DEAR
WHITE HOUSE AIDES: SAVE YOURSELVES. SAVE US.
MATT BAI
If you’re reading this furtively on your secure phone during a
senior staff meeting in Washington, and if the room you’re standing in has no
corners and you can look out a window and see a lot of pretty roses planted
outside, and if your boss is carrying on about what a mess everything is and
how incompetent you are, then listen to what I’m about to say very carefully,
because you may not have much time.
Leave the room as quietly as you can. Find a box. Go back to your
office, pack up your things, leave the badge on the desk and go.
It’s hard to get perspective when you’re living in a bunker,
sacrificing sleep and solid meals, holding tightly onto a dream you’ve had
since you were a kid. It’s impossible to see how desolate it looks from the
outside, how inevitable the finale.
But maybe you’ve seen that terrific movie “Get Out,” about the
dude who finds himself stuck in a house full of deranged predators he thought
were his friends?
Yeah, I know this is hard to get your head around, but you’re the
black guy.
Because every day you spend at the White House now, trying to
keep this thing on the tracks, is a disservice to yourself, and ultimately to
the rest of us.
I get why you wanted the job, I really do — even if you didn’t
especially know or trust Donald Trump, even if you rooted for someone else in
the primaries. Serving was the patriotic thing to do. No one should blame you
for that.
I, too, thought it was possible, if unlikely, that Trump could be
a force for good, a reformist rather than an arsonist. With some experienced
hands to guide him, with just an ounce of humility, it didn’t seem crazy that
he could figure out how to reinvent himself — yet again — as a kind of
confounding pragmatist.
And what were you supposed to do? Turn down the chance to become
a James Baker or a Peggy Noonan? Leave the guy to figure it out on his own,
surrounded by nothing but his dilettante kids and some alt-right conspiracy
freaks?
We all saw what happened when he let that Stephen Miller
character defend the travel ban on the Sunday shows. It was like
sending out an undertaker to entertain kids at the Chuck E. Cheese. No, Trump
needed some professionalism, and you were right to answer the call.
But here’s the thing: all that stuff about history and
transforming government? That all ended this week. You just haven’t
internalized it yet.
Every president gets a narrow window in which to accomplish
something real. I don’t mean just undoing what the last guy did in his last 12
minutes in the chair, or a bunch of vague executive orders that direct all
Cabinet agencies to take immediate steps to form a preliminary plan to make
America great again.
I mean actual legislating. Even a president whose party controls
Congress gets maybe 10 months — the period stretching from the glow of the
transition to the onset of midterm elections — to push through any big,
meaningful agenda items. After that, anything you do is bound to be both a
grind and a painful compromise, assuming you have the skill and the public
approval rating needed to negotiate even that.
That whack you just heard was the sound of Trump’s governing
window slamming shut. Forget his vision for health care or the tax code — he
couldn’t pass one of those little novelty footballs through Congress right now.
Anything that reaches his desk will be purely coincidental.
After all this stuff about trying to shut down an FBI probe and
gossiping with the Russians about top secret assets, the only thing the
Senate’s going to be debating for the next few months is whether it needs a
special prosecutor or an investigative commission.
And what happens to you in the meantime? Let me direct your
attention to Rod Rosenstein, a career prosecutor so highly regarded that he was
able to serve as a U.S. attorney for more than a decade under presidents of
both parties, and whose reputation Trump treated like a hand towel at one of
his hotels before Rosenstein managed to strike back by naming a special
counsel.
Or the decorated general H.R. McMaster, universally hailed as a
solid statesman when Trump hired him a few months ago, whom future historians
may now get confused with H.R. Haldeman.
And I won’t even bother with poor Sean Spicer.
Trump is a reputation vortex, plain and simple. He feeds off
credibility the way a vampire sucks blood. Sooner or later, if you hang around,
and if you have any integrity left, he will expertly find a way to compromise
it.
And that’s assuming you even have the option to hang around. That
growing murmur of dissatisfaction among Republicans in Congress has to find an
outlet somewhere. Very soon it will occur to Trump, if it hasn’t already, that
nothing short of a full and public reset will assuage party leaders who are
sick of the “drama,” to use Mitch McConnell’s word,
and who are on the verge of abandoning him altogether.
Richard Nixon tried this same thing, you’ll recall. He very
publicly axed the aides who’d been his most loyal and committed, because that
was the only way to show how upstanding a guy he really was.
And what do you think’s happening to you when Trump hits that
giant reset button? You think you’re still going to have an office when the
chief of staff, the senior advisers and the press secretary make their trail of
tears across the South Lawn?
If you go now, there will still be some law firms or lobbying
shops that will look past this debacle. Or cable networks — they’ll hire any
Republican who’s ever been in the same room with Trump for 20 seconds.
Who knows? If you’re not around when the whole thing finally
craters, and if you haven’t yet broken any laws, Mike Pence might even hire you
back.
But forget about you for a minute. Think about us. Think about
the country, for a change.
This disastrous start to a presidency only becomes truly
untenable in a couple of ways. One is that he gets impeached or removed from
office some other way, which seems
pretty unlikely, even now.
The other is that the professionals who work for him find some
inner steel and walk out, because they can’t abide the stifling of federal
investigations, or the lies and dangerous abuses of power, or the manifest
ineptitude of a family-run regime, or the increasingly bizarre
servicing of Russian autocrats.
High-level defections would paralyze this White House and send a
message to Republicans nationwide — a cry for help. Something would have to
give.
Maybe Congress would act, or maybe Trump would finally
acknowledge how deep he’s into it and turn the operation over to serious
governing types. Think of it as a necessary intervention, while the damage can
still be contained.
Leaving with what’s left of your integrity isn’t just the smart
career move. It’s the patriotic thing to do now.
2 comments:
Remember when you wrote poetry and it was awesome? I know this is your blog and I can fuck off of I don't like it. My only point I'm trying to make is that I have to see it and hear it from everywhere else. Facebook, news, twitter, instagram. Everyone bitching about the things they cannot change. Why in the hell do I have to see it on this blog that I come to in order to read some shit from someone as miserable as me who may just get it and may just understand how I feel as well. Forgive me, I relate. Yes, he's the president and it sucks. It always sucks. Every one of them is completely detached from the plight of the common man. Can I just have ONE PLACE that isn't saturated with bitching about the stupid fucking government?! Please?! FUCK!(
I know, I know, I just need my own little space to vent sometimes. My girlfriend doesn't like hearing too much about it, cuz Trumpy just depresses her beyond words. We've hit a point now, tho, where I just can't seem to keep up with the guy's fucktardedness, so posting things him about him and his group of old white men is getting to be too much work. As soon as I can wrap my mind around the pussy-grabbing, he's leaking secrets to the soviets. As soon as I start to get a handle on that, he's blaming Obama for wiretapping, etc etc. Who knew folling the lives of the paranoid and narcissistic was so much work? I've been moving back to a mostly art, writing and music format.
Having said that, tho, I'll probably keep posting pics of the naked first lady just to amuse my self w/ the utter hypocrisy of the uber-religious, and probably that fake video of Trump getting slammed by the football player, cuz GOD DAMN is that one funny....
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