The swamp remains fetid. Just blocks away from the White House, the Trump International Hotel hoovers greenbacks from foreign governments. On the west coast, word seeps out that the president sold his Beverly Hills mansion at an inflated price to a Virgin Islands-registered company linked to an Indonesian businessman-cum-Trump business partner. From New York, reports that a Kushner family investment vehicle recycles offshore cash and petrodollars.
So much for America First and the emoluments clause.
At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, together with Elaine Chao, his wife and Trump’s secretary of transportation, have transformed their day jobs into a taxpayer-funded family business. Chao reportedly acts as a human “bridge” to the Chinese government on behalf of her kin’s China-centric maritime ventures. The Department of Transportation plays adjunct to her husband’s re-election bid.
This is what American kakistocracy looks like.
Alexander Nazaryan’s The Best People is another story for our turbulent times. Subtitled Trump’s Cabinet and the Siege on Washington, the Yahoo News correspondent’s portrait of Trump and his world receives direct assists from an on-the-record interview with the president, from Steve Bannon and from sundry government officials and spectators.
Few look good. Delusion and disappointment abound. Trump admits that some of his appointees were “clinkers”. Yet the president boasts that “there are those that say we have one of the finest cabinets”.
Trump is also captured blaming Kellyanne Conway for Bob Woodward’s less than flattering picture of him in Fear, the Washington Post man’s latest tale of a dysfunctional administration and a wrath-filled president. With Conway in the room, Trump tells Nazaryan she failed to advise him that Woodward had “asked 10 times for a meeting”. Had Conway conveyed the message, Trump asserts, Fear “would have been a little bit of a different book”.
Perhaps. The same way the Mueller report would have been a different kind of report if Trump had faced off against the special counsel.
These days, Conway also runs the gauntlet of her husband’s anti-Trump tweets and pro-impeachment op-eds and an official recommendation that she be bounced from the West Wing for violating the Hatch Act. Apparently, Conway went way too far in blurring the line between her day job and electoral politics.
But in Trumpworld, so what? Bet on her staying where she is. The law is meant for suckers and others.
Bannon, the brains behind Trump’s election upset, once a senior adviser, casts a wide and generally damning net: “Here’s the brutal reality … There was not a deep bench of talent that could step in to the government and run things.” As to be expected he unloads on Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor and first head of the Trump transition. But he also dumps on Steve Mnuchin, the treasury secretary, calling him an “errand boy” for Stephen Schwarzman, the billionaire behind the Blackstone Group who is also a Trump buddy.
In his takedown of Mnuchin, Bannon adds: “I thought Wall Street would go through fucking conniptions because he’s not a heavy hitter.” He may have spoken too soon. Mnuchin is now tasked with negotiating the debt ceiling and budget in the shadow of the 2020 campaign. A hunch: Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer will eat him alive.
Bannon has kind words for Don McGahn, the former White House counsel, who was ultimately shoved out the door and shared a lawyer with Bannon. Ladling out praise, Bannon refers to McGahn packing the bench with conservatives, undoing the legacy of the New Deal and gutting the so-called administrative state, making him the “most significant White House counsel in the history of the republic” with the exception FDR and Harry Truman’s guy, Samuel Rosenman.
The Best People also lays out the fates of the “formers”, cabinet officials who were not long for the world of government. There is Tom Price, the former health secretary; there is Ryan Zinke, the former secretary of the interior; and there is Scott Pruitt, the former director of the Environmental Protection Agency. None had any business being in the cabinet. Ever.
At best they were clueless, at worst self-aggrandizing and brazenly venal. As Elijah Cummings, now chair of House committee on oversight and reform, exclaimed: “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
If all this sounds chaotic, it was and remains so. The Best People also describes how during the transition, Trump’s “beachhead” teams took a lackadaisical approach to scoping out their agencies and departments, emitting little more than mere impressions of ineptitude and a dearth of seriousness. One official at the Department of Housing and Urban Development complained that Trump’s team possessed only an “‘elementary understanding’ of federal housing policy”. The nuts and bolts of government were not their thing. Then again, Trump is not much of a reader.
Members of the transition left to become lobbyists, notwithstanding a supposed lobbying ban. As Politico reported in May 2017: “Three months after Trump moved into the White House, at least nine people who worked on his transition have registered as lobbyists.” Trump promised to drain the swamp. Instead, it has grown murkier than ever.
Although unemployment sits under 4% and the economy grows, the electorate is dissatisfied. Early polls show Trump down by double digits to Joe Biden. As for other Democrats, the numbers project a foot race. In other words, Trump’s unpopularity has placed a ceiling on his upside. The tumult that characterizes his tenure has eclipsed the economy, arguably his signature achievement.
And yet, as The Best People impresses upon its readers, Trump was repeatedly warned that governing is not the same as campaigning. Routinized order, ethics and structure all matter. The seeds of the president’s possible electoral downfall were sown with his election in 2016. If not earlier.
