Incompetence Trumps Malevolence

"Who's making the decisions in the White House?" Senator John McCain asked reporters on February 14. "Is it the 31 year old?" he continued, alluding to Trump adviser Stephen Miller. "Is it Mr. Bannon? Is it the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff? I don't know." The "whole environment is one of dysfunction in the Trump administration," McCain said.

"“I’ve consulted many people in town about analogies and comparisons and nobody can come up with any," Bill Galston, former Deputy Assistant to President Clinton, now at the Brookings Institution told the Guardian. "Our seismographs are broken.... We appear to have a president who cannot distinguish chaos from order. There are amateurs doing a job that only professionals can do, and even then often not successfully."

"It was kind of fun in the beginning watching the kids run around and bump into each other," Rich Galen, former press secretary to George W. Bush's Vice President, Dan Quayle, said. "Now they’ve got the keys to the car and it’s dangerous. Someone has to go in and get their arms around this."

"Trump has a mediocre staff, whom he doesn’t treat well," Elizabeth Drew wrote recently in the New York Review of Books. With apparent surprise Drew noted that so far only one "significant" White House aide has quit -- deputy Chief of Staff, Katie Walsh. Dismissing the White House cover story that Walsh's departure was part of a White House reorganization, Drew wrote "it’s more likely that Walsh left because she couldn’t stand the unpleasantness of working for Trump."

Perhaps in part a result of the staff weakness, organizational chaos, and lack of trust, the Trump administration has come to resemble Gertrude Stein's description of her hometown Oakland, CA, "There is no there there." The  Washington Post recently highlighted the crying lack of appointees for literally hundreds of positions that require Senate confirmation. As monitored by the Post and the nonprofit, nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service, "of 553 high-level positions requiring Senate confirmation, only 22 have been confirmed, 24 formally nominated and awaiting confirmation, and 29 announced and waiting formal nomination." Rice University's White House Transition Project, which has assisted administrations since 1999, called the Trump administrations efforts at appointing and obtaining confirmation for key positions "the worst performance in three decades."

Writing in the Washington Examiner, conservative commentator Byron York suggested that part of Trump's problem governing is that he "does not have enough loyalists to staff the White House, much less the entire executive branch." The time in political life that most presidents have spent allows them to gather around them loyal supporters, colleagues, and associates who can "take jobs at all levels of government." With no political experience, Trump has no loyalists. Moreover, York wrote, in running his business he relied on a small circle of family members or longtime associates. And he "campaigned with an abrasive style that alienated a significant portion of the Republican Party's political talent."

Both Drew and York referred to the almost comical situation in which seemingly any issue of weight or complexity has been assigned to the portfolio of First Son-in-Law, Jared Kushner, whose greatest achievement, like that of his father-in-law, seems to be having been born into a wealthy real estate family. By Drew's count, Kushner's agenda includes:

• The Department of Veterans Affairs
• The criminal justice system 
• Opioid abuse
• Broadband service for all Americans 
• “Transformative” infrastructure projects 
• The Middle East
• Diplomacy (including US-China, but also all foreign leaders)

Vanity Fair's recent chronicle of the Bannon-Kushner "civil war" highlighted one of Kushner's problem-solving techniques. Reportedly, during the campaign after Trump had expressed something resembling a point of view on China, Kushner was left with the task of researching the topic. His solution was to browse Amazon, where he found an interesting title, "Death by China," and called the author to ask him to join the campaign as an adviser. Vanity Fair's Sarah Ellison noted that, at the time, Navarro was the campaign's only economic adviser. Trump's tax plan was apparently crafted similarly. According to Vanity Fair, Kushner once presented Trump with a speech he had written himself, which Trump judged "terrible." "I'm not a fucking speechwriter," Kushner is reported to have said. "I'm a real estate guy."

"Kushner is in over his head," Drew wrote, "But Trump, as inexperienced in government as his son-in-law is, does not seem to realize that, and so he keeps loading new responsibilities on him, apparently as the only person inside the White House he’s been able to trust."

Conservative talk-show host Charlie Sykes issued a characteristic critique of the Trump White House in February. "They are undermining their own agenda, they have self-inflicted wounds,” Sykes told MSNBC's Alex Witt. "There needs to be some sort of adult supervision...."

Among other dubious "firsts," Trump is the "first modern president to lose his first major piece of legislation," Drew noted. In his so-called negotiations with congressional factions "He came across as blundering and incompetent.

For Drew, the defeat was an example of Trump's "substance free approach to governing." 

"Trump was clearly unaware of and unperturbed by what was in the bill; he wanted to win. He told his aides that he simply wanted to sign a bill, that it would make him look presidential."

Drew observed that Trump "apparently didn't grasp" that business negotiations and political negotiations are very different phenomena. Unlike a business, where both sides normally have a motivation to reach a deal, in politics "the more you give away the more insatiable the forces you give away to become." In the specific case of the Republican health care bill, the Freedom Caucus opposed it on the ideological grounds that government should not provide health care. So members had no compunction about wringing concessions from the President (or his men), and still voting against the bill.

"[T]here are major differences between running a business and running a government," the Washington Post's Catherine Rampell wrote, shortly after Trump's inauguration, anticipating Drew's observations.  "[I]t’s a myth that aptitude at one necessarily translates to aptitude at the other," she condinued. "But with ineptitude, maybe it’s a different story."

The triumph of incompetence over malevolence was perhaps seen most clearly in the rollout of the Executive Order on visas and refugees. As reported by multiple news organizations, the order was not reviewed by the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department, the State Department, or the Department of Defense. NBC's Ari Melber reported that the White House actively prevented the order from being reviewed by National Security Council lawyers. The New York Times reported that officials of the two agencies most directly affected were briefed by phone while Trump was signing the order.

"Our commander in chaos," the Arizona Republic declared.

Reviewing the order after receiving it Friday, January 27, the day that Trump signed it, the Department of Homeland Security determined that it did not apply to permanent residents, aka green card holders. Bannon and Miller overruled that judgment Friday night, asserting that green card holders would be allowed to enter the country only on a case-by-case basis. The directive sent to airlines Friday night, however, stated that the travel ban did not apply to green card holders. 

As reported by CNN, the White House policy team developed the order in relative isolation, deliberately avoiding the customary interagency process that would have enabled the Justice Department and affected homeland security agencies to provide "operational guidance."  The order's stated purpose is to "protect Americans" by ensuring that "those admitted to this country do not bear hostile attitudes toward it and its founding principles...."  "The United States cannot, and should not, admit those who do not support the Constitution, or those who would place violent ideologies over American law. In addition, the United States should not admit those who engage in acts of bigotry or hatred...," the latter, presumably because there are enough of those already among Trump voters and the administration.

Lawfareblog's Benjamin Wittes questioned whether the stated purpose was actually the real intent of the executive order. If the state purpose were the real purpose, Wittes wrote, "the document is both wildly over-inclusive and wildly under-inclusive." In Wittes view, by making it nearly impossible for Syrian refugees to even apply for admission to the U.S., while not preventing people from entering from many of the places from which, for example the 9/11 hijackers originated. Other effects of the order, such as raising the threat of deportation for foreign students lawfully in the country, and detaining travelers mid-flight, were "orthogonal to any relevant security interest," Wittes suggested:

When do you do these things? You do these things when you’re elevating the symbolic politics of bashing Islam over any actual security interest. You do them when you’ve made a deliberate decision to burden human lives to make a public point. In other words, this is not a document that will cause hardship and misery because of regrettable incidental impacts on people injured in the pursuit of a public good. It will cause hardship and misery for tens or hundreds of thousands of people because that is precisely what it is intended to do.

And yet, Wittes continued, many of the de facto objectives of the executive order on visas and refugees were achievable within the president's executive authority without creating diplomatic tension or so many openings for litigation. An immigration lawyer Wittes contacted described the order as "look[ing] like what an intern came up with over a lunch hour."

At the center of the travel ban fiasco was self-styled Svengali, former Brietbart editor Steve Bannon. Bannon's carefully crafted "evil genius" image (he retains a personal publicist) took a bit of a beating. "[A] clod with delusions of grandeur," Wittes' colleague at the Lawfareblog, Quinta Jurecic, labeled Bannon in the aftermath of the Executive Order rollout. Dismissing recent profiles of Bannon in Time and Politico that highlighted his supposed affinity for obscure right wing philosophy, Jurecic's declared him an "Internet troll." Breitbart, wrote Jurecic, "may be the most well-known example of the coupling of trolling with reactionary politics."

Trolling, in its purest form, is the act of deliberately behaving in an upsetting or offensive way in order to provoke an angry response. It’s a form of entertainment, but in recent years, it’s also become linked to reactionary politics.... Trolling reflects a profound lack of sincerity, even a hostility to sincerity. It allows the speaker to make an offensive declaration and then insist that his or her (usually his) statement was just intended to make you mad—that you’re the real fool for taking this seriously. The speaker gets to say the thing and also gets to deny responsibility for it. The troll believes that people who care about things are chumps and that the only wise way to go through the world is with a level of ironic detachment that borders on nihilism. Trolling isn’t just about being offensive. It’s about being gleefully offensive.

Jurecic went on to note that Curtis Yarvin's writing, which Bannon allegedly reveres, "is terrible." She made this statement, she said, not as a "potshot," but to highlight that in the various so-called "alt-right" communities, there's an obsession with proving one's intelligence, which is frequently couple with eugenicism.

Jurecic's observations of Bannon form a sad and disturbing parallel to Laurie Penny's account of her time "On the Milo Bus With the Lost Boys of America’s New Right," published in the Pacific Standard magazine. Penny accompanied a forlorn band of groupies (boys) who, along with their champion former provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, had been ousted from their venue by Berkeley protesters. The article is worth reading in its entirety, but Penny's conclusion, which could apply to whole swaths of the Trump administration, is striking.

Now the entire alt-right is realizing, in full view of a few million popcorn-munching online leftists, that they were never the new punk. They were never the suave and seductive blackshirts of the new American authoritarianism. They are, at best, the brownshirts, and they are becoming less useful to their benefactors by the day. Where they were once “underground,” they are now are an ankle-biting embarrassment to the movement they made mainstream — and they have no clue what to do next.