter in Collins’s name, insisting that the purchase of those half a million ounces of silver was her own idea, pursued at her own initiative, and that “Neither Father Coughlin nor any other officer except myself”, had anything to do with it.

One of the underappreciated demagogues of the second half of the twentieth century was Vice-President Spiro Agnew*, whose meteoric rise from local Maryland politics to the White House was aided more than anything by admiration, among Nixon’s advisers, for his relentless invective against protesters and civil-rights groups. As Nixon’s Vice-President, Agnew developed his own zealous national following by training rhetorical fire on the press and, when he fell under criminal investigation, on the legal system.

In 1973, Agnew, facing the prospect of a forty-count felony indictment, was allowed to plead nolo contendere to a single count and escaped all the other charges in exchange for his resignation. Because Agnew’s nolo count was a tax-related charge, it’s sometimes forgotten that the bill of particulars against him described not run-of-the-mill tax fiddling but the sitting Vice-President of the United States literally taking envelopes full of cash at the White House and stuffing them into his desk.

In our own time, Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation has done more than anyone, anywhere, to remind us that authoritarian rule always entails thievery. Three years ago, as Navalny voluntarily returned to Russia after surviving an assassination attempt, he released a film titled “Putin’s Palace,” revealing evidence that the Russian leader had a secret billion-dollar Black Sea lair, which Navalny called “the biggest bribe in history.” (The Kremlin denied that the palace belonged to Putin.)

After Navalny’s death in an arctic Russian prison earlier this year, his foundation released a follow-up video, which showed hidden-camera footage of the inside of the palace, including plush bedrooms, a gaudy chapel, and a dirty construction trailer used by workers at the site. On a wall above a filthy toilet, someone had scrawled, “Lyokha [Alexei], you were right!”

The banner headline of Navalny’s leadership was his insistence that opponents of Putin’s regime must not be afraid. If Navalny himself could deny the regime his fear, as their persecution of him relentlessly escalated, then surely no one else should lend the regime their fear either. But the core of Navalny’s work against Putin was exposing his thievery from the Russian people.

Dictators and demagogues are thieves—here, there, always, and everywhere.

If history is allowed a word in this moment, let it be informed by the visionary antifascist and anti-authoritarian leaders of our time, but also by our own squalid experience with this kind of guy, the guy we’ve just put back in the White House. He starts the new gig while being legally barred from serving as an officer or a director in any New York corporation or from taking out loans with New York banks, and while the longtime C.F.O. of his company, convicted of tax fraud and perjury, is still adjusting to life outside jail. Here is a man who took time out of his Presidential campaign to launch not only a line of watches and sneakers and commemorative coins but also a new cryptocurrency scheme in which his partners are the self-proclaimed “dirtbag of the internet” and the entrepreneur behind Date Hotter Girls, L.L.C.

Let’s not be surprised about where this is heading.

We’ll shout down our own fear, yes. But we’ll also expose and humiliate thieves. History is here to help. Historians may or may not have the ear of the electorate, but the history of this era, at least, will be told. And, if past is prologue, it’s likely to be lurid. ♦

Published in the print edition of the November 18, 2024, issue, with the headline “Too Many Crooks.”

Spiro Agnew (1918-1996)

*My personal experience with Spiro Angew.  As a native Marylander who lived in Baltimore city and in Baltimore County, where the former Vice-President was once the county commissioner, before he became the state's governor. My mother was a widow who was trying to raise three children as a single parent.  She wanted to be a school crossing guard because the job allowed her to be home when her children were not in school.  At that time, in the 1960s, the school crossing guards were like an extenstion of the police department and they were selected based on recommendations and other good character qualifications.  But, when Spiro Agnew became the Baltimore County Commissioner, he fired my mother because she was a registered Democrat!  Fortunately, the undertaker, the man who buried my father, was a Maryland Republican.  He personally took my mother's petition to keep her job directly to Agnew, explaining how our family depended on my mother being able to care for us at home while working to earn more money.  At the time, me and my two siblings were too young to work.  Indeed, Mr. Brooks Bradley prevailed and Agnew revoked his decision so my mother kept her job.  But Agnew's horrible decision to fire my mother solely because she was a registered Democrat created nearly as much grief as experiencing the untimely death or my mother's husband and our father.