The president of the United States is, was, and will forever be completely off the rails. This is reflected in the hourly chaos that is his administration. Also, this is all somehow Reince Priebus’ fault.
So we are led to believe according to the “over a dozen Trump aides, allies, and others close to the White House” quoted in a Monday Politico report. “As the White House struggles to gain its footing almost two months into Donald Trump’s presidency,” Politico writes, “administration officials increasingly put the blame on one person: Reince Priebus.”
It doesn’t require feeling sympathy for the White House chief of staff, who knew precisely what he was getting into when he took the job, to recognize that the latest iteration of the “blame Priebus” genre is slightly unfair. The main flaw in the theory that makes Priebus responsible for the actions of a visibly unhinged president and his administration: There might just be a figure more senior, perhaps one who works in a White House office with no corners, who’s more at fault here. No one chief of staff will ever be able to clean up all of the messes such a man so joyfully makes.
The complaints set forth by the dozen-or-so anonymous gripers are mostly about Priebus’ management style, which doesn’t get to the nub of why the White House is struggling. They whine about “a micromanager who sprints from one West Wing meeting to another, inserting himself into conversations big and small and leaving many staffers feeling as if he’s trying to block their access to Trump.” They moan about him trying to stock the administration with his allies, as though other power centers aren’t doing the same. And—this is my favorite!—“they expressed alarm at what they say are directionless morning staff meetings Priebus oversees that could otherwise be used to rigorously set the day’s agenda and counterbalance the president’s own unpredictability.” Attending pointless, unproductive meetings is a feature of 100 percent of the world’s jobs; in Washington, especially, attendance of such meetings is typically the job itself.
Note, in the sentence about having to sit through these dumb meetings every morning, what the staffers say they would be focusing the dumb meetings on: “rigorously [setting] the day’s agenda and [counterbalancing] the president’s own unpredictability.” Priebus is being blamed for not focusing these brief meetings on covering for the scatterbrained president and his lies, perhaps pre-emptively. It could be, then, that the White House’s difficulties are more Trump’s fault than they are Priebus’.
Politico acknowledges this in a rich to-be-fair paragraph about one-third of the way into the story. “It is unfair to solely finger Priebus for the administration’s missteps,” the authors note. “Much of the fault can be assigned to the president himself—a notoriously unpredictable figure who relishes drama.” (One wonders if ancient broadsheets ever described Nero as “a notoriously unpredictable figure who relishes drama.”)
“Priebus himself has been caught off guard by a number of controversies,” the story continues, “the latest on Saturday, when he awoke to a series of Trump tweets, some of which accused former President Barack Obama, without evidence, of wiretapping Trump Tower phone lines.”
The story of the administration so far is: a wave of constant insanity—initiated by the robed president himself, his Twitter account, and a little Fox & Friends for inspiration—interrupted by two (2) moments of normal adult politician behavior.
The first was the nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. Trump was able to trudge through brief prepared remarks without choke-slamming an arbitrary person in attendance, buying his administration a few days of good fortune and returning the spotlight to the very real story of how screwed the Democratic Party is.
The second instance of adult politician behavior was last week’s joint address to Congress. Here, he made it through lengthy prepared remarks without choke-slamming an arbitrary person in attendance. Early surveys showed that viewers were pleased.
These two moments, the only two moments of Trump’s presidency that have really worked, were reportedly Priebus’ doing. “[D]espite the scrutiny focused on him, Priebus has won internal credit for helping to engineer the rollout of Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch,” Politico writes, “and playing a central role in overseeing Trump’s well-received congressional address last week.” Since those were the two total things that have improved the president’s public image, and Priebus was responsible for both of them, that means that the rest of the administration staff quoted roasting Priebus for holding 20-minute meetings each morning have made zero contributions to improving the president’s public image.
The best way to improve the president’s public image would be for the president himself to exhibit more normal adult politician behavior through the use of such adult traits as self-control and coherence. If Priebus and the rest of the White House staff want to play a constructive role in this long-shot effort, that means no longer enabling Trump. Consider just this past weekend when Trump, without telling anyone, popped off on Twitter alleging Obama had wiretapped his apartment without presenting any evidence. “The staff scrambled throughout the day to craft a statement that didn’t anger the president,” Politico writes, “but also didn’t create any further headaches.”
Some staffer, probably Priebus, needs to tell the president that his staff can no longer defend unannounced crazy person tweets to which there is no plausible defense. If doing so gets him fired, well, there are better paying, less stressful, and similarly morally compromised workplaces out there on which to impose his tyrannical regime of fruitless meetings. Another staffer, perhaps one of Priebus’ unnamed critics, could then have a shot at managing Donald Trump’s White House, and Donald Trump himself. It’s doubtful such a person would have any more success than Priebus, but the chief of staff would have one less critic.
