Interview
Michael
Lewis and John Lanchester: ‘Trump is a trust-destroying machine’
Killian Fox
Before the
2024 election, the two authors tried to stop Donald Trump’s plan to gut the US
federal government with an investigation that transformed the image of civil
servants from bureaucrats to superheroes. Now their worst fears have been
realised
Killian Fox
Sun 16 Mar
2025 11.00 GMT
In late
2023, as the US presidential election was heaving into view, the author Michael
Lewis called up six writers he admired – five Americans and one Briton – and
asked if they’d like to contribute to an urgent new series he was putting
together for the Washington Post. At the time, Lewis was hearing talk that if
Donald Trump got back into power, his administration would unleash a programme
of cuts that would rip the federal government to shreds. Lewis decided to
launch a pre-emptive strike. The series, entitled Who Is Government?, would
appear in the weeks running up to the election. Its purpose, Lewis explains
over a Zoom call from his book-lined study in Berkeley, California, “was to
inoculate the federal workforce against really mindless attacks”. It would do
this by valorising public service and, as he puts it, “jarring the stereotype
people had in their heads about civil servants”.
Other
writers might shrink away from the notion that they could restrain a US
president with a handful of essays, but Lewis has an outsized sway. Author of
such mega-bestsellers as Liar’s Poker and Flash Boys, he has a knack for
writing about arcane concepts in business, finance and economics in ways that
don’t just enlighten the uninitiated but whip along with the pace of an airport
thriller. Hollywood loves him: Moneyball, The Blind Side and The Big Short all
got turned into hit movies crammed with A-listers. So when Lewis speaks out
about the forces shaping our world, even if it concerns something as seemingly
unsexy as the federal government, people tend to listen.
The British
writer John Lanchester, who contributed a standout piece to the series, got a
glimpse of Lewis’s appeal when they first met in 2014. It was behind the stage
at the London School of Economics. Lanchester had agreed to interview Lewis
about Flash Boys, which plumbs the murky world of high-frequency trading. “Not
only was the venue sold out,” Lanchester recalls, “but they’d had to add on
another room at the theatre for people to watch, and that was sold out too. I
remember thinking: ‘There’s a tube strike on, it’s absolutely pissing down,
nobody’s going to come.’ But not a bit of it. The place was packed.”
Lanchester
is no slouch himself when it comes to turning knotty financial matters into
page-turners. An acclaimed novelist (The Debt to Pleasure, Capital) who used to
review restaurants for the Guardian, in 2010 he published a book about the
financial crash – Whoops!: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay – that
gave a sweeping overview of the global economy while mercilessly skewering its
absurdities. Now he regularly takes his filleting knife to topics ranging from
Brexit to cryptocurrencies for the London Review of Books.
Since their
2014 meeting, the pair have become good friends, with an odd-couple dynamic
that’s entertaining to witness. Lewis is hyper-engaged and talks in a confident
New Orleans drawl about the iniquities of Trump and Elon Musk; Lanchester,
joining us from his kitchen in London, seems more mild-mannered at first but
his easy-going demeanour hides a biting wit. They clearly enjoy each other’s
work and company. “I make a point of inviting him for dinner whenever I’m in
London,” says Lewis, “and I try to get him over here whenever I can. And of
course I looped him into this series …”
Who Is
Government? isn’t Lewis’s first foray into the workings of the US civil
service. In 2017, soon after Trump got in for the first time, Lewis had an
insight into just how unprepared the new president was to take over the US
government’s various branches. “The Obama administration had spent six months
preparing a series of briefings for the transition,” he recalls, “but then
Trump won and he just didn’t show up. So I decided to fly to Washington and
find out what went on inside the government.” He wrote up his findings in three
articles for Vanity Fair, later gathering them into the 2018 bestselling book
The Fifth Risk. Among the people he spoke to who’d been neglected by the Trump
team were officials tending the US nuclear arsenal.
As the 2024
election approached, amid warnings that Trump might do much worse than neglect
the civil service if he got back into power, Lewis decided to revisit the
government’s inner workings. Joining him for the ride this time was Dave
Eggers, who reported on a team of scientists probing for extraterrestrial life
from Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. In turn, Geraldine Brooks
profiled online sleuths at the Internal Revenue Service who uncover evidence of
cybercrime and child sexual abuse in the darker regions of the net, and W Kamau
Bell wrote touchingly about his Black goddaughter’s work as a paralegal at the
justice department.
For his
part, Lewis tracked down a mining engineer at the labour department named
Christopher Mark, whose research had helped prevent fatal roof falls in
underground mines. He also wrote about Heather Stone, a rare-diseases expert at
the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), who had saved lives by fast-tracking
authorisation for an experimental drug to treat potentially lethal balamuthia
infections.
Lanchester,
meanwhile, opted to write not about a person but a number – the consumer price
index, a fiendishly complex statistic that acts as the main official measure of
inflation. The lack of a human protagonist doesn’t make the piece any less
absorbing, and Lanchester has fun uncovering the staggering amount of data on
seemingly insignificant matters (such as the average length of the adult bedbug
or the average annual income for a nuclear medicine technologist in Albany, New
York) that the federal government hoovers up every year.
The overall
effect of the series, just published as a book –Who Is Government?: The Untold
Story of Public Service – is to transform civil servants from faceless
bureaucrats into selfless superheroes. It’s a cracking read but sadly, contrary
to Lewis’s hopes, it did nothing to prevent the flurry of devastating cuts that
Trump and Musk, via his “department of government efficiency” (Doge), have
inflicted on the government over the past couple of months. Of the 3
million-plus federal workers, it’s estimated that more than 20,000 have already
been fired. Many of the subjects of the book are at risk of losing their jobs.
“Maybe we’re
in early stages in the war, but it’s amazing how little effect the series has
had,” Lewis says ruefully. “Not only have I not heard a peep from Doge, but I
haven’t had any sense that they were worried about what I might write. Though I
did send Elon Musk an email asking if I can move in and watch what he was
doing. He didn’t respond.”
Musk isn’t
the only tech billionaire behaving erratically. From conception to publication,
the Washington Post series had the full support of the newspaper’s owner. “Jeff
Bezos was very excited to be covering the government in any way you could,”
says Lewis. “Every piece, he’d call [then opinion editor] David Shipley, and
Shipley would call me, saying: ‘Bezos loves this thing.’ But things have
changed.” The day before our conversation, in a move widely interpreted as a
knee-bend to Trump, Bezos announced that the newspaper’s opinion section would
now be dedicated to supporting “personal liberties and free markets”. Shipley
resigned before the announcement.
Now Lewis
and Lanchester are looking back at a collection of essays conceived in a more
hopeful time and wondering what will become of the departments they wrote about
– and the country that relies on them. They are not optimistic. Over the course
of our 90-minute conversation towards the end of last month, they talked about
the motivation behind Trump and Musk’s war on the civil service, its probable
effects on the US and the lessons the UK should be taking.
You say in
the intro to Who Is Government? that “the sort of people who become civil
servants tend not to want or seek attention”. Was it hard to find interesting
people to write about?
ML: It took
about a nanosecond. And I think there’s a reason for that: there are just a lot
of great subjects [in the federal government], and the minute they face
existential risk, they become really interesting. They’re weird and different.
They’re not interested in money, for a start. They’ve got some purpose in their
lives.
Was the
entire series written before Trump’s re-election?
ML: All
except for the last piece [about rare diseases expert Heather Stone], which was
conceived before, but I didn’t write it until after. What I’m doing now is
getting all the writers to go back to their characters to ask what’s happening
to them. Both my characters look like they’re about to be fired. Heather has
been told that the whole enterprise of dealing with infectious disease is going
to be axed from the FDA. And [mining engineer] Chris Mark texted me the other
day to say: “They’ve cut our purchasing authority and they want us to hand in
our credit cards.” So if they’re not gone, most of our characters are disabled.
It’s like watching a toddler loose inside of a nuclear reactor pushing buttons.
You two are watching from afar. Are you watching the end of our democracy? Or
are you watching some kind of false jeopardy situation?
JL: Well, we
had an exchange over email about this, and I’ve been thinking about what you
said, Michael, that we’ll probably muddle through but we are playing Russian
roulette with democracy. That image lodged in my head. And the thing that is
deeply shocking and surprising is that nobody seems to give a shit about [the
government cuts].
The cuts are
being made in the name of efficiency but it looks more like an ideological
purge. Is that how you see it?
ML: I don’t
think it’s one person’s will being exerted; it’s a combination of Trump, Musk
and Russell Vought, who’s now the director of the office of management and
budget. He was the architect of that Project 2025 book and he’s a Christian
nationalist-slash-libertarian, whatever that is. Trump is the easiest to grok.
He’s a trust-destroying machine. He needs chaos where nobody trusts anybody and
then there’s a weird level playing field, and he excels in that environment.
Musk is like
an addict. He’s addicted to the attention – he’s stuck his finger in the social
media socket and his brain is fried
Michael
Lewis
My simple
view of Musk is that he’s like an addict. He’s addicted to the attention, the
drama – he’s stuck his finger in the social media socket and his brain is
fried. He’s probably got cheerleaders, his little Silicon Valley crowd, telling
him he’s doing a great thing, but most of them don’t know anything about it or
the consequences. Vought’s the only one, I think, with a clear vision, but it’s
a weird vision – really drastically minimum government. Those are the threads I
see of what’s going on, and the backdrop is that they can do anything and the
polls don’t move – people here don’t seem to care.
But isn’t it
only a matter of time before people do start to care… once the effects of the
cuts kick in?
ML: The
pessimistic response is that, when things go wrong, there’ll be a war of
narratives. The Trump narrative will inevitably say something like: “These
bureaucrats screwed it up,” and it creates even more mistrust in the thing that
you actually need to repair. I do think we’re going to muddle through. But I
don’t think Trump’s ever going to get blamed in the ways he ought to. And
whoever comes and fixes it is never going to get the credit they should.
JL: When you
look at the historical analogies to this kind of collective delusion, it’s
quite hard to think of a way of recovering from losing a sense of an agreed
consensus reality. The only historical examples I can think of is, basically,
you lose a catastrophic war. You know, the Germans lose and they wake up and
they have a reckoning with their past. But that’s historically quite rare and
hard to imagine … But maybe that’s too dark. Maybe what happens is specific
impacts arise from specific programmes being cut that make people think: “Oh,
actually, that’s not such a great idea.”
A clip just
circulated of Musk talking about the US Agency for International Development
(USAid) and he said something like: “Oh yeah, we made a couple little mistakes,
like we briefly cut Ebola prevention there for just a second, then we brought
it back again.”
JL: And then
I saw someone who ran the USAid Ebola response during one of the outbreaks
saying: “That’s flatly not true [that Musk restored the Ebola response].” Musk
talks loudly about fraud and theft in government, but these things aren’t fraud
and theft – they’re just programmes they don’t like. In fact I haven’t actually
seen anything that you could with a straight face categorise as fraud – have
you, Michael?
ML: There’s
almost no worse place to be trying to engage in fraud or theft than the US
government, because there are so many eyes on you. When you take a federal
employee out to lunch, they won’t let you pay for their sandwich – they’re so
terrified. In fact it’s far easier to engage in fraud and theft in a Wall
Street bank or a Silicon Valley startup, and there’s probably much more waste
too.
Has either
of you met Musk?
ML: I have
not. I have lots of one degree of separations. Walter Isaacson, who wrote
Musk’s biography, is an old friend. I basically watched him do that project – I
followed it blow by blow.
JL: Isaacson
basically lived with Musk for, what, nine months, and there’s not a single
commentary on politics at any point in the whole book. In 2022, Musk was still
a Democrat. It’s just utterly bizarre. And I think part of the frenzy and
vehemence comes from an extraordinary naivety about [government]. He actually
doesn’t know anything about it, and he didn’t care about it until about 10
minutes ago.
One thing
that strikes me about Doge is how adversarial it is without it having to be.
You could run a project like this, unleashing a roomful of 20-year-olds on the
systems of government, without saying that everyone who works in federal
government is a criminal. You could just ask: “How could the systems be made to
work better?” Because $7tn [the approximate annual budget of the federal
government] is quite a lot of money to spend and it’d be astonishing if there
wasn’t some waste in there. But you could do it without making people
frightened.
And it
worries me, because lots of things that happen in the US come back over the
Atlantic. It happened with Reagan and Thatcher. It happened with Clinton
providing the template for New Labour. So I suspect a version of this is going
to come back over here.
If the UK is
going to do a zero-based review of government spending, let’s do it without
framing civil servants as the enemy
John
Lanchester
What lessons
should the UK be taking from this?
JL: Well,
that’s one of them. If we were going to do what they call a zero-based review
of government spending, let’s do it without framing them as the enemy, because
it’s deeply unhelpful. Also, I wouldn’t be astonished if this attack on DEI
[diversity, equity and inclusion in companies and organisations] came over. I
think we should brace for impact on that one.
For your
essay, John, why did you decide to write about a number instead of a human
being?
JL: It’s
partly intellectual vanity, but I really like the challenge in writing about
structures and systems. We’re hardwired to like stories about people, but a lot
of the most important stories in the world don’t have individual people as
their central character. We’re very resistant to the idea that we don’t have
agency as individuals.
Your writing
on economics arose from the research you did for your novel Capital, didn’t it?
JL: Yeah,
that’s right. I’d been following the financial crisis and ended up knowing a
lot about it, so I wrote a nonfiction book [Whoops!] in order to quarantine
that information, because one of the problems with research from the fiction
point of view is that you end up having to use it. It’s very difficult to
research a topic and then say: “You know what, that doesn’t really belong in
the book.” But finance is difficult to dramatise because of the level of detail
involved. It’s kind of anti-erotic in fiction to just explain things.
Michael, in
the other direction, have you ever come upon a story that didn’t quite work as
reportage and you wished you had a novelist’s toolkit to turn it into fiction?
ML: No, but
I have had moments where I thought: “This story is not mine because I’m just
not equipped to write it.” And I wrote one of them – a book about Amos Tversky
and Daniel Kahneman, the two Israeli psychologists [2016’s The Undoing
Project]. I had that story land in my lap, with privileged access, and I spent
eight years arguing with myself [about whether] I was the person to do it. I
was sure that someone else better equipped – a subject-matter specialist –
would come along and write the book. Then the people I had interviewed started
dying off and I realised that no one was.
JL: With
quite a lot of these stories, the subject-matter expert is precisely the person
who can’t tell the story.
ML: That’s
right. They don’t have the childlike wonder about it all. They don’t ask the
simple questions. because they’re too deep in it … But no, I’ve never been
frustrated by my lack of novelistic flair, and I never had a strong desire to
write a novel. My literary frustration is all in screenwriting. I’ve had a very
successful career as a failed screenwriter. I’ve been paid over and over to do
these things, and they never got made.
The world of
screenwriting is a profound mystery, because you see all the shit they make.
What’s the process? You’re turning down these things and making that? I worked
on an adaptation of my last novel, The Wall, but then Apple said: “Really
sorry, we have a competing project.” The competing project was called
Extrapolations and I’ll give you a cash prize if you can get through a single
episode. They spent tens and tens of millions on it. And it’s off-the-scale,
unbelievably, face-meltingly bad.
One problem
for writers now is that there’s just such a blizzard of extraordinary news. How
do you get a foothold and decide what to write about?
JL: Perhaps
this is more a matter of temperament than anything else, but I’m feeling that I
have to step back a bit until it’s clear what the shape of it is, because my
hunch would be some form of horrific implosion and the wheels falling off and
chaos ensuing. But I thought that last time that Trump was president.
ML: I’m
going to Washington for much of April, and I have a character in mind, but I
want to test it. It’s kind of a dark, funny book that I want to write, and I’ve
got to see if this character can sustain that. Generally, I’m with John in that
I like to wait and see. I feel like my role in the war is sniper. Don’t give
away your position. You’re going to get one shot at this. Wait until you get
the clean shot and take it. But I don’t think we’re far away from having the
clean shot.
JL: Given
that you were on to [the possibility of Trump getting re-elected and gutting
the federal government] when we spoke 18 months ago, Michael, are you surprised
by how this has played out? Is it basically what you imagined, or is it
weirder, more extreme?
ML: I’d
never have predicted this. I know Trump said that he could go out on Fifth
Avenue and shoot somebody and the supporters would still be with him …
JL: I
believe that.
I didn’t
think Trump would do what he’s doing materially to his own base. It isn’t the
behaviour of someone who is maximising his political future
Michael
Lewis
ML: But I
didn’t think he’d do what he’s doing materially to his own base. I mean, two
days ago he partially gutted the veterans’ healthcare system. This is the
healthcare system in a lot of the rural US. That’s his base. And who would have
predicted the alliance with Musk? Not me. I would have thought they’d have a
falling out after three days, that there just isn’t enough oxygen in the room
for both of them. If you’re looking for the simplest explanation for what’s
going on, if Trump was a Russian asset, I don’t know if he’d behave any
differently from how he’s behaving. I’m not saying he is, but it isn’t the
behaviour of someone who is maximising his political future – it’s someone
who’s maximising the damage to society. And why would you do that? He was
supposed to get rid of illegal immigrants, stop inflation, cut taxes, whatever.
But [gutting the civil service] has become the central feature of his
administration. I just didn’t think he cared that much about it.
Which is the
real Bezos; the one who was supportive of this series celebrating public
service or the one who’s now dedicating the Washington Post’s opinion pages to
championing free markets?
ML: I feel
some sympathy towards Bezos. I really like him, personally. He’s fun to talk
to. He seems to be basically sane. He’s not obviously megalomaniacal or even
that self-absorbed. He’s really interested in the world around him. He makes
sense on a lot of subjects. So I think the real Bezos is not a bad guy.
But he’s
done a bad thing. And it’s curious why. You would think, if you had $200bn,
that you’d have some fuck-you money. I mean, how much do you have to have to be
able to live by your principles? There’s some curve that bends, and at some
point, when you have so much money, you’re back to being as vulnerable as
someone who has almost nothing. He’s behaving like someone who has nothing,
like he’s just scared of Trump. I think if you were with him and watching every
step, you’d be watching an interesting psychological process where he’s
persuaded himself that what he’s doing is good. He’s rationalised his
behaviour, but his behaviour is really appalling.
JL: How
fucking craven do you have to be, if you can lose 99% of your net worth and
still be worth $2bn and you can’t say “fuck you” to proto-fascists? The thing
that is frightening is that people like him, men like him, are looking into the
future and basically assuming that the US is going to become a kind of fascist
state. Because, I mean, $2bn is enough to say “fuck you”. But if the US is now
going to become a Maga [Make America Great Again] theocracy, and we just had
the last election we’re ever going to have, then maybe he’s positioning for
that. I don’t know that to be true, but that’s my darkest version.
Who Is
Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service, edited by Michael Lewis, is
published by Allen Lane (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your
copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
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