this concocted dumb show of loyalty only served to suggest how unsustainable it all is.
.. The reason that this White House staff is so leaky, so prepared to express private anxiety and contempt, even while parading obeisance for the cameras, is that the President himself has so far been incapable of garnering its discretion or respect. Trump has made it plain that he is capable of turning his confused fury against anyone in his circle at any time.
.. blamed the Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein, for the legal imbroglio that Trump himself has created.
.. The President has fired a few aides, he has made known his disdain and disappointment at many others, and he will, undoubtedly, turn against more.
Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Jared Kushner, Jeff Sessions, Sean Spicer–––who has not yet felt the lash?
.. Trump’s egotism, his demand for one-way loyalty, and his incapacity to assume responsibility for his own untruths and mistakes were, his biographers make plain, his pattern in business and have proved to be his pattern as President.
.. Veteran Washington reporters tell me that they have never experienced this kind of anxiety, regret, and sense of imminent personal doom among White House staffers
.. by retailing information anonymously they will be able to live with themselves after serving a President who has proved so disconnected from the truth and reality.
.. Pat, who on vacations resided separately from the President.
.. making sure that Henry Kissinger was no longer seated at state dinners next to the most attractive woman at the occasion.
.. Nixon, who barely acknowledged, much less touched, his own wife in public, resented Kissinger’s public, and well-cultivated, image as a Washington sex symbol.
.. Incident after incident revealed Nixon’s distaste for his fellow human beings, his racism and anti-Semitism, his overpowering personal suspicions, and his sad longings. Nixon, the most anti-social of men
.. It was all for the sake of “history,” Nixon said.
.. Kennedy and Johnson had taped selectively, but Nixon wanted it all for the record––his own records––but no one was to know.
.. there is little evidence that the show of bogus loyalty performed last week has any basis in real life.
.. Will Bannon, Spicer, Conway, Sessions, Kushner, and many others who have been battered in one way or another by Trump, keep their counsel? Will all of them risk their futures to protect someone whose focus is on himself alone and the rest be damned? Will none of them conclude that they are working for a President whose honesty is on a par with his loyalty to others?
If you work for Trump, it’s time to quit
You hate that people are shying away from administration jobs in droves: Just this week, in rapid succession, Sen. John Cornyn and Rep. Trey Gowdy withdrew their names from consideration as replacements for former FBI Director James Comey, the guy your boss fired. Whatever department you’re in, it’s a safe bet that it’s a whispering graveyard of empty appointments and unfilled jobs.
.. after all, just a few days after taking office, he assured us, “I can be the most presidential person ever.”
.. You figured Trump would turn his political capital into big wins, and that his lack of interest in policy details would let you and your friends in Congress set the agenda. Sure, you knew you’d have to feed Trump’s ego and let him take a victory lap after every success, but you also thought you might claim a smidgen of credit for
- a popular infrastructure bill,
- a big tax cut,
- repeal of Obamacare
- or a host of other “easy” lifts.
.. you’re really not doing much except playing defense and wondering which of your colleagues is leaking to The Washington Post.
.. If you’ve been ordained to appear on television as an administration surrogate, you know by now that your task isn’t to advocate for your agency or issue, but to lavish the president with praise.
.. You already know you can’t save the president because he doesn’t want to be saved. You already know there’s not another, better version of Trump getting ready to show up.
.. When this regime falls, do you want to be among those who said “not me,” or do you want to go out like a Baath Party generalissimo?
Sticking with Trump to the bitter end and pretending the unfolding chaos is just “fake news” won’t save your reputation as the walls close in.
.. Cutting ties with a man who is destructive to our values, profoundly divisive, contemptuous of the rule of law and incontrovertibly unfit to serve in the highest office in the land just might. Do it now.
Trump’s 100th-day speech may have been the most hate-filled in modern history
Trump used his high office to pursue divisive grudges (Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer is a “bad leader”), to attack the media (composed of “incompetent, dishonest people”) and to savage congressional Democrats (“they don’t mind drugs pouring in”). Most of all, Trump used his bully pulpit quite literally, devoting about half his speech to the dehumanization of migrants and refugees as criminals, infiltrators and terrorists. Trump gained a kind of perverse energy from the rolling waves of hatred, culminating in the reading of racist song lyrics comparing his targets to vermin. It was a speech with all the logic, elevation and public purpose of a stink bomb.
.. They must somehow believe that presidential rhetoric — capable of elevating a country — has no power to debase it.
.. The great temptation, in Havel’s view, is for people to conclude that politics can’t be better — that it “is chiefly the manipulation of power and public opinion, and that morality has no place in it.”
.. This demoralized view of politics would mean losing “the idea that the world might actually be changed by the force of truth, the power of a truthful word, the strength of a free spirit, conscience and responsibility.”
.. “Genuine politics,” argues Havel, “is simply a matter of serving those around us; serving the community, and serving those who will come after us.”
.. “I feel that the dormant goodwill in people needs to be stirred. People need to hear that it makes sense to behave decently or to help others, to place common interests above their own, to respect the elementary rules of human coexistence.”
.. It is certainly not the spirit of Trumpism, which exemplifies the moral and spiritual poverty Havel decries: the cultivation of anger, resentment, antagonism and tribal hostilities; the bragging and the brooding; the egotism and self-pity.
.. The alternative to Trumpism is the democratic faith: that people, in the long run, will choose decency and progress over the pleasures of malice. The belief that they will choose the practice of kindness and courtesy. The conviction that God blesses the poor, the hungry, the weeping and the stranger. Faith in the power of the truthful word.
.. But this can take place only if we refuse to normalize the language of hatred.
Trump Undercuts Bannon, Whose Job May Be in Danger
Trump is notoriously fickle in his decision-making process, and he dislikes confrontation. But by openly criticizing Mr. Bannon, he has created an environment that makes it hard for the swaggering and self-assured chief strategist to remain in place without appearing undermined.
.. Mr. Bannon, he has told one person, is “not a team player.”
.. Mr. Kushner; Mr. Cohn; Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter; and Dina Powell, a former Goldman Sachs executive who is now a deputy national security adviser, have come to represent to many on the right a slow and dangerous creep of liberalism into the administration.
.. cutting Mr. Bannon loose would send the wrong signal to conservatives — and could be dangerous given the delight Mr. Bannon takes in disruption.
“I think firing Bannon would be a huge mistake for Trump,” Mr. Deace said. “Hell hath no fury like a Bannon scorned.”
.. To Mr. Trump, there is only one person on his team worthy of attention: himself. He has long recoiled at descriptions of this or that adviser as the brains behind his operation. And he was said to be especially bothered by Mr. Bannon’s appearance in February on the cover of Time magazine.
.. The possibility of a Breitbart unleashed against the White House in a broader conservative news media backlash is not lost on many Republicans.