Pressure mounted on the president to give up. Government employees were missing paychecks, and even junior aides around the White House fretted about making ends meet. Many of us thought the whole ordeal was a waste of time and worried about the compounding effects across government. Information was shared with the president about the growing consequences of a prolonged government closure. Then the media reported that US airports would soon take a hit, snarling travel across the country. That did it. Shortly after, the president caved and reopened the government with little to show for the debacle. Trump didn’t secure the “billions” of dollars he demanded for his wall and wound up with a political black eye to kick off the new Congress—a very bad and very avoidable start to the year.
We’ve continued down this dirt road, with one unforced error after another. Decisions that had previously been teed up carefully for the president, such as the future of the US presence in Afghanistan, are now being shanked into the rough. Donald Trump is so anxious to withdraw from the country that he nearly brought Taliban leaders to Camp David for a summit to agree to a deal on the eve of the September 11 anniversary, infuriating Trump appointees who weren’t informed. Remember, we’re talking about the same people who harbored the terrorist group that murdered nearly three thousand Americans and who are responsible for killing or injuring hundreds of US soldiers. They don’t deserve to step on US soil, let alone be welcomed by the president of the United States at a retreat used to huddle with American allies. Yet there are fewer people left to reject the folly of these ideas, and those that do are written off by the president as disloyal.
The demise of the Steady State also means the culture of the executive branch has returned to a darker place. Infighting, which surged in the early months of the administration but eventually leveled out, has returned with a literal vengeance. You may think you have an ally, only to find the same person talked to the president about your potential firing. Ambitious staffers are jockeying for position as more people are either purged or flee the building. Vacancies mean potential promotions, creating an incentive for overzealous climbers to undercut their colleagues in order to advance. Staffers threw sharp elbows to make their way into Mulvaney’s office, and in places such as the Pentagon, mid-level political appointees fought for jobs to get in close proximity to General Mattis’s replacement, acting secretary Pat Shanahan, and then later to his replacement’s replacement, Mark Esper, who took the job when Shanahan was unceremoniously kicked out by Trump.
First-time hires are naive about the level of drama until they encounter it. I remember a new Trump appointee attempting to assert independence from a questionable White House policy by leaking internal deliberations to the press to distance himself. The problem was that he threw a more veteran and ruthless political staffer under the bus. “That was a bad move. He brought a knife to a gun fight,” a communications aide said after reading the news article. “That fucker will be dead by morning.” If the Trump administration is good at anything, it knows how to eat its own.
The cannibalistic culture is deterring good people from coming on board. Mick has struggled to source qualified, outside candidates for essential positions that would have been sought by big-name politicians across the country only a few years ago. Making matters worse, Trump prefers to go with his gut on new appointees. He is too impatient to vet candidates to determine whether they are the right fit for the job.
The result is that the president’s tweet-picked nominees shrink in the spotlight and appear unqualified—because they often are. Consider the time the president announced Texas congressman John Ratcliffe would be his nominee as director of National Intelligence. The congressman had no real intelligence background. His only qualification was that he was a staunch defender of the president on television. Ratcliffe withdrew himself when it became apparent that the Republican-led Senate didn’t share Trump’s enthusiasm.
With the president’s four-year term hitting the homestretch, gun fights and rivalries are thinning the herd. As a result, the administration has lost its real leaders, and unsavory figures are racing to the forefront. The public doesn’t recognize many of their names yet, but they will eventually. You will see them get subpoenaed and watch them testify. History will record the rise of the Apologists, and, one day, perhaps one day soon, chronicle their fall.
Why the Worst Get on Top
In the midst of the Second World War, Austrian intellectual Friedrich Hayek published The Road to Serfdom, describing how free societies descend into totalitarianism. Hayek’s tenth chapter, “Why the Worst Get on Top,” offered a description for how “the unscrupulous are likely to be more successful in a society tending toward totalitarianism.”
It’s not accurate to say Donald Trump is a dictator. Commentators who make such claims shouldn’t be taken seriously. However, it’s fair to say the president possesses clear authoritarian tendencies like very few presidents before him. Trump’s attempt to mimic the strongmen he admires has certainly led us to take steps down the road Hayek mentions.
The Austrian thinker listed three main reasons why, over time, an authoritarian personality is likely to be surrounded not by the best “but rather by the worst elements of any society.” President Trump’s inner circle has increasingly checked each of those boxes.
First, Hayek explained, an autocrat needs a group with questionable morals. The cohort will also tend to be undereducated. “If we wish to find a high degree of uniformity in outlook, we have to descend to the regions of lower moral and intellectual standards where the more primitive instincts prevail.” Check.
Second, the autocrat must expand the size of the subservient group. He “must gain the support of the docile and gullible, who have no strong convictions of their own but are ready to accept a ready-made system of values if it is only drummed into their ears sufficiently loudly and frequently.” Check.
Finally, Hayek said, authoritarian types need to weld the group together by appealing to their basic human weaknesses. “It seems to be easier for people to agree on a negative program—on the hatred of an enemy, on the envy of the better off—than on any positive task. The contrast between the ‘we’ and the ‘they’ is consequently always employed by those who seek the allegiance of huge masses.” Check.
The end result is the core team will be faithful in implementing the leader’s policies. “To be a useful assistant in the running of a totalitarian state,” Hayek wrote, “it is not enough that a man should be prepared to accept specious justification of vile deeds.” He must be prepared to carry them out. “Since it is the supreme leader who alone determines the ends, his instruments must have no moral convictions of their own. They must, above all, be unreservedly committed to the person of the leader.” Ultimately, their willingness to act in ways they know are wrong becomes their route to a promotion.
Hayek’s characterization doesn’t apply to everyone who serves in the Trump administration, yet there are echoes in his words of what has happened to our team. Unquestioning followers have floated to the top, stitched together by the president’s enmity toward “others”—criminals, immigrants, enemies in the media, job-stealers. His internal coalition stays united because of what they stand against, not for. They clap politely when he talks about something like supporting America’s veterans with better care, but they roar with laughter and approval when he blasts a left-wing first-term congresswoman from New York City, an evil liberal trying to revive socialism in America.