The Brookings Institution tracks the tremendous turnover in Mr. Trump’s key White House positions. These are not subject to Senate confirmation. Most of these people left because they were ineffective, unable to get along with Mr. Trump, or both.
Perhaps finding personnel is difficult for any outsider executive. If you hire experienced people, you end up with the establishment. If you hire inexperienced people, many of them won’t work out.
When I worked at Freddie Mac, at one point senior management hired someone from outside the company to take on a high level position in information systems. A co-worker pointed out to me that if you’re an outstanding leader, people from your old organization will want to follow you to your new one. She pointed out that nobody came with this guy, and she viewed this as a bad sign. She was right.
I am inclined to believe that a President with Mr. Trump’s outsider status could find at least one high-level staffer who could in turn bring in colleagues and former subordinates that are also highly effective. As I have said before, I think that this was Mr. Trump’s biggest weakness.
None of this should have been surprising. Trump’s only real major business success came as a reality TV star in a show literally built around watching him fire people in imaginary businesses.
Is it surprising then to find that, as President, he saw his main job as firing people and doing anything to dominate the news cycle and increase his TV viewership? He never stops bragging about and grossly exaggerating his TV ratings, poll results, and crowd sizes. Firing people (after milking the headlines for as long as possible with the threat of their firings) is always guaranteed to be a better way to generate a news story than not firing anyone.
As far as his career as a real businessman, he was born rich and left behind a string of bankruptcies and cons like Trump University that were designed to pay him huge fees before they inevitably eventually blew up losing money he borrowed from other people. Can anyone cite a single brilliant employee he ever hired and got along with for the long term? Even one? Rudy is his most durable relationship outside of family and we see how well that’s going. It’s been a long time since any legitimate bank would loan him money.
The surprising thing isn’t that he has been a terrible personnel manager. The surprising thing is that anyone ever thought he would be good at it. Of course, for his many sycophants, he was a brilliant personnel manager thwarted by the diabolical deep state.
Clearly, you don’t appreciate all of the subtleties involved in playing 256-dimensional chess.
Your comment reflects your service to rotten and corrupt democrats. Obama could fill many jobs with people as rotten and corrupt as him. What did he achieve other than the personal benefits of big money and controlling a large bunch of idiots to serve him?
Your comment reflects a confusion about which President Arnold’s post is about EB.
And, as usual, it reads like some strangely impoverished Mad Lib where only the same two adjectives are ever available to describe Democrats. Do you actually type those words out individually each time or have a word processor set to insert the phrase with a single keystroke?
However great Obama’s failings were, they do not make Trump competent.
You are right, but the relevant issue is to assess Trump’s benefits and costs for Americans. Please show me that the performance of the past 10 presidents was better than Trump’s.
I don’t believe that it is relevant to assess Trump’s performance against other presidents. Dr. Kling made an observation about Trump’s ineffective personnel management. The implication being that, had his management been better, he would have been a more effective president than he was. So, however great you believe Trump made America, better personnel would have helped him make it that much greater.
Still, let me take a shot at replying to your request for a comparison. Of Trump’s six big triumphs – the corporate tax cut, three conservative judges on the Supreme Court, hundreds more conservative judges on lower courts, warming relations between Israel and Arab nations, Operation Warp Speed, and reduced regulation – the first four had little to do with Trump himself.
Trump outsourced judicial selections to the Federalist Society largely to allay pre-election fears from conservatives. The Federalist Society chose well and Mitch McConnell did yeoman work getting the nominations through the Senate.
The tax cut was largely thanks to (the much reviled) Paul Ryan in the House and, again, McConnell in the Senate.
Obama probably deserves more credit than Trump for the Arab nations making peace with Israel. Obama’s policy was to help Iran establish hegemony over the Middle East, presumably to bring peace to the region. This scared hell out of the Sunni republics who turned to Israel as the only regional power able to counter Iranian strength. Clearly, they could no longer count on the United States.
Operation Warp Speed was an executive branch initiative and was under the direction of a former general. Great personnel choice by Trump or one of his advisors.
Deregulation was also largely handled by the executive branch, so that can be chalked up as another big win for Trump himself.
Balanced against those successes are:
– Trump’s alienation of half of the American people by his angry and divisive rhetoric
– Alienation of our allies
– Abandonment of our Kurdish allies on ridiculously short notice. While Trump apologists have pointed out that the Kurds aren’t choir boys and weren’t formal allies, the fact remains that they fought along side our troops and we abandoned them. This made our formal allies question the value of their ties to America.
– The (in progress) abandonment of the Afghani government. Whatever the merits of Trump’s decision, this move further spooks our allies who are now looking to make whatever deals they can with China and Russia.
– Unnecessary COVID deaths through politicization of masks, failure to restock the national supply of PPE, and by raising the price of PPE through tariffs.
– Hurting domestic manufacturers by tariffs on industrial inputs such as steel and aluminum.
– Funneling federal money into Trump-owned businesses.
– Disregard of presidential and constitutional norms, which may well serve as precedent for power grabs by future chief executives.
– Damage – perhaps fatal damage – to the GOP. Our two-party system depends upon having two parties capable of leading the country. The Democratic Party is trending hard left and its few remaining “adults” are retiring or dying. Without a healthy Republican Party, we’ve got a very small pool of rational and politically viable leaders from which to choose.
Trump was probably only a little worse than Obama in alienating allies, though a lot worse in alienating Americans. Unlike most of his predecessors, Trump didn’t start any wars (or “police actions”). As far as I can remember, Obama is the only other President who abandoned any of our allies (Iraq). I’m not aware of anyone else who profited from the presidency while still in office. Certainly the Clintons did very well after they left the White House. Obama handled the H1N1 pandemic better than Trump handled COVID, though Obama also failed to replenish the national PPE stockpile. Obama probably abused executive power more than Trump. But none of Trump’s predecessors brought the office into such disrepute.
Your skills for comparative analysis need to be improved. Please be sure to explain how events “during” a person’s life can be attributed to that person. I still remember a graphic joke at the NYT in the 1990s in which Clinton takes credit for the sunrise (and another in which Hillary explains to Chelsea why her parents were still together).
[personal attacks not welcome–ed]
@Richard W Fulmer, Thanks for the thoughtful post. I’m not sure it’s right but I’m glad to see someone trying to take wide, long-term view.
One thing I think you’re wrong about: You say, ” As far as I can remember, Obama is the only other President who abandoned any of our allies (Iraq).” That leaves out the most famous recent example, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger and the end of the war in Vietnam. The United States had steadily withdrawn troops and was pretty much down to Air Force and non-combat personnel when the South Vietnamese government was pressured into accepting the Paris Peace Accords. Nixon and Kissinger held out a teeny, tiny hope that the South Vietnamese government could make it on its own, but both were pretty sure that the agreements only created a “decent interval” between American withdrawal and that government’s fall. As it turned out, there wasn’t even an interval.
I can’t comment about what was going on in the minds of Nixon and Kissinger, but if they did knowingly abandon the South Vietnamese, they had a lot of help. In June 1973, Congress passed the Case-Church Amendment prohibiting any further military activity in Southeast Asia without prior Congressional approval. In late 1974, Congress cut back on financial aid to the south. And, after the fighting began, Congress blocked a ship carrying much needed munitions from docking.
Yes, they did.
You might be interested in Barry Gewen’s recent The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World. I thought it was fascinating and mostly right.
This is far too forgiving of Trump. I have managed teams of many different sizes, and led a number of transformations that changed how the teams operated and what they were responsible for.
You need to have a clear vision, people need to understand that vision, not necessarily support it at first, you need to inspire them by winning small victories, constantly talking about the stakes, and relentlessly publicizing the victories and stakes internally to show your vision and strategy are necessary and working.
People want to be effective, and they want to be led. Very few people need to be replaced, or won’t do what you tell them.
” I have managed teams of many different sizes, and led a number of transformations that changed how the teams operated and what they were responsible for.”
I am going to guess that you worked in the private sector, not with large government organizations. When people in a large organization are asked to make major changes, what kicks in is passive aggressiveness. They assume that they can just outlast you. In the case of government, they are right.
I would say this is far too unforgiving of Trump. Conquest’s Third Law is “The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal o its enemies.” Handle’s addendum is that the entire way the current federal government structure of personal command and control is organized is basically a giant maze designed to utterly thwart all the usual leadership techniques and any possibility of effective team management and operation. It is kind of a wonder anything gets done at all, and when it does, it is very often despite and in arguable circumvention of the official design.
There is really only one general exception to this, which is when you get to benefit from social tailwinds which have already done some of the essential team-building work for you, for example, a church creating Christians which can be relied upon to act and decide on their own to further the interest of Christianity anywhere in Christendom, and in a decentralized, spontaneous manner, without any need for explicit direction or supervision.
That is, the important members of the “team” have already been thoroughly acculturated, socialized, and indoctrinated to have a certain kind of uniformity in outlook, belief, and understanding of values and goals they should be pursuing, and thus don’t really even need leadership or “command and staff” superiors.
If in the heat of battle a lower unit gets cut off from communicating with higher, they still generally know which side they are on and what the general goals and missions are, and can be relied upon to do their best to make decisions on their own initiative to help out the cause.
If you have something like that going for you, it’s like you have a Gollum who can show you the secret path through the otherwise impassable “dead marshes” of the federal government’s insane structure.
If you don’t have that going for you, it would take the most extraordinary group of perfectly aligned and cooperative supermen to manage things well.
>—“If you don’t have that going for you, it would take the most extraordinary group of perfectly aligned and cooperative supermen to manage things well.”
The more that’s true, the more it becomes obvious that relying on Jared, Ivanka, Rudy, Don Jr. and Eric as your most essential advisors wasn’t evidence of any talent for hiring and managing people.
It used to be that, when people questioned whether POTUS was the right first job in government for a reality TV star, his supporters would answer that he would hire the right people to get the necessary knowledge on the team.
Of course the victory of the “secret cabals” is the universal and unfalsifiable excuse when these predictions fail. You could never disprove the existence of the conspiracies because the evidence of their existence is secret by definition.
“The more that’s true, the more it becomes obvious that relying on Jared, Ivanka, Rudy, Don Jr. and Eric as your most essential advisors wasn’t evidence of any talent for hiring and managing people.”
There are legitimate reasons a modern establishment-hated figure would have to rely on close family as the least worse option.
Still, there is the problem of hindsight bias here. I think it’s worth asking what everyone thought or expected before the pandemic / George Floyd. My recollection is that Trump was doing pretty well in large part because of a great economy and wasconsidered to be in a strong position for reelection. If we had dodged those two events, or if good vaccine news had come out before the election and converted just enough people in just enough places, all those “obviously bad” decisions like relying on Jared and Ivanka would seem to have been vindicated in the opinion of most observers.
I personally think that Jared and Ivanka were bad influences on Trump and the administration, even from the point of view of winning reelection without these bad luck events. But I am reluctant to make the argument for that conclusion based on the election result itself.
>—“I personally think that Jared and Ivanka were bad influences on Trump and the administration, even from the point of view of winning reelection without these bad luck events. But I am reluctant to make the argument for that conclusion based on the election result itself.”
I agree that his election loss is not the thing you should base that conclusion on. “The opinion of most observers” about who was vindicated in some counterfactual is yet another poor base for such an opinion.
I don’t think the death of George Floyd hurt Trump at all politically. The only people blaming him personally for George Floyd’s death were never going to vote for him anyway. And he benefitted from the reaction against the rioting and the “defund the police” idiocy. He actually increased his support among blacks.
As for the virus, that did hurt him, not because it hurt the economy (which everyone understood happened but wasn’t his fault) but because it revealed his utter incompetence to handle a major crisis.
Almost every other world leader and governor enjoyed a big INCREASE in support in reaction to the pandemic because there is a natural tendency of people to rally behind their leaders in a crisis.
Trump would have enjoyed that same bump in popularity from the pandemic too if he hadn’t mismanaged the crisis in so many ways.
From start to finish he has been a fountain of misinformation on the virus. In the first crucial couple months, when the number of cases was low but growing exponentially, he insisted it was nothing even though he knew how serious it was and told Carl Bernstein so. He claimed this was because he was afraid of panicking people (even as he was telling them that rioters and MS-13 members were coming to the suburbs to kill them).
Then he suddenly switched to proclaiming himself a “wartime President” due to the virus and doing a daily TV show in that role till he bored of that. During this time he endorsed lockdowns and criticized Governor Kemp for daring to end his lockdown too soon…while also claiming it would all be over by Easter when the churches would be full again.
Then he soon switched to opposing lockdowns but suggesting that taking disinfectants internally might be the answer in a nationally televised display of buffoonery. He touted Hydrochloroquine as a known cure despite the fact he never took it himself when he had the virus.
He occasionally gave half hearted endorsements to mask wearing and distancing while mostly discouraging and mocking this nearly universal sound advise from real medical doctors.
The more it became obvious that pandemic was much worse than he had been claiming, the more he doubled down on an endless stream of failed predictions that the pandemic would end any minute. As the election approached and cases soared in a second wave he began regularly hosting super spreader events which resulted in an ongoing stream of news about people in his orbit catching the virus. And he finished off the campaign with one last failed prediction – that the news media would drop the coverage of virus spread as soon as election day had passed.
So the virus was bad for him because it put a spotlight on his incompetence even as it was good for most other national and state leaders of even mediocre competence.
Greg,
I have problems with the optics on Trump and the virus, but this is an absolutely pathetic take on the issue.
First, Trump is right about the virus. It isn’t that dangerous and it doesn’t justify what’s been done about it.
In mid April Trump directly called on people to “liberate themselves”. You can go check the timestamp on the tweets. This was in support of protests against lockdown orders. I’ve seen lockdown protestors at the same spot every Friday since those tweets.
I don’t really care what Trump may or may not have said about Kemp. Anyone would agree that in the broad swing of things Trump has been the no panic anti-lockdown candidate and his opponents have been the pro-lockdown pro panic candidates. Anyone showing up on Election Day knew that was what was on offer.
“He occasionally gave half hearted endorsements to mask wearing and distancing while mostly discouraging and mocking this nearly universal sound advise from real medical doctors.”
Universal sound advice from the real medical establishment has been dismal and pathetic. Masks have done little if nothing to stop the spread, and demonstrated in several countries. The medical community endorsed the George Floyd protests. It rung its hands about opening schools even when there was little evidence that was a problem.
Your hero Dr. Fauci told people to go on cruise ships if they wanted to and said that we would never have a vaccine within a year.
“He touted Hydrochloroquine as a known cure despite the fact he never took it himself when he had the virus.”
He apparently took it at the time.
This entire pandemic is a story of leftist and beuracrats trying to squash treatments in fear that it might help Trump. From the FDAs incompetence on not allowing testing (we could have had cheap at home testing early in the process) to denying human challenge trials and making us wait nine months for a vaccine that was invented in two days.
I agree that Trump handled his press conferences badly and I think he should have done more to fight his enemies on these issues. Perhaps he could have managed his image better to get better electoral results. Cuomo basically murdered people and he’s managed his image great.
But lets be clear, his enemies were in the wrong. Dead wrong, on everything. All that has happened is because of them. They did the lockdowns. They hindered the development of treatments and testing. They wouldn’t allow human challenge trials. They delayed vaccine development. To top it all off, they encouraged mass rioting in a pandemic.
The deep state was dead wrong in this pandemic and is responsible. You just endorsed these people and don’t expect them to act any differently the next time this happens.
>—“Trump is right about the virus. It isn’t that dangerous…”
It recently became THE leading cause of death in America despite huge advances in treatment with anti-coagulants and steroids.
But I have long since ceased to be surprised at what people will believe just because the stable genius says so.
>—“He apparently took it (Hydrochloroquine) at the time.”
He took it “at the time” when he DIDN’T have the have the virus. When he DID have the virus he suddenly developed a willingness to take more conventional medical advise.
Instead of a little under 3M deaths this year, we are going to have 10-15% more total deaths, some of them related to COVID. Those dying have a median age of 82 with two comorbidities and would have died of something in the next couple of years anyway. That’s not something that deserved the response we got.
Trump took the best medicines available at the time he got the virus, which was many months later. Despite being in his 70s and obese he recovered quickly with few complications. He tweeted out videos of himself during the process that showed someone not in bad straights, a live example of how not deadly this virus is.
My lockdown loving Democrat state governor also got the virus around the same time and didn’t even have symptoms.
You would think all of these people experiencing the virus and not having so hard a time of it would cause them to update their views on the thing, but the “pandemic” is about tyrannical power not lives.
asdf,
>—“Those dying have a median age of 82 with two comorbidities and would have died of something in the next couple of years anyway.”
Since March, it has been the third leading cause of “those dying” Americans in age groups 45-54, 55-64, and 65-74 as well as more recently becoming the leading cause of “those dying” in the age group including all Americans.
>—“You would think all of these people experiencing the virus and not having so hard a time of it would cause them to update their views on the thing…”
Now that was a real clinic on motivated reasoning.
You could use exactly the same logic to say that all those smokers who didn’t get lung cancer should “update their views” on whether or not smoking causes cancer.
“That is, the important members of the ‘team’ have already been thoroughly acculturated, socialized, and indoctrinated to have a certain kind of uniformity in outlook, belief, and understanding of values and goals they should be pursuing, and thus don’t really even need leadership or ‘command and staff’ superiors.”
What a church provides, and what Trump never provided – and, as far as I can tell, never attempted to provide – is a consistent set of values and goals that the governmental “teams” should be pursuing.
>—“What a church provides, and what Trump never provided – and, as far as I can tell, never attempted to provide – is a consistent set of values and goals that the governmental “teams” should be pursuing.”
Disagree. Trump was crystal clear in insisting on one overriding value and goal: personal loyalty to and faith in Trump. What could be more like a religious doctrine?
So then Comey would have been perfectly fine to continue to lead the FBI if he had pledged and delivered personal loyalty to Trump but was guilty of “treason” for not doing so.
And no need to do the customary writing of the party platform at the convention. Just a few lines indicating that the platform will be whatever Trump says it is.
True, but if I’m running the widget inspection agency and my “prime directive” is to advance Trump’s political, psychic, and economic wellbeing, how does that directive inform my, now secondary, goal of inspecting widgets?
>—“True, but if I’m running the widget inspection agency and my “prime directive” is to advance Trump’s political, psychic, and economic wellbeing, how does that directive inform my, now secondary, goal of inspecting widgets?”
That’s an easy one Richard. Just make sure your inspections reveal that he deserves credit for every type of widget making success and gets no blame at all for any widget making failures.
Gotcha. Press release from the WIA (Widget Inspection Agency): President Trump has contributed bigly to the terrific quality of our great nation’s widget production.
I’m surprised that nobody has yet mentioned that “thoroughly acculturated, socialized, and indoctrinated to have a certain kind of uniformity in outlook, belief, and understanding of values and goals they should be pursuing” is now accomplished in school. That uniformity is in general “progressive” so there is a line out the door of people who want to serve in an Obama administration but few who want to serve in a Trump administration and do what he wants.
The following link is to an article about the Trump administration’s impact on the CDC. The article is based on interviews with two disgruntled former high-level CDC managers who complain that the impact was malign, so it’s very one-sided. And, clearly, the pandemic exposed the fact that the CDC had serious issues unrelated to Trump. Malign or not, however, Trump’s impact appears to have been significant. If true, this runs counter to Handle’s claim that entrenched bureaucrats can thwart any administration’s reform efforts.
https://dnyuz.com/2020/12/16/like-a-hand-grasping-trump-appointees-describe-the-crushing-of-the-c-d-c/
I’ve never seen any discussion on this or blog or any of its near neighbors of The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis. Mostly it involves Lewis interviewing people in un-newsworthy parts of the federal government doing unglamorous work that helps glue US society together.
They basically all say that Trump’s team showed zero interest in handling the transition from the previous administration and totally neglects their agency except where he appoints a campaign donor with a clear conflict of interest, to run it.
(IIRC Lewis pretty much takes these people at their word.)
“If you hire experienced people, you end up with the establishment. If you hire inexperienced people, many of them won’t work out.”
Based on more than a few years in the EOP and a decade on the Hill, I concur. I wonder how overlooked this trade-off has been a factor in favoring other types of political systems. In China, for example, the Party is the only route to positions of authority so a strong personal network within the establishment is automatic for any leader.
Last night I was rereading Robert A. Dahl’s “On Democracy” (for the third time this year alone!) and I think he gets at the reason why the establishment is advantaged:
“Over two centuries Americans seem to have developed a political culture, skills, and practices that enable their presidential-congressional system with FPTP, federalism, and strong judicial review to function satisfactorily. But the American system is exceedingly complicated and would not work nearly as well in any other country. In any case, it has not been copied. Probably it should not be.”
Dahl’s great insight was to understand the USA system as “polyarchy.” Per Britannica:
“Polyarchy, as presented by Dahl, should be understood as a process by which a set of institutions that comes close to what one could call the ideal type of democracy is developed. Therefore, public power is essential, and authority is effectively controlled by societal organizations and civil associations (e.g., interest groups and political parties). Hence, in Dahl’s view, the extent to which those societal actors can and do operate autonomously, as well as independently from the state, will enhance the democratic quality of a polity.”
In the USA, of course, in DC in particular, societal organizations and civil associations are directly funded by the state and there is frequent rotation of staff in and out of the government and civil associations. No independence. No autonomy.
Complicating this unfortunate situation is the absence of a neutrally competent civil service. The career civil service in the USA operates in opposition to the political leadership. “Yes, Minister” levels of antagonism would be a hundred fold improvement. The absence of actual civil service examinations or anything remotely resembling a merit system has created a dense web of patronage ties that allows federal agencies to operate branch of government with minimal checks or balances from the executive, legislative, and judicial branches.
God bless his soul, Jimmy Carter recognized the problem but only made it worse. There is no ROI in attempting reform so the unresponsive civil service is now a permanent feature of government. Outsiders who have come to high office through parliamentary systems with their stronger traditions of neutral competence and responsiveness are much less beholden to the establishment.
For these reasons, I suggest that the best way to facilitate success of outsiders in politics would be to cut the enormous cash flow from the government to civil associations and organizations.
Carter is, at the time of writing, still alive (age 96).
D’oh.
Thank you for the correction
Arnold, a poor post because you don’t compare Trump with any other president. You should compare him with Obama –an outsider, a complete unknown that paid the price of joining the Party just to become president and could do it in less than 8 years and that relied on the Party’s insiders to do almost everything. What did he achieve other than personal benefits? Please tell me what did he achieve in 8 years other than facilitating the Party and radical leftists to fill many positions in government agencies and universities at all levels of government? What did he do for black Americans in Chicago and other large cities? Take any federal-level issue related to health care, education, migration, and please tell me what he achieved. And what about his promises of peace and his achievement in wars and violence abroad? What about the Middle East, China, Russia? He talked too much, but he said and did nothing, while he was feeding armies of rotten and corrupt democrats by placing them in agencies and universities. Yes, his rotten and corrupt fellows are still holding positions in agencies and universities, and the top ones are now ready to get back to their old positions. They hate Trump because he disrupted their careers.
Yes, Obama didn’t change personnel as often as Trump. And so what? Be ready because Obama’s owners are ready to reset themselves into their old positions after Hurricane Trump. Two big differences, however: first a majority of Americans now know how rotten and corrupt they are, and second they have to deal with the radical leftists that they bought to get power back.
Obama worked with the grain rather than against it, if you see what I mean.
Yes, to enrich himself.
(The grain is the deep state.)
Yes, he worked with them to enrich himself.
1) I would love to see historical analysis, both to compare Trump to his recent peers in Obama, GW, and Clinton; and also just to see what the trend looks like going back to the buggywhips and quill pens era.
2) During the great recession, when things where grim, we had one guy who could somehow manage to land big account after big account. Lots of people ended up working for him, and it was awful. He was an awful coworker, an awful human, and he landed these accounts by promising them cheap, fast, and good all at the same time. At the tail end of the recession, he jumped to another org in a higher level position, either VP or c-suite, can’t remember. He was recruiting all the people that worked for him and dangling very large pay increases. Exactly 1 person (other than his secretary, who he treated well because he’s smart) followed him, and they left after a few weeks. This guy discovered, about thee months later, that his VP/c-suite position “wasn’t a good fit for him”.