We have never had a dumber White House, never, and we’ve known that for well over a year now. Trouble is, it’s actually getting dumber by the day and that’s just how the presi ...I still can’t write “president” with respect to this man … that’s just how Trump wants it. This is how Trump operates, it is where he is comfortable. He has whittled down the “staff” of people that actually “knew something” down to essentially nothing, such that the White House now operates like the Trump Organization. God help us all.
Politico doing some good work:
No doubt Trump saw his share of standard pyramid-style organizational charts during his two years at Wharton, but he has always preferred what anthropologists call “a circular hierarchy”—or, in plain English, a wheel. A work-flow diagram at the Trump Organization would have put Donald Trump at the hub and connected him by spokes to his small number of top staff. They numbered about a dozen, and he hired them with the same kind of gut instinct that propelled his political rise—he didn’t value traditional expertise as much as a willingness to give him undisputed loyalty and unlimited energy. Trump spotted Matthew Calamari, a former college linebacker, at the 1981 U.S. Open tennis tournament when Calamari, working security, tackled a pair of hecklers. Trump hired him as a bodyguard. Today, he’s the Trump Organization’s chief operating officer and executive vice president.
The entire reason that the “pyramid” structures have worked so damn well over the years as a business model, is the same reason they make good architectural models; the top can be extremely weak, so long as the base itself retains strength and integrity. The wheel analogy? Ummm, well, if the center of all the spokes is brittle, it doesn’t take much to have it explode on the highway, especially highways near Atlantic City, or in the parking lots of Trump University, to name just two spectacular failures that are the all-too-expected result when one very uneducated, incurious, and corruptible man is the “center” holding (or not holding) everything together.
In a pyramid-type of executive branch/business model, those various layers of brick or blocks symbolize people with “knowledge” and experience, the more, the better, it stabilizes the top, keeping it strong. Running counter to that model, in fact, rejecting that model, yields an all too predictable response:
What Trump wanted most were soldiers, not subject-matter experts.... But it was people he hired for their knowledge that lasted the shortest time. In fact, a number of his more celebrated business flops happened when he ignored the industry veterans he had hired and plowed forward with his own ideas. When he acquired the Eastern Airlines shuttle in 1988, he hired airline executive Bruce Nobles but disregarded his advice to be frugal. He splurged ...losing critical market share to tackier but cheaper rivals. Two years later, he ignored warnings from his own executives, including Jack O’Donnell, then president and COO of Trump Plaza, one of the two profitable casinos Trump already had in Atlantic City, about the danger of opening a third casino in an overcrowded market. Instead, Trump bulled ahead, opened the Trump Taj Mahal, and caused profits at all three to crater. He ended up firing Nobles and O’Donnell resigned, though Trump claimed he had fired him too.
Nature is not kind to stupidity, nor is the nature of business, nor the nature of running a successful nation, never mind navigating the laws and politics of all of it. The result is preordained, inevitable. I believe it was Steve Schmidt the other day on MSNBC who noted that at some point, the lack of knowledge and discipline at the top, the decision-making itself, would start having real life impacts on people, to their detriment. If we had not yet seen that with the shift in immigration entry visas, the tax cut, ripping out Obamacare protections, we’re surely seeing it now with Trump pushing us toward a recession by starting needless trade wars.
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Ready for the chase scene? Of course, we know the horrors already. But seeing it all together it’s like, well, like seeing a car wreck in slow motion. Except this particular car wreck involves a bus, one in which we’re all traveling.
When Trump first arrived at the White House, he stepped outside his usual comfort zone and appointed several people, including Tillerson and Gary Cohn, who had decades of experience in their fields. But they also had ideas that conflicted with Trump, and now they’re gone, replaced with more pliable figures. Mike Pompeo, a former Kansas congressman whose support for Trump netted him the top post at the CIA, will take over for Tillerson, who couldn’t get with Trump’s forget-diplomacy program, and Larry Kudlow, an economics pundit on TV and an early Trump loyalist, has replaced Cohn, who refused to sign on to Trump’s tariff plan. The possibility of Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt’s imminent ouster raises the question of whether Trump would replace him with someone less likely to draw critical attention. Filling some positions, like the still-vacant communications director, don’t appear to be high on Trump’s to-do list; he had the perfect person in the job—the ultraloyal and supremely deferential Hope Hicks—and for now he appears content to handle the White House messaging himself.
Sweet mother of god, we’re so fk’d.
It does ring true. All this turnover, all the ousters, all the “You’re fireds” — it was all a plan, maybe not fully formed ahead of time, (can we stipulate that Trump is too lazy to actually “plan”?) But, he had an instinct; Gotta get rid of all these ‘know it alls’ that won’t be loyal, gotta get rid of these guys who think they know better, I know better. Gotta have fewer people, all that I can control, all loyal.
Think about it, can we conceive of Trump running anything involving more than a couple dozen people? Running any entity where the primary qualification and measure is NOT “loyalty” to the boss (not the country)? No, we could never have pictured that, and that’s why the assurances of “surrounding Trump” rang hollow. Trump, like every pres, governs like he campaigns. Obama had “No drama Obama,” Trump had “No one is home, constant turnover, small organization, bilking things for money.” Nothing’s changed.
This is why the executive branch of government, at least the executive portion of the executive branch (Hard-working IRS employees, EPA, Forest Service, all regular people trying to raise families and live a good normal life, excluded from that summation), is down to about a couple dozen, just like the Trump Organization. And of that couple dozen, roughly 10% are literally family.
Jesus, these people.
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Oh, by the way, this is what dictatorships look like, too. Even our dictator sucks! He is a supremely insecure dictator, at that.
Upon election, we had been assured that the “establishment” could surround Trump with adults who could control him. It would not be so dangerous, so we were told. We all knew better. Because that is not Donald Trump. He knows very few things, surely he’s never known how much he doesn’t know, but he always knows that he knows best. What better than a national election to prove his point? (No, it doesn’t count that he actually got fewer votes.) Now, he has a staff that is small enough for him to control, and he knows they all totally agree with him.
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That is why we’re in more danger than ever. Especially as Mueller starts to really work his angles, Trump will feel a need to lash out, and there is nothing left in the White House staff to hold back the worst of his animal instinct, that instinct geared toward self-preservation.
Again (and again) this is all so predictable. We’ll see continuous turnover as more get burned out, or the employee sees something even he/she can’t countenance, and will be gone, never to be replaced. That’s the other thing Trump hasn’t been doing — replacing people who leave. Notice? Have you heard who might replace Hope? As White House Comm Director, I mean, not any other capacity. We’ve heard little to nothing. As the article says, Trump believes he can do it, Why wouldn’t he think that? Who is there to tell him otherwise? Actually, I kind of do wish he would just to fk himself.
I digress.
When I try to picture myself as President (fess up, we all have), I imagine myself sitting at those huge rosewood tables, surrounded by people like Paul Krugman, Rachel Maddow, Lawrence Tribe, Malcolm Nance, a couple Republicans playing Devil’s advocate like Nicole Wallace, George Will, a V.P. like Corey Booker, and a close associate as top aide, chief of staff, someone like John Lewis, who has seen it all, to talk about it later. I envision being surrounded by the best, fostering discussion, seeing if I can steer toward consensus, and then using my judgment on whom, of all those brilliant people, is “most right” — then praying that we make the right decision.
I guess that sounds like hell to Trump, who feels threatened by people who “pretend” to know more than him. That’s why they’re all gone. It’s perfect now, at least from Trump’s perspective.
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My Other work. Alienation