Seriously. It's in the bible somewhere.
WORKING
FOR TRUMP IS AN EMBARRASSMENT
By Michael
D'Antonio, Fri March 10, 2017
(CNN) On Wednesday, former
Governor Jon Huntsman accepted President Donald Trump's offer to serve as US
ambassador to Russia. Having previously served as an ambassador to China,
Huntsman may feel prepared for the task at hand. But chances are he will become
the latest Trump employee to face professional embarrassment in the days and
weeks to come.
Just look at Sean
Spicer squirm and wiggle away from questions about President Trump's outrageous
claims, something the White House spokesman has been required to do many times
since Inauguration Day. Once a highly-regarded professional, Spicer has become
Exhibit A in a growing body of evidence that suggests that serious people with
reputations they value serve the President at their own peril.
In his previous job,
as communications director of the Republican National Committee, Spicer was
respected as a fierce partisan who was, nevertheless, trustworthy. However,
before he even settled into his new West Wing job, the press secretary was forced to defend,
despite photographic evidence, Trump's claim that his inauguration was attended
by enormous crowds.
Less than one week
into his tenure, Spicer became the butt of endless jokes and his credibility
was so damaged that speculation over his
dismissal swirled in the news media. In California, former
gubernatorial press secretaries offered both pity and advice
for the man: "There is no fighting chance now that there could be a trust
relationship (between Spicer and the press), because it's been so abused,"
said Kevin Eckery, press secretary to former GOP Governor Pete Wilson.
Since then, Spicer
has affirmed many more falsehoods, saying that an order that Trump called a
"ban" on Muslim immigrants was not a ban, that no one in the Trump
campaign had contact with Russian officials and, most recently, that a Fox News
reporter's phone had been tapped
while Obama was in office.
Because his stock in
trade is credibility, Spicer took a great risk when he agreed to be chief
spokesman for a president with such a loose relationship with facts. (Of 372 Trump statements checked by the
authoritative Politifact.com, just 15 have been rated as fully
"true.") And Spicer is not the only one who has experienced
humiliation in Trump's administration.
The men appointed to
lead various intelligence agencies assumed office knowing that the new
President had antagonized the rank-and-file for months, questioning the
widely-affirmed conclusion that Russia had tried to sway the 2016 election in
Trump's favor. Trump continued to undermine the intelligence community even
after his inauguration. As morale plummeted,
leaks to the press revealed that intelligence professionals were uneasy with Trump's
leadership. Next came the resignation of National Security Adviser
Michael Flynn, who was forced to step down because he lied about his own
contacts with Russia's ambassador in Washington.
The Flynn debacle
raises serious questions about the president's judgement as a team-builder.
Notoriously hot-headed, Flynn was reportedly pushed out of the same job that he
held under Obama because he was abrasive and worked against the President's
policy.
Flynn won Trump's
confidence when he became an early supporter in the campaign. At the Republican
National Convention, he cried "Damn right" as people chanted
"Lock her up!" In appointing Flynn, Trump signaled that personal
loyalty mattered more than temperament and judgment.
Anyone with any
doubts about the challenge of working for Trump need only consider that the
President's top pick to replace Flynn, Vice Admiral Robert Harward, turned him
down. Harward's official reason -- that he couldn't devote his full attention
to the job -- sounded much like the excuse of "I'm resigning to spend more
time with my family." According to The New York Times, Harward's real reason was
Trump's "unpredictable style and the level of chaos that has engulfed his
White House."
The mounting
evidence of an administration in chaos includes the withdrawal of the men
appointed to lead the Army, the Navy and the Department of Labor. As they
stepped away from prestigious appointments, these nominees seemed, on one
level, to have failed. However, it is also true that they may have escaped
something worse.
Consider the
experience of Trump's pick for Secretary of State, the former ExxonMobil chief
Rex Tillerson. Soon after he took the job, Tillerson was publicly humiliated
when Trump refused to let him pick Elliott Abrams to be his deputy. Trump also
undercut the secretary when he failed to consult him on changing longstanding
American policy in favor of Palestinian statehood.
Although the
position of secretary of state is widely considered the most prestigious in any
cabinet, Tillerson has been upstaged by Trump's 36-year-old son-in-law Jared
Kushner and by Trump's chief strategist Steve Bannon. Trump also took the
highly unusual step of adding Bannon
to the principals group of the National Security Council, a position never
previously granted a chief White House political aide.
Like Spicer,
Tillerson is on the losing side of a bargain he made with a leader he may not
understand. Here it helps to become familiar with the work of Northwestern
University psychologist Dan P. McAdams, who has studied the personalities of
presidents including Trump, whom he views an as extreme example of the
dominance style deployed by alpha chimpanzees. Leadership by dominance is more primal
than the other main kind of leadership, which is based on expertise.
Although previous
Presidents have displayed a mix of these two styles, Trump is almost all about
dominance. It's likely that the people who declined his job offers sensed the
President's lack of respect for their expertise and the conditional quality of
his support. Extremely dominant leaders consider loyalty a one-way street and
will abandon partners in favor of a better deal. Witness the fate of Michael
Flynn.
The dominance mode
explains Trump's bluster, bullying and tendency to dismiss people who have
genuine experience. As McAdams told me this week, Trump "has no respect
for, or interest in, expertise of any kind, writing it off as weakness and the
providence of elites." This is the mindset that led Trump to put some
agencies -- like the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Energy and
the Department of Education -- under the control of people who either knew
little of what these organizations did or, in some cases, are hostile to their
missions.
Among Trump's first
appointees, Spicer may have possessed the greatest relevant expertise combined
with the smallest measure of dominance behavior. To witness his struggle is to
witness the dynamic that could cause chaos throughout the administration.
Modern institutions, including the White House, require expertise.
And in chimpanzee
colonies, which McAdams notes "do not have democratic institutions,"
the dominance mode comes with guaranteed chaos. "Things always end badly
for the alpha chimp," he said, who torments his underlings until the
moment he is overthrown.
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