After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made

by Ben Rhodes

Don’t be too critical of Trump, I was advised. You’ll be taken less seriously by the shapers of conventional opinion. You’ll narrow your options for future employment—in government or the private sector. You’ll attract negative attention from the Republicans who control the White House and Congress and seem willing to use their power to punish their political opponents. The fact that there was a logic to it made the advice more chilling. Even with a fascistic lunatic running the country, self-censorship was expected in how one talked about it. Be critical of Obama, I was advised. You need to demonstrate your independence, to reinvent yourself as something other than Obama’s guy. I was familiar with this formula, as it had been followed by some of my former colleagues, including all of Obama’s former secretaries of defense. But why was it helpful to criticize my former boss when the fascist lunatic running the country was blaming him for everything? I knew the litany of points that people wanted me to hit. We should have gone to war in Syria. We should have kept those ten thousand troops in Iraq after 2011. We should have been more robust in confronting Putin in proxy wars from Syria to Ukraine. I did have my list of things we’d done wrong—for instance, supporting the Saudi-led war in Yemen, surging troops to Afghanistan, or failing to more forcefully confront the Republican Party’s efforts to undermine democracy. But these, I knew, were not the criticisms that most of the ...