As Priebus gets the knife, other top Trump staffers must wonder, 'Who's next?'
Reince Preibus’s unceremonious departure from the White House on Friday afternoon wasn’t exactly a shocker, given that new communications director Anthony Scaramucci revealed the knife in comments reported Thursday in The New Yorker. But it is remarkable how much turmoil the administration has gone through in just six months. Maybe naming former general and current Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, who has experience managing bureaucracies, as chief of staff can bring some stability and government knowledge to the West Wing. But this administration might already be too far gone to be saved.
The administration is in chaos, in fact, and puts the lie to President Trump’s argument that he, as a successful businessman, knows how to get things done, and how to seal deals. Witness the failure to wrestle enough Republican votes to repeal Obamacare early Friday morning â€" a failure that in the end might be better for the Trump administration given how much blood they would have had on their hands from the suddenly uninsured.
It’s worth, noting, too, that as the vote neared, Scaramucci was playing palace intrigue games, rather than becoming the face of a an organized campaign to support repeal and replace. So what we have is a new communications director with no apparent skills at handling top-level communications. Vicious gossip and character assassination? Well, he’s got that. It’s remarkable that through his New Yorker interview Scaramucci managed, at least for a moment, to make Steve Bannon a sympathetic figure.
So here’s the view from the outside, and three time zones away. Trump is a mean-spirited, disorganized, brutish chief executive who seems to delight in pitting subordinates against one another. If he subscribes to the theory that creative chaos leads to innovation, well, this administration is living proof that at the very least, it’s a lousy way to run a presidency. Imagine being a West Wing worker this weekend, not knowing if your boss will be the next to be bounced, or how secure your own job can be. Loyalty to country and political principles is admirable; loyalty to a frustrated despot is not, and it’s remarkable that anyone continues to work for Trump.
That chaos makes it difficult for White House staffers to focus on the tasks, and problems, at hand. North Korea just launched another missile test â€" is there a strategy beyond blaming China for not reining in North Korea? Russia just retaliated for U.S. sanctions by closing U.S. diplomatic facilities and ordering a cut in staff in the country. We’re still waiting for Trump’s plans for defeating ISIS â€" not just driving them out of their strongholds, but defeating the terror network. Trump promised such a plan within 30 days of taking the oath of office; he’s five months overdue.
Remember that $1-trillion infrastructure plan? Still waiting. Immigration policy is built out of bluster, with no coherent plan for reforms â€" just malignant tweets, and roundups of people who don’t have permission to be here. There are 11 million such people. Still waiting for a plan. Where are the promised bilateral negotiations with England and Germany? And those bilateral agreements to replace the Trans Pacific Partnership? About the only thing Trump has been e ffective at is injecting uncertainty into political, economic and legal systems that need stability to be effective.
Granted, not all administrations make significant advances in its first six months. It’s also not unusual for an administration to revamp itself and occasionally shake things up. But the dust from the inauguration hadn’t settled when the Trump administration began falling apart. Trump fired his inherited FBI director, has since threatened his temporary successor, and has been pressuring his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, an early and stalwart political ally, to resign â€" more instability that just reinforces the sense that Trump and his campaign holdovers are hiding something.
The only good news arising from this level of White House incompetence is that it makes it all but impossible for Trump to get significant parts of his abhorrent agenda fully formed and proposed, let alone approved. Which gives rise to a new national motto: In chaos, we trust.
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