Subtle Tools: The Dismantling of American Democracy from the War on Terror to Donald Trump

"Despite assertions about the unprecedented nature of his presidency, few of Trump's policies have been novel; many had been proposed in varied form throughout the latter years of the 20th century. Yet it was not until 9/11 that many of these policies started to take hold. In this intellectual and political history, Greenberg traces the evolving language, law, governance and policy that began to redefine the nation in the wake of 9/11 and shows how these took a transformative step forward under Donald Trump. Rampant executive power, exceptionalism in foreign affairs, racism and xenophobia, disinformation, and a disdain for the law-all found secure footing initially after the attacks of 9/11 and with new energy and rootedness in the era of Trump. Ultimately, Greenberg shows how Trump repurposed the war on terror playbook and turned it on democracy itself. The book outlines the "subtle tools" that were put into place in the wake of 9/11 and that paved the way for Trump's politics today: imprecision and vagueness in language, secrecy and the hiding of facts, bureaucratic porousness, and the abandonment of norms. Greenberg shows, for instance, how the all-encompassing language used in the Authorizations for Use of Military Force (which ultimately authorized the Iraq War) became characteristic of other policies, providing legal grounding for previously illegal practices like the indefinite detention of "detainees" at Guantanamo Bay and of children and adults at the southern border. These tools--subtle enough to evade public scrutiny--hold the key, Greenberg argues, to understanding the trajectory of our democracy over the last two decades. In mapping out democratic vulnerabilities, the book also points to the reforms that would be needed to strengthen and ground American governance. Overall, the result is a book deeply grounded in interview, legal documents, and archival work that finds a new origin point for the story of the Trump-era and reveals the deep connection between the war and terror and our current political life"--