The following article by James Hohmann and Breanne Deppisch was posted on the Washington Post website May 15, 2017:
THE BIG IDEA: Many West Wing staffers have sacrificed their personal reputations by parroting falsehoods on behalf of Donald Trump. How will their devotion be repaid? Perhaps with pink slips.
The president has a congenital inability to take personal responsibility for his own mistakes. Throughout his career, he’s sought out scapegoats whenever situations get hairy. He’s doing it again amidst the continuing fallout from his decision to fire James Comey as FBI director.
Trump demands unquestioning loyalty from his subordinates, but kowtowing and paying fealty do not ensure that he’ll return the favor.
Several people who have spoken with the president tell Philip Rucker that he has been quick to blame his staff for the blowback to axing Comey. “Privately, Trump has lashed out at the communications office — led by press secretary Sean Spicer and communications director Michael Dubke — and has spoken candidly with advisers about a broad shake-up that could include demotions or dismissals,” Phil reported on the front page of Sunday’s paper. “Yet Trump did not inform Spicer and Dubke of his decision until about an hour before it was announced, keeping them and other senior aides out of the loop because he feared the news might leak prematurely. … Their defenders said they were assigned an impossible task of orchestrating on short notice a complete rollout plan — from crafting and distributing talking points to lining up lawmakers, legal experts and other Trump supporters to give interviews.”
The president and his family members do not want to hear these excuses. “Trump is in some ways like a pilot opting to fly a plane through heavy turbulence then blaming the flight attendants when the passengers get jittery,” Phil observed. “Some of Trump’s allies said they are worried that the president views the Comey episode entirely as a public-relations crisis — a branding problem — and has not been judicious about protecting himself from legal exposure as the FBI continues to investigate possible links between his campaign and Russia. … One GOP figure close to the White House mused privately about whether Trump was ‘in the grip of some kind of paranoid delusion.’”
THE PRICE OF LOYALTY:
— Trump reportedly asked Comey to pledge his loyalty three times during a one-on-one dinner in late January, but the FBI director refused to do so. Comey allies say he believes this conversation is what led to his termination last week.
The president denies asking Comey to pledge personal loyalty, but he also says that he does not think doing so would be inappropriate. “I don’t think it would be a bad question to ask,” Trump said in an interview that aired Saturday night on Fox News. “I think loyalty to the country, loyalty to the United States, is important. You know, I mean, it depends on how you define loyalty.”
— When you consider Trump’s history, there is nothing surprising about him asking Comey for a loyalty oath.
You might recall that the president installed minders inside key agencies as soon as he took power in January. These apparatchiks, who have already proven their devotion to the president, are charged — above all — with monitoring the loyalty of cabinet secretaries and reporting back to the White House. “This shadow government of political appointees … is embedded at every Cabinet agency, with offices in or just outside the secretary’s suite,” Lisa Rein and Juliet Eilperin reported in March. “The White House has installed at least 16 of the advisers at departments including Energy and Health and Human Services and at some smaller agencies such as NASA … These aides report not to the secretary, but to … a White House deputy chief of staff.”
The administration’s head hunters have struggled for months to find well-qualified people for high-level posts because any past criticism of Trump is often disqualifying. Trump rejected Rex Tillerson’s first choice to be his deputy because he’d criticized Trump during the campaign. A top aide to Ben Carson was summarily fired and escorted out of the Housing and Urban Development headquarters by security in February after a Trump loyalist discovered a critical op-ed he had written last fall.
During the GOP primaries, Trump asked attendees at his rallies to physically pledge loyalty. “Raise your right hand,” he said last March in Orlando, for example. He then told the crowd to repeat after him: “I do solemnly swear that I — no matter how I feel, no matter what the conditions, if there’s hurricanes or whatever — will vote, on or before the 12th for Donald J. Trump for president.” Jewish groups complained at the time about the disconcerting imagery of people raising their right arms in what looked like a Nazi salute.
“Asked during a 2014 speech about the trait he most looks for in an employee, his answer was unequivocal: loyalty,” Bloomberg notes.
BUT LOYALTY DOES NOT CUT BOTH WAYS:
— Last year, Trump repeatedly cited his refusal to fire then-campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, after he forcibly grabbed a female reporter and then denied it (even though there was video), as a testament to his own character. “Folks, look, I’m a loyal person,” Trump said at one town hall. “It would be so easy for me to terminate this man, ruin his life, ruin his family.” (He even cited Lewandowski during a meeting with Jewish leaders to make the point that he’d stay loyal to Israel if elected.) “This campaign, above all other things, is about loyalty,” Lewandowski told New York Magazine around this time.
Shortly thereafter, however, Trump fired Lewandowski. Then a few months after that, struggling in the polls, the candidate fired his replacement. It was a reminder that, for Trump, loyalty is always conditional. There are strings attached.
— Trump has described himself as a “loyalty freak,” according to a profile written last summer by Politico’s Michael Kruse, but what he really meant by that is that he wants people under him to stay loyal to him.
— From a prescient BuzzFeed profile in April 2016: “A review of the billionaire’s tumultuous, decades-long career — including interviews with former employees, aides, and confidantes — suggests that Trump’s dedication to even his closest allies can wear thin, particularly at moments of professional crisis. Far from a tight-knit family of blood brothers, The Donald’s inner circle has been purged and repopulated many times over the years. Devoted workaholics burn out and flame out. Longtime alliances end with lawsuits and tabloid sniping. Sometimes reconciliation follows, sometimes grudges endure — and rarely does Trump refuse to bury the hatchet when it’s good for the bottom line.”
Trump has even been willing to throw family members under the bus to avoid accepting fault for his own mistakes. “In 1990, when the disastrous opening of the Taj Mahal Casino threatened to unravel Trump’s Atlantic City casino empire, he aimed his fury at his younger brother, Robert, who worked on the project,” the Buzzfeed story noted. “According to a 1991 book written by a former Trump executive, the magnate angrily berated Robert in front of other employees. Robert immediately departed the casino seething, according to the book, saying, ‘I don’t need this.’ … The episode put a lasting strain on their relationship.”
— “Perhaps one of the most fraught positions for someone to occupy in Trump’s orbit is that of the PR man,” The Atlantic noted back in March: “Long before he earned the distinction of becoming the first president to live-tweet cable news, Trump was a headline-obsessed media junkie who devoured the New York Post daily and demanded round-the-clock attention from the publicists on his payroll. In one emblematic example from the early ‘90s, Trump became irate that he was losing the media battle with his first wife, Ivana, as their breakup dominated the tabloids—so he fired the public-relations consultant that his family had employed for more than two decades. Asked about the incident years later, the consultant, Howard Rubenstein, waved it off as a short-lived temper tantrum. ‘There was a time when [Trump] was upset with everybody,’ he shrugged. Still, in retrospect, the episode seems to have foreshadowed Trump’s widely chronicled displeasure with Spicer.”
TRUMP STILL HAS A LOT TO LEARN:
— The president clearly prefers to surround himself with “yes men.” Consider what some of his favorite staffers said on TV in recent days:
- “I understand I have to earn his confidence every day,” Rex Tillerson said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” (That sounds exhausting.)
- Kellyanne Conway did not even try to dispute that Trump demands loyalty. “The president expects people who are serving in his administration … to be loyal to the administration,” the counselor to the president said on Fox News last Thursday as the Comey imbroglio blew up.
- Nikki Haley, the ambassador to the United Nations, added yesterday on ABC’s “This Week”: “The president is the CEO of the country. He can hire and fire whomever he wants. That’s his right.”
— In fact, that is not how it works. Trump is the president, not “the CEO,” of the United States. This is a meaningful distinction. The federal government does not belong to Trump. It is not a family business. Or even a publicly-traded corporation with a board of directors. There are checks and balances. There are courts and Congress. There are laws designed to prevent obstruction of justice. As our first president to take office with no prior political or military experience, and lacking any formal training in history or constitutional law, Trump clearly still faces a Herculean learning curve.
— This point is very important: FBI agents do not take an oath to the president. They take an oath to the Constitution. The bureau explains why this matters on its own web site: “It is significant that we take an oath to support and defend the Constitution and not an individual leader, ruler, office, or entity. … A government based on individuals — who are inconsistent, fallible, and often prone to error — too easily leads to tyranny on the one extreme or anarchy on the other. … The American colonists were all too familiar with the harmful effects of unbalanced government and oaths to individual rulers. For example, the English were required to swear loyalty to the crown, and many of the early colonial documents commanded oaths of allegiance to the king.”
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