A Warning

by Anonymous

We wanted the administration to succeed and supported significant components of the president’s agenda, but we were alarmed by his unstable behavior, in public and private. Those who tried to steer him away from self-destructive impulses were not the so-called “Deep State,” I wrote, but the “Steady State.”

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election. “The President’s efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful,” he wrote, “but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the President declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.”

Donald Trump, despite his extraordinary flaws and the threat of impeachment in Congress, will be reelected in 2020. By then the guardrails will be gone entirely, and freed from the threat of defeat, this president will feel emboldened to double down on his worst impulses.

When everything is a crisis and a scandal, the end result is that nothing is.

Unsavory figures in his orbit have relished the possibility of another four years—not in the “we can do good for the country” way you would hope, but rather with the attitude that “no one will be able to stop us.”

Citizens are more divided than ever, right down to the household level, and sensational media coverage only compounds it.

Two camps emerged: federalists, who wanted a stronger central government, and antifederalists, who preferred more power in the hands of the individual states.

Most importantly, they wanted Americans to focus on the message itself, not on the messenger. The subject matter was too important to let the national conversation sink into a quarrel about the personalities involved. They hid their names, not out of fear of debate, but to further it.

America’s Founders could never have imagined today’s world, where public mobs are supercharged by social media. Our attention spans have withered, and our national dialogue has been debased by the politics of personal destruction. When someone speaks, the mob attacks the person, and the ideas are left in the rubble.

Removing my identity from the equation deprives him of an opportunity to create a distraction. What will he do when there is no person to attack, only an idea?

This town has been corrupted by a slash-and-burn culture, where people tell stories through the press meant to cut others down while building themselves up.

Donald Trump is fond of telling officials that he learned an important lesson in business: People are not scared when you threaten a lawsuit, but they are scared when you actually sue them.

Former president Theodore Roosevelt argued that it was treacherous not to criticize the nation’s chief executive, as long as it was honest criticism. “To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public,” he wrote. “Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or anyone else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about anyone else.” We do not owe the president our silence. We owe him the truth.

Trump often encouraged disunity by making suggestions about who had his favor and who did not.

False optimism infected the new team. Everyone was hopeful the rancor of the campaign would be replaced by the high purpose of leading the country, which can ennoble even the most distracted minds.

He was so focused on his “win” that he could barely focus on the forthcoming task of governing. Trump carried around maps outlining his electoral victory, which he would pull out at odd times in discussions meant to focus on preparing him to take office.

The administration was only a few weeks in, and already the mayhem made everyone look foolish. Internal whispers grew louder: This was not a way to do business. As a result, people who’d previously been outsiders to Trump World grew closer to one another and developed a bizarre sense of fraternity, like bank-robbery hostages lying on the floor at gunpoint, unable to sound the alarm but aware that everyone else was stricken with the same fear of the unknown.

Two traits are illustrative of what brought the Steady State together: the president’s inattentiveness and his impulsiveness.

Come in with one main point and repeat it—over and over again, even if the president inevitably goes off on tangents—until he gets it. Just keep steering the subject back to it. ONE point.

“He is the most distracted person I’ve ever met,” one of the president’s security lieutenants confessed. “He has no fucking clue what we are talking about!” More changes were ordered to cater to Trump’s peculiarities. Documents were dramatically downsized, and position papers became sound bites. As a result, complex proposals were reduced to a single page (or ideally a paragraph) and translated into Trump’s “winners and losers” tone.

It was a visceral lesson that we weren’t just appointees of the president. We were glorified government babysitters.

Some aides grew so worn down by the roller coaster of presidential whims that they started encouraging him to hold more campaign rallies, putting aside the fact that it wasn’t campaign season. The events had the dual benefit of giving Trump something “fun” to do and also getting him out of town, where he would hypothetically do less damage.

The day-to-day management of the executive branch was falling apart before our eyes. Trump was all over the place. He was like a twelve-year-old in an air traffic control tower, pushing the buttons of government indiscriminately, indifferent to the planes skidding across the runway and the flights frantically diverting away from the airport.

“About a third of the things the president wants us to do are flat-out stupid. Another third would be impossible to implement and wouldn’t even solve the problem. And a third of them would be flat-out illegal.”

In other cases he thought of the funds as bargaining chips, as in the case of money earmarked by Congress to go to Ukraine, and tried to pause the funds for whatever purpose suited him at the moment, perhaps until he got something he wanted in return.

(Trump often was persuaded against something if he thought it was too pricey, ironic for someone who is driving the country deeply into debt).

Despite the president’s recurring desire to do so, the law cannot be shaped like Play-Doh and made to say whatever he wants it to say.

It got harder and harder to convince the president to avoid reckless decisions. Improving the “process” wasn’t a durable solution. It was just a wet Band-Aid that wouldn’t hold together a gaping wound.

John Bolton, Trump’s third national security advisor, saved the president many times from irresponsible decisions but grew weary of the turbulence and Trump’s fumbling in foreign policy. He resigned of his own volition, but the president still tried to make it look like a firing.

“God grant that men of principle be our principal men,” Thomas Jefferson once wrote.

Public servants are corruptible and expendable. As we will discuss later, that’s why the Founders proposed a system of checks and balances, so that negative human impulses would be ameliorated and the power of one branch would be kept in line by another.

In the history of American democracy, we have had undisciplined presidents. We have had incurious presidents. We have had inexperienced presidents. We have had amoral presidents. Rarely if ever before have we had them all at once.

your moral code is your “software”—your belief system—that operates your “hardware”—your body and its actions.

Their greatest philosophers, including Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, all asked themselves, “What makes a man ‘good’?” A rough consensus emerged about core elements. These qualities came to be known as the “cardinal virtues”: wisdom, temperance, courage, and justice.

Cicero gave us a useful guide for measuring a leader’s character. His four-part rubric will sound familiar: (1) “understanding and acknowledging truth”; (2) “maintaining good fellowship with men, giving to every one his due, and keeping faith in contracts and promises”; (3) “greatness and strength of a lofty and unconquered mind”; and (4) “the order and measure that constitute moderation and temperance.”

Great deeds can be done by imperfect men. We just need to decide whether it’s worth it.

When we put the chief executive on a pedestal, young people in particular will learn from the leader’s behavior, setting the tone for future civic engagement.

A man’s character is tested when he’s given power.

It’s been said that character is a tree, and reputation its shadow.

Cicero said true wisdom doesn’t require knowing all the facts up front. Rather, it consists of “learning the truth,” an eagerness to seek the facts and to get to the root of an issue.

Intelligence is one of those qualities that, if you insist you have it, you probably don’t.

it is dishonorable to stumble ignorantly when it comes to the facts and to be deceived.

He is the nation’s most prominent re-tweeter of “fake news” while simultaneously being its biggest critic.

we have all learned the hard way that the president’s modus operandi emphasizes combat over peacemaking, bullying over negotiating, malice over clemency, and recognition over true generosity.

A courageous person takes both credit and blame when they are the leader, yet Trump refuses to do the latter.

“He who is carried by the foolishness of the ignorant mob should not be counted a great man”

checklist for a courageous person includes resistance to the mob mentality, avoidance of obsession with money and pleasure, and stability through crises.

Polls and polling to him are demonstrations of loyalty, not scientific measures of the country’s mood.

“If you set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time, and you would achieve nothing.”

“Power is like being a lady,” she remarked. “If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.”)