I was delighted to learn that President Trump and I have something in common. We both spend 60 percent of the work day doing nothing that is productive. Of course, in my case this indolence is known by another name--retirement. I tell my wife that this is my Executive Time, interludes wherein I recently read Cliff Sim’s book, “Team of Vipers.” Sims is a conservative Alabama Baptist who served on the Trump campaign’s communication team then took his talents to the West Wing for the first 15 months of the president’s term. He worked shoulder to shoulder with Sarah Sanders, Reince Priebus, Jared Kushner, John Kelly and the rest, including the president himself.
Sims describes how he joined the White House staff with admiration for the president, although his eyes gradually were opened to the walking dysfunction that is Donald Trump. Even so, he felt a powerful need to see something favorable in the President, although he appears to acknowledge that the boss’s good traits were routinely out of stock. Thus, Sims became the walking definition of cognitive dissonance. His book provides us with understanding of a human tendency to support the president while pushing aside the lurking notion that he is a disaster. To Sims, the Trump White House is a nude beach, except that, rather than clothes, it is leadership that is optional.
The positive: “I marveled at Trump’s willingness to endure a seemingly limitless amount of criticism and never waver. He was fearless—the rarest of traits among politicians,” Sims writes, adding, “He was the bravest person I’d ever seen in the face of public scrutiny…”
But Sim’s admiration belies attributes that he found unsettling, such as that Trump “…believes he alone, often through sheer force of will, can solve certain problems,” and that Trump believes “…that creating chaos gives him an advantage.” It shows.
Trump begins each day, Sims reports, reading various newspapers and watching Fox News, then fritters away time pumping staff members for their thoughts about how favorably he was being portrayed in the media. It is narcissism on steroids, as Sims describes it. And because of what can only be termed a vacuous leadership style, the Trump White House is rife with backbiters, infighting and sniping, rather than with a coherent plan, rather than a set of goals around which a staff can cohere. Indeed, Sims describes a team of vipers, with the president as the biggest asp.
As for loyalty, Sims concludes that in Trump World loyalty does not go both ways. Near the book’s end, Sim’s writes that the president, “had not lifted a finger for countless loyal aides…and I’m sure he wouldn’t for countless loyal aides to come…loyalty was a one-way street…I had let my personal relationship with the President blind me to the one unfailing truth that applied to anyone with whom he didn’t share a last name: we were all disposable.” Same as the American people, evidently.