Economists who evaluate the effect of tariffs on small farmers are having their jobs relocated in the hopes that they will quit and the Trump administration can replace them with party localists
Betsy DeVos emerges a Trump Cabinet survivor
Yet the president shows no signs of asking her to resign, reflecting in part his lack of interest in the issue of education and the department responsible for it. And DeVos has no interest in departing. Advisers say she is excited by the tasks ahead. After two years of mostly undoing the work of her predecessors, she has shifted to advancing her own agenda.
Topping her list is a proposal for a $5-billion-a-year tax credit that would reimburse taxpayers and corporations dollar for dollar for donations to scholarship programs. DeVos, 61, came to Washington after a lifetime of advocating for school vouchers and other programs that allow families to channel tax dollars away from traditional public schools. Passage of such a plan would represent a crowning achievement — though it is unlikely, given widespread Democratic opposition.
DeVos persuaded the Treasury Department to support the idea, even though the credit would complicate the tax code just two years after a bill passed to simplify it. She worked behind the scenes to negotiate details and unite most school choice proponents behind the plan. Now, she is traveling the country to promote the idea, with trips so far to three states and more planned.
At the White House, aides do not expect the measure to become law, and Trump hardly mentions it. But White House officials say DeVos gets credit for pushing the school choice agenda, which is popular with Trump’s core of conservative supporters.
And DeVos, who is deeply religious, scores points for the president with evangelical Christians, an important part of his base that has stuck by Trump even as unseemly details of his personal life have spilled out.
“He has staffed his administration and surrounded himself with people who have deep roots and street cred in the faith community. Betsy would be at or near the top of that list,” said Ralph Reed, founder of the Faith and Freedom Coalition and a longtime evangelical leader.
DeVos does not shy from talking about her faith. At an event in January hosted by the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities, she spoke of her Christian education and said her faith helps her deal with public criticism.
“There’s an audience I play to, and it’s just an audience of one,” she said. “That’s a true north star.”
.. DeVos has benefited from Trump’s lack of interest in education, officials say. And the president — despite his “Apprentice” reputation for dispatching with poor-performing employees — is actually loath to fire subordinates. In many cases, he’s let them dangle for months before cutting the rope or makes their lives so miserable they quit.
.. Also bolstering DeVos’s standing: She hasn’t had a single personal scandal. She’s a billionaire and travels by private plane, but she pays for it herself. She donates her salary to charity. Even detractors say that in person, DeVos is pleasant and easy to be around. And she has shown personal grit, appearing in public in a wheelchair after she broke her pelvis in a cycling accident.
In contrast, White House officials describe Trump as more hot and cold regarding DeVos and said he rarely sees her. He has been frustrated with her public mistakes, beginning with her disastrous confirmation hearing, they said, and expects perfection from his lieutenants.
But Trump appreciates that she’s tough, handles criticism and is a loyal soldier willing to defend even unpopular policies, officials said. For instance, she spent three days last month defending the administration’s plan to eliminate nearly $18 million in federal funding for a Special Olympics program in schools. She had fought to maintain the spending and was overruled by the White House budget office but still argued for the cut before hostile lawmakers at two congressional hearings.
Then, after the three-day mini-drama, Trump swooped in and announced he was overruling “my people” and favored the funding. It prompted a rare, albeit gentle, DeVos pushback.
“I am pleased and grateful the president and I see eye-to-eye on this issue, and that he has decided to fund our Special Olympics grant,” she said. “This is funding I have fought for behind the scenes over the last several years.”
Before that, she had kept quiet about the internal dispute. Early in the administration, she attended a dinner for the Special Olympics, dining with athletes and then speaking about her support for the program. Two weeks later, Timothy Shriver, chairman of the Special Olympics, was shocked to see the president’s first budget plan, which proposed cutting all federal support for the group.
He called DeVos to ask about it. At first, she defended the cut but then backed down, implying it was never her idea. Six months later, she donated a quarter of her salary to the nonprofit. Congress ignored the president’s request and increased the funding.
.. DeVos kept quiet on other disagreements with the White House, too. She was against revoking documents meant to help schools work with transgender students but never publicly protested. She didn’t think that a school safety commission, formed after the mass shooting in Parkland, Fla., should consider the question of racial disparities in student discipline. Again, she said nothing.
Aides describe her as a loyal soldier, an approach that has helped keep her position with Trump secure. But DeVos has done little to win over critics who opposed her from the start. Detractors say she lacks basic knowledge about education, caring only about her pet issue of school choice. They charge that she wants to destroy, not bolster, public education. And they argue that someone who has never attended a public school has no business being education secretary.
“She is undeterred in her mission despite the forces against her,” department spokeswoman Elizabeth Hill said. “People see she is in it for the right reasons.”
Aides said DeVos has met with Democrats who might support her tax credit plan but declined to name them. She has never reached out to Charlie Barone, lobbyist for Democrats for Education Reform, a group that favors some of the same policies — such as more charter schools — and who might have been at least an occasional ally.
Sometimes, Aides Save a President From Himself
Trump-McGahn incident detailed in Mueller report shows presidents need staff around them who won’t just blindly do their bidding
When the history of the Trump administration is written, one moment in mid-2017 may be seen as decisive—a moment when a staff member saved the president from himself.
On June 17, according to the report by special counsel Robert Mueller released last week, the president called White House Counsel Don McGahn at home and ordered him to tell the Justice Department to fire Mr. Mueller, just as the special counsel’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election was getting under way. Mr. McGahn declined to carry out the order.
Then, about six months later, when word of the president’s attempt to fire the special counsel leaked out, Mr. Trump met with Mr. McGahn in the Oval Office and pressured him to deny the account publicly. Again, Mr. McGahn refused.
Had Mr. McGahn agreed to do what Mr. Trump wanted—to have Mr. Mueller fired and later create a false narrative about the effort—the case that the president had attempted to obstruct justice would have been much stronger. As it is, Mr. Mueller declined to say whether the president had or hadn’t obstructed justice; the Justice Department has decided there wasn’t sufficient evidence to show he did so; and Democratic leaders in Congress, much as they are under pressure from activists in the party to impeach Mr. Trump, are skeptical they have a case for doing so.
The Trump-McGahn exchanges point to an important, larger truth: Presidents need people around them who aren’t simply yes-men and yes-women who will blindly do their bidding. They need aides willing to take the tough step of challenging the leader of the free world. One key question is whether Mr. Trump still has enough of them around him.
Anybody who manages an organization recognizes—or should recognize—the need to have subordinates who can walk the fine line between being loyal and being willing to tell the president he or she is making a mistake. Playing that role as a staff member is particularly tough in the rarified air of the White House—and especially in this White House, where the boss has shown a penchant for lashing out at anyone seen as disloyal.
Yet history is replete with examples of the need to have White House aides willing to stand up to the boss. “That lesson cries out” from the Mueller report, says presidential historian Michael Beschloss.
President Richard Nixon, a mercurial man, was self-aware enough to recognize his need for such staff work. When he was preparing to take office, he wrote a memo to his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, specifically authorizing him to ignore orders that seemed impetuous or ordered in anger. “There may be times when you or others may determine that the action I have requested should not be taken,” Nixon wrote, according to a definitive biography by John A. Farrell. “I will accept such decisions but I must know about them.”
Mr. Haldeman and others acted accordingly, a practice that proved crucial as Nixon descended into depression amidst the Watergate crisis that ended his presidency. One Nixon aide recalled years later that the president, apparently drunk, encountered him in a White House hallway late at night during the opening phases of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and seemed to order him to unleash an American bombing attack on Syria. The order was ignored, and apparently forgotten by the president the next day.
Aides to President Ronald Reagan were frequently excoriated by conservatives for failing to “let Reagan be Reagan” when they pushed back against presidential instincts. Yet Mr. Reagan always defended his staff’s right to do so, and disputed the idea that he was being badly served by strong aides.
In his memoir, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates recounts a bitter argument with President Obama over implementation of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that compelled military commanders to discharge or separate gays and lesbians from other troops if their sexual orientation became known. That policy was being disputed in the courts, and there was a movement in Congress to change the law. Mr. Obama wanted his defense chief to suspend implementation of the policy in the meantime.
Though he supported changing the law, Mr. Gates refused, arguing that existing law couldn’t simply be disregarded. Congress soon passed legislation changing the practice, which included a period to certify that a new policy could be implemented smoothly. It’s likely the change went down better with commanders because Mr. Gates had shown the need to abide strictly by law.
Who Is Left to Say No to Trump?
Kirstjen Nielsen is the latest one out of the president’s spiraling cabinet who expressed his cruelty but wouldn’t go as far as he wanted.
There’s no reason to mourn Kirstjen Nielsen’s departure from the Department of Homeland Security. She was an immigration hard-liner working aggressively to carry out President Trump’s restrictionist agenda. She spearheaded efforts to crack down on migrants and asylum seekers. She requested military assistance at the border. She limited the number of people who can legally present for asylum at ports of entry. And she vastly increased the number of immigrants in detention.
She also carried out the president’s “zero tolerance” policy, resulting in the separation of thousands of families at our border with Mexico. Many parents are still searching for their children.
But there were limits to Nielsen’s embrace of Trump’s immigration policies. She pushed back on his demands to break the law to stop migrants from entering the country, according to The Times, and repeatedly reminded the president of “the limitations imposed on her department by federal laws, court settlements and international obligations.”
In almost any other administration, this would be unremarkable. It simply means Nielsen took her job and its legal obligations seriously — what we would expect from any civil servant. But Trump is unusual among modern presidents for his routine elevation of people who lack that basic sense of public ethics. If regular pressure to break the law was part of Nielsen’s decision to leave the administration, then her departure illustrates how any belief in the public good, no matter how slight, is incompatible with working for this president, even if you share his views.
This was evident from previous resignations and firings. Rex Tillerson, Trump’s first secretary of state, seemed to share the president’s skepticism of the department, carrying out an agenda meant to shrink its influence. But when Trump wanted to break the law — which, Tillerson said in an interview after leaving the administration, was “often” — Tillerson would push back, unwilling to completely subordinate himself to the president’s will. “I would have to say to him, ‘Mr. President, I understand what you want to do, but you can’t do it that way. It violates the law.’”
The president’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, faced similar pressures after he recused himself from any investigations related to the prospect of Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election. Sessions took that step after The Washington Post revealed his meetings with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, during the campaign — the kind of contact he had denied during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Trump was furious, which grew into rage after the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, appointed Robert Mueller special counsel. Trump reportedly berated Sessions in the Oval Office — which the attorney general called his “most humiliating experience in decades of public life” — and complained that the recusal was “unfair.”
Trump wanted Sessions to derail the Russia investigation and protect him from scrutiny, essentially making himself above the law. And he spent much of 2018 pressuring the attorney general to do just that, either attacking him in public or cajoling him in private. Sessions, who shared Trump’s politics but not his complete contempt for the rule of law, wouldn’t budge.
The overall pattern is clear. Trump wants to act with impunity, breaking the law if he needs or even just wants to. His appointees, who share his goals but not his methods, resist. He scolds and attacks them until they resign, replacing them with loyalists who may actually bend to his will.
Rex Tillerson was replaced by Mike Pompeo, then serving as director of the C.I.A. Unlike Tillerson, who attempted to contain Trump’s worst instincts, Pompeo has been willing to say or do nearly anything to stay in Trump’s favor. It’s why he would echo the president’s widely criticized flattery of Kim Jong-un and the North Korean government.
Trump says that Kevin McAleenan, until now the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, will take over for Nielsen as acting secretary of Homeland Security. Like Nielsen, McAleenan backs the president’s harsh border policies. He defended border patrol agents after they used tear gas on hundreds of migrants, including women and children, who tried to enter the United States near Tijuana, Mexico. Some attorneys say it’s unclear if Trump can elevate McAleenan, since the laws regarding succession point to under secretary for management Claire Grady as next-in-line as acting director.