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| Kevin Lamarque/Reuters |
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There’s been a great deal of speculation about shifting alliances among Trump’s White House staff—it’s virtually a daily exercise—but in the end Donald Trump defines his administration. Trump has a mediocre staff, whom he doesn’t treat well. They’re hesitant to give him news he won’t like for fear of being screamed at, a frequent event. Experienced potential aides haven’t been keen to work in a Trump White House and though it’s not widely known by the outside world many of those who are there are unhappy. As one close observer put it to me, “They came to work for the president but found themselves working for Donald Trump.” The moody man at the top is strongly affected by what’s in the news. But so far only one significant aide has seen fit to quit, Chief of Staff Reince Priebus’s deputy Katie Walsh; while some reporters described her departure as part of a White House “shakeup,” it’s more likely that Walsh left because she couldn’t stand the unpleasantness of working for Trump. According to reports, with things not going well for him, the atmosphere in Trump’s White House has grown progressively worse....
Yet despite the weakness and disorder of the president’s staff, and though previous White House staffs have tried it (if not as thoroughly but without success), Trump and his top aides seem particularly determined to hold power throughout the government. This is why even more than halfway into the first hundred days most of the Cabinet officers are home alone. It’s not accidental that few of them have a deputy, not to mention the legally established complement of assistant secretaries and deputy assistant secretaries—some 550 appointments the president makes and the Senate confirms. As of now, Defense Secretary James Mattis is the only newly confirmed official in the entire Pentagon leviathan, but the wars he has to fight and the crises he has to try to avert won’t wait until he gets his own staff. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is also without a deputy, the one he wanted having been vetoed by Trump because he’d criticized him during the primaries. Such a consideration would rule out a great many potential presidential appointees. Tillerson is another tycoon who is more than a little lost in government. The generals whom Trump has appointed (three of them) are more accustomed to a political atmosphere and to dealing with elected politicians. This is no guarantee of success but they do tend to be less bewildered in their new positions of power....
Yet the thinness of the ranks of officials to propose and implement the laws is actually also how Trump and his top aides want it. “A lot of those jobs, I don’t want to appoint someone because they’re unnecessary to have,” Trump said in late February. “In government, we have too many people.” Trump, Bannon, and son-in-law Jared Kushner have been particularly keen to keep control of the government in the White House. Kushner now has more assignments than any single figure known of in a modern White House and shows no inclination to devolve power. These people may well be taking on the impossible, and this would be true even if they’d had any government experience....
Kushner is in over his head. But Trump, as inexperienced in government as his son-in-law is, does not seem to realize that, and so he keeps loading new responsibilities on him, apparently as the only person inside the White House he’s been able to trust. Ivanka is of course a trusted and cherished daughter, who has just officially become a presidential adviser. This odd arrangement would raise more hackles if it weren’t that people see Ivanka and Jared as calming influences on the president. Since they haven’t completely cut themselves off from some of their former sources of income the possibilities for conflict of interest—for which, unlike the president, they’re not legally exempt—are rife.
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That Trump announced a rollback of environmental regulations adopted by Barack Obama is probably the least surprising thing he’s done as president. Climate change has been eliminated not only as a consideration in formulating policy but even as a term that can appear in official government documents and websites. But while Trump’s proposals pleased the merchants of the extraction industries and many other private businesses, and outraged environmentalists, they may turn out to be far less effective than it first appeared.
Sheldon Whitehouse, senator from Rhode Island, who has given a speech on the environment every Monday that the Senate’s in session—he has given more than a hundred thus far—told me, “We have to be on our guard against Trump’s instincts to please polluting industries, but because of his limited grasp of things, he won’t achieve what he thinks. He doesn’t grasp the economics of what natural gas is doing to coal mining jobs in Appalachia. He doesn’t grasp how courts require administrative agencies to adhere to fact and law.” And, according to Whitehouse, in eschewing the environmental movement’s achievements and goals, Trump is bringing onto himself a political problem: “He also doesn’t appear to grasp that America is not on his side as he sells out the environment to big donors.”
It was widely understood, even by the happy coal mine operators present at Trump’s announcement of his deregulations, that so much has happened in the development of cleaner fuels that coal mining jobs aren’t coming back in any significant number. But Trump has led unemployed coal miners in Appalachia—which contains two crucial electoral states, Pennsylvania and Ohio, both of which Trump carried—to believe that they will.
This is a pattern that might cause Trump a great deal of trouble over time. Coal miners aren’t the only disenchanted working class voters to whom Trump addressed his campaign. He led a great many unemployed and underemployed people in depressed industrial areas to believe that he could get their jobs back.
But despite the relative success of Trump’s early flim-flam about saving some jobs at a few plants—never to the extent that he claimed—companies are again showing no compunction about relocating to Mexico. He misdiagnosed the cause of job losses as being the result of trade deals that he says cheated the US, when in fact the much larger problem is that the jobs are obsolete; even if, as he kept promising, he could get other countries to yield the US more in those deals, he’s not going to produce any significant number of new jobs that way. And then his budget cut funds for training for other kinds of jobs. That’s the thing: though he campaigned with the rhetoric of a champion of the displaced and angry middle class, his policies would make their situation worse....
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| Carlo Allegri/Reuters |
When the subject comes up, as it does incessantly in Washington, of whether in fact Trump will end up serving as president for four years, a major argument against his somehow having to leave office (for reasons other than health) is that he has a strong base. Richard Nixon also did, until he didn’t. Gradually, Nixon’s onetime backers became disenchanted for one reason or another; he still had support at the end, but it wasn’t strong enough to save him. How long will Trump’s base stick with him even in the face of seeing their hopes betrayed? This isn’t a fanciful question: a recent poll by Geoffrey Garin for Priorities USA, showed a ten-point drop in support among Trump voters in the third week in March (the week the health care bill failed).
.... The discontent with Donald Trump on Capitol Hill runs very deep and also very wide. I’ve been told that upwards of two-thirds of the Senate Republicans, in particular, discuss—in the gym and in clusters on the Senate floor—their desire to see him gone. These senators talk rather openly—even with their Democratic colleagues—about their fear of Trump’s recklessly getting the country into serious danger, about the embarrassment he causes it in the world (his petulantly refusing to shake hands with Angela Merkel was just one example of his mishandling of foreign leaders), about his overall incompetence.
Whether or not anything is ever proved, most members of Congress, including Republicans, think something was amiss in the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia, or Russians, including plutocrats who owe much to Vladimir Putin. No one thinks that FBI Director Comey would have opened, much less announced, a counter-intelligence investigation of the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with the Russian government in its attempt to sway the election if he didn’t have serious evidence. On the Senate floor the other day, a cluster of Republicans jocularly made a betting pool on the way in which they think Trump will be forced to leave office.