One Republican had especially blunt words as the clock ticked down to Election Day. He said he only supported Trump out of antipathy toward Hillary Clinton. “I’m doing so despite the fact that I think he’s a terrible human being.” Donald Trump is “absolutely not” a role model, the conservative leader declared. In fact, he is “[one] of the most flawed human beings ever to run for president in the history of the country.”
The speaker was South Carolina congressman Mick Mulvaney. Roughly twenty-four months later, Mick would become Donald Trump’s third chief of staff.
Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote what might be described as one of the earliest and most incisive “self-help” books of all time. Book Two of the tome opens with this advice:
When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own… and so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness.
Trump appointees would be wise to tape the emperor’s words at their bedsides, for life has gotten uglier inside the administration. Looking right and left, we can see the Steady Staters are mostly gone. What remains are more defenders than do-gooders in the political ranks; obsequious pleasers outnumber thoughtful public servants. One of the most visible signs of the devolution is the unwillingness of people around the president to stand up to him.
It’s important that advisors speak truth to power. Presidents have enough flatterers in their midst. What they need more than anything are people willing to present unvarnished facts and to challenge bad decisions. This is essentially what the Steady State tried to do. If advisors feed “spin” to the president instead, it’s a triple loss. The aide fails in his or her duty, the commander in chief is poorly served, and the country is worse off for it. Further still, making decisions based on fiction and not fact can create new problems for a president to solve, becoming a vicious cycle of misinformation-turned-mistake.
The Trump story is briskly moving into a fictional universe. Sometimes aides are afraid to tell President Trump what is really happening, or they buoy his belief that he can take actions that, in reality, he cannot. The result is that President Trump makes more untrue statements than he would otherwise and takes ill-advised courses of action detrimental to the nation. Staff don’t want to deliberately mislead him. More often than not, they make these mistakes because they want to seem supportive of Trump’s agenda, even when it doesn’t comport with reality. I can’t overstate how precarious it is for a president’s advisors to become an assemblage of servants.
Consider President Trump’s response to Hurricane Dorian, when he incorrectly stated that Alabama was in the storm’s path at a time when it wasn’t. The president refused to admit he was wrong and his information was outdated. He spent days unloading at the White House to anyone in earshot, insisting he was right about where it could have gone and whom it could have hit. The fury didn’t take long to spill into public view. Trump whipped out an old poster board of the storm track in the Oval Office, which had been marked up with a Sharpie to make it look like the storm was still projected to hit Alabama. Trump was mocked further, which infuriated him more. All the while Americans in the storm’s path wondered what the hell their president was doing. I could only shake my head.
Rather than urge him to issue a short correction, too many aides in the West Wing were eager to help him perpetuate the lie. Trump made phone calls to get the answers he wanted. They heeded the call. He told them to issue statements disputing reality. They did. He asked for data points to make it seem like he’d been right. They complied. By the end, it was like a game of Twister gone wrong; the truth was so tied up in knots, no one knew what the hell we were talking about anymore. The poor folks at the weather agencies were badly demoralized by their first exposure to the common-yet-frightening White House spin cycle.
A conservative time traveler from 2016 would find the whole charade amusing, if it weren’t so serious. “Didn’t you fools hear the warnings?” he or she might say. “Republicans anticipated this. We predicted this is precisely what a Trump administration would look like!” They would be correct, of course. GOP leaders were accurate in describing the man and prophetic in forecasting the outcome of this presidency. The validity of their words hasn’t changed. What changed is their minds.
Gun Fight
Donald Trump brought an assortment of hangers-on into the White House. He collected assistants throughout the years, building an island of misfit apprentices. During the campaign, he gathered more. His operation was a magnet for third-rate talent, attracting the political equivalent of amateur day traders, the kind who liked to walk the line between risk-taking and indictments. They all tried to come into the White House with President Trump, but luckily, mature voices stepped in to push many of the lackeys aside. For a time it worked. But in Trump’s world, the descent of good people is as absolute as the law of gravity. The rise of the Steady State was followed by its inevitable fall.
Today a third category of advisors is ascendant: the Apologists.
The shift occurred at the end of year two. As the Steady State crumbled, White House budget director Mick Mulvaney was tapped as acting chief of staff, coming a long way from vehement Trump critic to close presidential aide. Despite telling colleagues he was not interested in the job, he angled for months to get it. Mulvaney is a survivor. He saw opportunity as John Kelly’s star dimmed. The acting chief confided in friends not long after taking the position that he didn’t understand why Kelly loathed it so much. The perks were great (he became especially fond of visiting Camp David), and he got to be in the thick of it whenever he wanted, while stepping back when he didn’t.
Mulvaney brought a new approach to managing the West Wing. He didn’t manage it. His guiding maxim was: Let Trump be Trump. Mick’s outlook—don’t challenge the president’s impulses, just make them work—represented a sharp departure from his predecessor. No longer would officials play back-in-the-box with the president’s awful ideas. Instead, we were urged to focus on making bad ideas more palatable, to soften their rough edges. This kept the president happy and his acting chief of staff out of Trump’s line of fire. The only problem with the approach is that Trump has not changed since the time Mulvaney blasted him as a “terrible human being.” So, in effect, Mulvaney’s raison d’être is to help a “terrible human being” be maybe a little less terrible, if he can swing it. If not, well, that’s okay, too.
With the guardrails gone, “year three” of the Trump administration might as well have been announced as “season three.” Old controversies previously averted struck back with a vengeance, and the cast of characters grew seedier. Aside from the Syria withdrawal, the president resumed his “shutdown” mantra. With fewer and fewer aides to persuade him otherwise—and a chief of staff eager to accommodate—Trump decided to close the government and demand more money for his border wall. Few in the administration or in Congress supported the plan. It was senseless for a variety of reasons, namely that it didn’t appear the president had the leverage he thought he did.
The result was a foreseeable disaster. Nobody in the White House had a plan for ending the impasse, and nobody wanted to be responsible for finding one. “This place is so fucked up,” an official on the ad hoc shut-down team complained weeks into the government closure, as everyone else watched helplessly. “There is literally no one in charge here.” As evidence of the bedlam, Vice President Pence was scheduled to lead White House negotiations to cut a deal. Rather than sit down with members of Congress who could broker a path forward, a meeting was arranged between Pence and their staff members. The legislators were out of town on recess. It was an embarrassing display that Pence had to endure with a smile. He was, unfortunately, used to that.