Whether or not you believe public disclosure will affect the GOP Congress (and remember, one hopes that at least one house will go back to the Dems in November), I still find it pretty fucking hard to be okay with White House insiders surreptitiously undermining their boss. Nobody elected these people. This is not how a republic works. So, if you want to say, Door #1 Authoritarianism and Door #2 Asskisser Junta, and those are literally your only options, fine. But that means we’re more or less across the Rubicon already.
I think that was obvious by about 11PM on November 8, 2016.
Actually, we already know Russia flooded our info ecosystem with illegally obtained information, and that to me is a serious taint on the election. Specifically the hacked e-mails of the DNC and Clinton’s campaign were obtained by illegal hacking in violation of federal law, and also in violation of the normal expectations of confidentiality.
There is a question as to what amount the hacked emails contributed to the electoral result, but since I feel Trump’s victory had many contributing causes, I don’t think you can discount the hacked emails as a contributing cause. Was it a primary cause? Hell, I have no idea. I guess I feel like with the info we have now I cannot call Trump’s election completely illegitimate but he at least gets an asterisk like Roger Maris used to have.
There is yet another way the election could be illegitimate even without actual vote changing: if the Russians hacked the Clinton campaign analytics, gave it to Trump’s campaign, and the Trump campaign used that info in campaigning, then, yeah, that’s not legit.
Interesting points, Sharpe.
Also, it just occurred to me - is the op-ed writer a Game of Thrones watcher? Maybe they think of themselves as Jaime Lannister to Trump’s Mad King.
Gordon supports assassinating foreign leaders confirmed!
Seriously, though, good employees prevent their bosses from fucking up by ignoring their more stupid decisions all the time. That’s one of the things they’re paid for; the boss is always free to fire them if he disagrees.
And as someone mentioned before, this is hardly the first time the White House has been run by unelected people while the President is sidelined - Wilson after the stroke, Ike’s heart attack, Reagan’s second term, the last days of FDR, etc. It’s just that this time the president was disabled before he was ever inaugurated.
You are absolutely correct that the proper procedure is to get the 25th invoked; staffers covering for the president should always be a temporary measure. But the people in charge of doing that refuse, so the other staffers have no choice but to lock president man-baby in his crib and carry on the best they can.
This makes them neither heroes nor villains, just people doing their jobs. (My beef with the op-ed author is that s/he is trying to claim they deserve a halo for a kludge.)
Yes, I’m familiar with Edith Wilson, but I don’t think that’s a model we want to emulate or encourage.
If you have any ideas, I’m sure they’d be welcome. They can’t involve legislating, though, because that branch of government is on permanent siesta.
For starters, every member of the smug, self-satisfied ‘Steady State’ can come out publicly and reveal everything they know indicating Trump’s unfitness for office. And yes, they will lose their jobs. So be it.
As for the legislating branch of the government, I had heard there was an election coming up.
I think we should look at this pragmatically. The person who occupies the highest office of the most powerful county of the world is seeking (haphazardly or not) to upend global stability, destroy public institutions, scorch the earth such that future generations will not be able to recover the current state of the environment, and promote dictatorships and authoritarian governments everywhere.
There is at least one person, through the course of their day job, that is willing to try and subvert the worst of these impulses. Good for them, I don’t really care if they think low taxes for rich people are the bee’s knees, want a career after Trump is humiliated, or write wanky op-ed pieces for national newspapers.
Obsessing about ulterior motives for checking a raving lunatic is silly, at least wait until Trump is gone and this guy/girl is trying to rehabilitate their public image, that is the time to have a go at them. Sometimes I wonder if when Trump orders a Nuclear strike on somewhereistan and the joint chiefs pretends they can’t hear him, you’ll get these liberal thought pieces decrying “a soft coup on a democratically elected government, bla bla bla”.
“For he who is not against us is for us” and all that.
Here’s the thing. You work in whatever capacity this individual does. You know as soon as you come forward you’ll be labeled “disgruntled loser employee we didn’t like anyways”. His (I’m guessing male based on how it was written and the male/female ratio up there) actions are then potentially denigrated to that of a peon’s ant and minimized until he’s forgotten.
So, does he stay and write anonymous stuff that doesn’t expose who he is, or come forward just to be ignored after a few days? Congress is corrupt beyond belief and he’s seen first-hand how Republican’s handle a threat to their own paychecks (treason). He’s also seen how reputable people have come forward and denounced how awful trump is and seen nothing come of it. Calling him a coward is not helpful, but providing helpful constructive criticisms would be. Explain how he could come forward to take trump down without being labeled a traitor for showing classified nuke information, thrown in jail ala Reality Winner and forgotten. If he came forward and couldn’t get traction it’s a death sentence.
As I saw somewhere today, this is Derp Throat.
I don’t think he’s ‘for us,’ at least for those of us who want to see the Republic preserved, because I don’t think junta tactics, even soft ones, are to the advantage of the Republic’s preservation.
Yes, if it averts an actual nuclear exchange it’s probably worth it, but that’s about it in my opinion. And of course we’ll never know if it is/did/would have. Counterfactuals are a bitch.
Meanwhile, Charlie Pierce’s wife thinks it’s Kellyanne Conway…
This. A million times this.
I’m also not sure where people get this “illegal” vibe, either. You’re not always doing what your boss is telling you and you’re occasionally undermining him for the sake of your own agenda. Worthy of being fired for? Absolutely. Illegal? IANAL, but it would take some serious work to convince me; despite Trump’s Commander-in-Chief title, the vast majority of the people in the White House aren’t in the military.
But that said, this only seems to be a self-serving bit of theater, and I still faintly wonder if Trump was behind it in an effort to shift attention from the cluster@#$% going on in the confirmation hearing.
For all the hill of beans my opinion amounts to, this is the right answer I believe. You take your lumps and you take a stand for your country, even if your country club buddies miss a tax break.
Anonymous admits they’re rolling the dice because occasionally they get good, solid, Republican outcomes, but they’re really playing Russian (ha!) roulette with the country. Maybe if we think and wish and hope and pray it won’t come up nuclear football.
Indeed. Everything about this op-ed smells like Republicans seeing a potential disaster on the horizon and trying to pretend like they were on our side the whole time. “Don’t blame us. We tried to stop him, but what could we doooooooo?”
I get that vibe from the Gary Cohn anecdote in Woodward’s book. Stealing official papers so the President can’t do his job seems like some kind of violation to me although I am also NAL. Granted the op-ed author hasn’t copped to anything quite that extreme.
I’m totally flummoxed that you think this is such a big deal. How easy is it for any aide to just print out the missing order again? “Mr. President, did you sign the order to do X?” It’s not there, they print it out again. Any normal administration would go through a process when deciding policy or signing an EO. That this worked at all is just further proof that trump’s decisions are just random and impulsive.
The story here though that seems to have gotten lost is that the Cabinet discussed the 25th amendment. And no one is surprised by the content of the OP-ED.
After the ACA vote happened, many Democrats knew they were going to lose their seats. They still voted for it. The real cowards here continue to be Republicans who refuse to do hold accountable a man wholly unfit for the office.
That’s not what it says. It certainly doesn’t say there was a meeting of all cabinet members and it was openly discussed. At best it says that some cabinet members broached the subject (with each other? their staff? their friends?), but it doesn’t even say that if you read it closely. It could equally well be staffers of cabinet members.
It’s also not the first time we’ve had a President who was an actual crook, but that’s no reason to say well that’s not so bad then. You can’t even identify the people who say they are undermining the President, and you have no idea what those people are actually responsible for doing vs. preventing. Why take their anonymous word for it that they’re looking out for us?
The story here, for me, is that Trump is a creature of impulses and whims. That his staff can pull papers from his desk that he asked for and he has no idea shows how incompetent he is.
If I ask my staff for something, and it’s important to me, I’m going to follow up with them if I don’t get it. If I’m an incompetent boob I’ll tantrum in a meeting, issue a bunch of directives to feel like I’m in control, then promptly forget about it all because I want to go shitpost on Twitter or scroll through Facebook to stroke my ego.