The Resistance Will Not Come From Within White House

Because, as apparently Bob Woodward’s book (sometimes inadvertently) demonstrates, 1)Trump’s nominees are mostly not much more competent than he is, and 2)like congressional Republicans they mostly want him to pursue the ends he’s already pursuing with less politically damaging tweets:

Nearly 300 pages into Bob Woodward’s new book, Fear: Trump in the White House, a West Wing aide named Zach Fuentes cautions fellow staffers. With depressingly familiar words, Fuentes informs his colleagues, “He’s not a detail guy. Never put more than one page in front of him. Even if he’ll glance at it, he’s not going to read the whole thing. Make sure you underline or put in bold the main points … you’ll have 30 seconds to talk to him. If you haven’t grabbed his attention, he won’t focus.” Some subjects, such as the military, do engage him, but the overwhelming picture is worrying and dire. Still, one could finish this passage and feel at least slightly relieved that people like Fuentes are aware of the reigning deficiencies in the White House, and doing their best to mitigate them.

Fuentes is merely an assistant to John Kelly, the White House chief of staff, but Kelly and James Mattis, the secretary of defense, are presented throughout Woodward’s book as being cognizant of the president’s extreme limitations and authoritarian instincts, and rather boldly willing to push back against their boss. This is why it’s probably worth mentioning that Fuentes wasn’t talking about Donald Trump; no, he was talking about John Kelly. And Woodward’s book—which arrived at around the same time as the already infamous, still-currently anonymous New York Times op-ed about the men and women in the executive branch supposedly working to protect America from Donald Trump—is as much a portrait of the craven, ineffective, and counterproductive group of “adults” surrounding Trump as it is a more predictable look into the president’s shortcomings. It’s not entirely clear how aware Woodward is of what he has revealed about the people he’s quoting at length. (Sources tend to come off well in his books.) But intentionally or not, Fear will make plain to the last optimist that, just as Republicans in Congress are unlikely to save us, neither are the relative grown-ups in the Trump administration.

[…]

The same cluelessness—or cynicism—arises in a number of other scenes Woodward stitches together. One occurs when Reince Priebus (another obvious source), Porter, Cohn, Hope Hicks, and Dan Scavino try to get Trump to rein in his tweeting. “As an extreme measure,” Woodward writes with a straight face, the staffers “proposed they set up a committee. They would draft some tweets that they believed Trump would like.” This plan naturally fails, but what exactly were they trying to accomplish, and why?

The story is presented as one in a long line of “here are the adults trying to moderate Trump” tales, but except for a cursory reference to the possibility of a tweet getting us into war with North Korea, it is very clear that the group simply thought Trump’s tweets were hurting him politically. (The impetus here was Trump’s attack on Mika Brzezinski.) It’s one thing to tell yourself you are saving the world from nuclear annihilation; it’s another to just wish the president was slightly less uncouth. (Sen. Lindsey Graham, who plays a ridiculously large role in the narrative, clearly presented himself to Woodward as one of the people reining in Trump. But his advice, too, is usually about tweeting less, or not “tweeting to your disadvantage.” When he weighs in on foreign policy, it is to push Trump to be more hawkish toward North Korea. Thanks a lot.)

Forget the myths the media’s created about the White House…