Jiang Minqin's Perspective: Trump's Gilded Age and the Kiss of Death

Fake gold is used to gild real gold, but if it's real gold, it doesn't need gilding. Ten years in Chang'an to get one rank, why bother with an empty stomach and high aspirations? - Tang Dynasty, Li Shen <Answer to Zhang Xiaobiao> In 1873, Mark Twain and Charles D. Warner co-authored 'The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today', using a thin layer of gold leaf to satirize post-Civil War speculation, greed, land flipping, and political corruption in the United States. So-called 'gilding' has never been gold, but rather covering cheap metals with a shiny surface: dazzling from afar, but rusty, nepotistic, and morally fractured up close. A century and a half later, the Reflection Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial has become the most accurate sequel to this novel. Trump initially stated that renovating the Reflection Pool would cost approximately $1.5 million; by June 2026, the project cost had exceeded $16 million, with approximately $14.7 million spent on repainting and waterproofing, and another $1.7 million on water purification systems. Trump called the new coating 'American flag blue' and claimed the project could last a century; but soon after the water was refilled, algae overran, the coating peeled in places, and after draining, it was clear that the original blue had faded to gray. By late July, the pool was drained again for repairs, less than two months after the 'century project' was supposed to be completed. Trump blamed vandals, claiming someone had made a 350-foot-long scratch. The National Park Service did report that someone had allegedly cut the new coating with a blade or sharp object; a former Olympic lightweight rower and several others were charged, but the defendants all pleaded not guilty. Existing judicial data can only prove that individual acts of vandalism occurred, not that these acts caused the pool bottom to fade, algae to grow, or the coating to peel in multiple places, nor can they exonerate the problems of rushing the job, no-bid contracts, material selection, and quality supervision. In fact, this was not the first time the Reflection Pool had cost a fortune. In 2012, the Obama administration invested approximately $34 million to rebuild the pool structure and water supply system, which also faced difficulties in managing algae after completion. While the two projects cannot be simply compared, they both remind us that the value of public projects is not just in whether they shine at the ribbon-cutting ceremony, but in whether their design, procurement, maintenance, and responsibility can stand the test of time. What is truly expensive is not the government's mistakes, but its refusal to acknowledge them; what is truly dangerous is not the failure of the project, but the gradual loss of the system's ability to correct failures. The English idiom 'Kiss of Death' perfectly describes this paradox. Early cultural prototypes of the 'Kiss of Death' can be traced back to the Bible, where Judas identified Jesus with a kiss, leading to his arrest; after the 1940s, English began using it to describe something that seems friendly but actually foreshadows failure. The execution kiss in gangster movies and popular culture further reinforced this image: lips approaching like a favor, but leaving a death notice. Recently, New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall described some of Trump's second-term policy interventions as 'Trump's Kiss of Death'. This is not superstitiously believing that everything Trump touches is doomed to fail, but rather proposing a governance hypothesis worth examining: when public projects, tariff negotiations, war decisions, industrial subsidies, sports governance, and election administration are highly personalized, short-term political clout often rises rapidly, while institutional procedures, policy predictability, and long-term governance costs may deteriorate simultaneously. This year's World Cup provided a nearly absurd example. American forward Folarin Balogun was red-carded and should have been suspended for one game, but Trump personally called FIFA President Gianni Infantino to request a review; FIFA subsequently postponed the suspension for a year, allowing Balogun to play. UEFA, the Belgian Football Association, and football officials from several countries criticized the move for undermining the certainty of rules and sports autonomy; however, the U.S. team ultimately lost 1-4 to Belgium. The Reflection Pool will eventually be drained, and the game will eventually end; what remains is not the leader's past interventions, but whether the system can still answer: who the rules apply to, and who is responsible. The 'Kiss of Death' is therefore not the accidental failure of a single policy, but a governance pattern that may recur. It comes from three mutually reinforcing decision-making mechanisms: groupthink eliminates dissent; the escalation of commitment effect blocks the exit; and real estate developer-style transactionalism repackages institutions, allies, enterprises, wars, and even democratic procedures as commodities that can be priced, traded, and renegotiated. Echo Chamber: When Loyalty Replaces Reality Testing In 1972, Yale University psychologist Irving L. Janis proposed the concept of 'groupthink'. What concerned him was not that decision-makers suddenly became ignorant, but how capable people in highly cohesive, authority-dominated groups abandoned critical judgment to maintain consensus. Janis analyzed decisions such as Pearl Harbor, the Bay of Pigs, and the Vietnam War, pointing out that pressure, leader preferences, self-censorship, and 'illusions of unanimity' could all cause erroneous information to circulate within the power center. When a leader's preferences gradually override institutions, dissent is seen as disloyalty, and silence is mistaken for consensus. Over time, the decision-making circle forms a closed echo chamber: everyone only hears their own voice, and everyone also believes that is the whole world. The latest Varieties of Democracy Institute (V-Dem) database, version 16, was released in March 2026, covering 531 indicators and 251 indices. Its long-term comparative research shows that the expansion of executive power, media suppression, and the weakening of horizontal accountability are recurring institutional phenomena in democratic decline; the V-Dem also lists media freedom suppression as one of the most commonly used tools by authoritarian leaders in the past 25 years. This data cannot alone prove that a particular president has transformed democracy into authoritarianism, but it is enough to suggest: when executive power demands that the judiciary, media, civil service, and professional institutions submit to a single narrative, the institutional warning light has already come on. Trump's intervention in the electoral system is a microcosm of this risk. As of this year, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's 'Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements' (SAVE) database has compared at least 67 million voter registrations, preliminarily flagging approximately 24,000 records as 'potentially non-citizens' and approximately 384,000 records as 'potentially deceased'. But these are only leads to be investigated, not confirmed violators; there have already been legal citizens mistakenly listed as non-citizens or deceased. Even if all the flags are ultimately verified, potential non-citizens account for only about 400 out of every 1 million registrations, far from enough to directly prove nationwide organizational fraud. On the other hand, New Jersey did experience a serious administrative error worth addressing: between 2023 and 2024, a software glitch caused approximately 6,600 driver's license applicants who had declared they were not citizens to be mistakenly registered as voters, with fewer than 400 of them having actually voted. This is not a minor issue that can be ignored; the state government should complete a case-by-case investigation and institutional repair; but currently, there is no evidence that it changed any election results, nor can it be inferred from a state-level software error to a nationwide partisan conspiracy. Reuters reviewed federal court data since 1996 and found only 129 cases prosecuted under the 'non-citizen voting' provision, with 73 people convicted or pleading guilty, and none of the cases were accused by the prosecution of involving a coordinated election conspiracy. Many cases stemmed from misunderstandings of qualifications, incorrect registrations, or the belief that permanent residency includes voting rights. This does not mean that violations do not exist, but rather that scale, intent, and institutional impact must be examined separately, and individual cases cannot replace evidence. The Trump administration has sued approximately 30 states to obtain non-public voter data; as of July 22, in the 16 cases that have been decided, the Department of Justice lost all of them, and some cases are still on appeal. These rulings are not a declaration that voter rolls do not need to be checked, but rather a requirement that executive power comply with privacy laws, federalism, and due process. Normal evidence-based governance is to first obtain data and then form conclusions; first identify the scale of the problem and then choose policy tools. Echo chamber politics reverses the order: first declare that the election has been manipulated, then require the administrative system to find cases that support the narrative; first determine that the leader is always correct, then redefine what constitutes evidence. Therefore, the problem is not just that 'policy-directed evidence' replaces 'evidence-directed policy', but that the state apparatus may change from a tool for uncovering the truth to a machine that provides confirmation for pre-existing truths. When leaders believe loyalty is more important than professionalism, when staff believe silence is safer than questioning, and when the government believes propaganda is more effective than evidence, democracy does not collapse immediately, but gradually loses its most precious ability—the ability to let different opinions enter decision-making. Escalation of Commitment: Neither Defeat Nor War Can Admit Defeat If groupthink answers 'why no one dares to say they're wrong', then the escalation of commitment effect answers 'why no one dares to admit they're wrong'.