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Ask any official serving in the Trump administration today if he or she supported the real-estate magnate when he threw his hat into the ring. In an unguarded moment, chances are they will tell you no. Many will admit that, in the field of seventeen Republican primary candidates in the 2016 race, Donald Trump was their seventeenth pick, dead last. His candidacy was a stunt.
Mulvaney brought a new approach to managing the West Wing. He didn’t manage it. His guiding maxim was: Let Trump be Trump. Mick’s outlook—don’t challenge the president’s impulses, just make them work—represented a sharp departure from his predecessor. No longer would officials play back-in-the-box with the president’s awful ideas. Instead, we were urged to focus on making bad ideas more palatable, to soften their rough edges. This kept the president happy and his acting chief of staff out of Trump’s line of fire. The only problem with the approach is that Trump has not changed since the time
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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
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Trump Apologists see him as a means to personal influence and advancement. They want to be close to power.
Donald Trump deserves to be fired.
More worrisome, reelection will convince him he is freer than ever to put his self-interest above the national interest.
As we stare at our secret ballots, the most important question of all will be: Does he reflect us?
The Trump administration is an unmitigated catastrophe, and the responsibility rests entirely at his feet, the predictable outcome of assigning organizational leadership to a man of weak morals. What is more regrettable is that his faults are amplifying our own.
The race is likely to come down to two candidates. Republicans will face a trade-off: “Pick the devil I know, Donald Trump, whose views align more closely with mine but whose moral code is visibly compromised. Or pick the devil I don’t, a Democrat, who will fight for policies I disagree with but is probably a more decent person.”
“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” —Abraham Lincoln
