Krashlia wrote:It would...mark a major Come-from-behind Victory for the Religious Right
Meh. Catholic leaders have already come from behind plenty of times.
Aquila89 wrote:Crimson847 wrote: what these officials are really doing is not so much active defiance as waiting out his bad moods in order to better pursue his "true" goals, like a friend hiding your phone when you try to drunk-dial your ex so you won't make a mistake you'll regret in the morning.
Except Trump never drinks. He's doing all this sober. If he really gives orders that are really just whims he'll later change his mind about, he's still unfit for office.
If he was drinking to that extent he'd be unfit for office anyway. In this context it really doesn't matter
why he's so mercurial and unreliable, just that he is.
Interestingly, people say this situation is "unprecedented", but that's not entirely true: in the last days of Nixon's administration, as the president became increasingly paranoid and started drinking heavily, his secretary of defense James Schlesinger ordered the military to double-check all orders from the President with him or the secretary of state, to prevent Nixon from, say, starting a nuclear war in a fit of drunken rage. Technically an illegal usurpation of power, but under the circumstances no one questioned it.
I guess the officials are doing a good thing when they ignore his stupid orders that he'll forget about tomorrow. But still, on some level I hate it that he's saved from his own stupidity. I'm tired of him getting away with everything. If Woodward's reports are true, he's acting like a capricious, uneducated asshole even when it comes to the most important matters, and yet he escapes consequences again.
I get the feeling that's a common reaction. It was certainly mine for some of these interventions. For instance, had Trump officially notified Congress of his intent to withdraw from the US-South Korea free trade deal, as he allegedly attempted to do early in his administration, Congress would almost certainly have declined to go along with that. But the attempt would be on the record. It would remain on the record later that summer as Kim tested his missiles. Like firing Comey, the original Muslim ban, or the attempted Obamacare repeal, it would be a solid example of Trump not just saying something awful (which hasn't surprised anyone since the Access Hollywood tape) but
doing something awful in his capacity as president. Anonymous reports of Trump allegedly declaring his intent to do crazy things aren't going to discredit Trump; Trump actually doing crazy things is what will discredit Trump.
Which is why I think I'm mostly on Frum's side in the aforementioned debate over the ethics of this internal resistance. If you're an administration official and you think the president is so unstable you have to do this kind of stuff to keep him from making terrible mistakes, that's a pretty severe indictment of the president no matter how you spin it and no matter how many papers you steal off his desk. Having such an unstable president is a crisis waiting to happen, because when shit hits the fan the president needs to be able to remain centered and deal with the problem intelligently
right now, not next week when he's in a better mood. The latter works okay for legislative policy or judicial nominations, but not so well in response to terror attacks or foreign policy crises or natural disasters. By hiding hard evidence of such a problem from the public, the internal resistance is only lengthening this security crisis.
Of course, that argument has its limits. If Trump signaled his intent to, say, nuke Beijing, I really couldn't blame his staff for deciding that stopping that from happening at any cost takes priority over being transparent with the public. So if Trump tried to order the military to commit an atrocity I think Mattis would be justified in doing whatever he needed to do to prevent that. However, delivering notice to withdraw from a trade deal if Congress consents is not nearly irreversible enough or devastating enough to world peace to qualify for such an emergency exemption. Also, in such an extreme circumstance Step 2 should always be to invoke the 25th Amendment and get the nutter out of office immediately, so even in such a case the deception should be short-lived, not something that goes on for almost 2 years.
So in the end, the public doesn't really benefit from this. The resisters benefit a little by making it more likely they'll get their way on policy, but also sacrifice by running the risk of being detected, fired, and possibly exiled from the Republican community, so despite what some Trumpers have argued it doesn't seem plausible that they're purely looking to advance themselves--with the possible exception of the guy who wrote a self-serving op-ed about it.
Who does benefit? Mainly, the GOP establishment and its policy agenda. If Trump were off the reins blatantly wrecking the china shop, the GOP's attention would have to be squarely on dealing with him. Sure, they'd be fine with Pence as President, but getting him there would be difficult and acrimonious for a party reliant on Trump supporters, including the diehards who still manage to believe he's a humble and deeply religious man.
Once they succeeded at getting him out of there, they'd
still probably lose the House in 2018, both because of butthurt Trump supporters staying home and because Pence and the "establishment" GOP agenda aren't popular enough to maintain a governing majority. And after a bruising impeachment fight, odds are pretty good that other than a moral victory in cleaning their own house they would have little to show policy-wise for their time in power. No record number of rock-solid conservative judges, no tax cuts, no mandate repeal, none of that. They'd walk out of power having given nothing to their supporters to reward them for their support. Given that the GOP base was already furious at the party for failing to deliver on its policy promises, the backlash against such a failure would have been devastating for the GOP.
Contrarywise, with the issue of Trump's character swept neatly under the rug for a while by the actions of the internal resistance, the GOP "establishment" in Washington gets a window of opportunity to make use of their hard-earned control of the government to direct more resources to their donors and constituencies, tilt the legal and political playing fields toward their supporters, and generally do their best to deliver the goods they promised to their voters so their current political coalition can survive a little longer. Problem is, the act of sweeping this under the rug also leaves the GOP establishment with full ownership of Trump's character problems, which will have much longer-term consequences for their goals that are difficult to foresee.
"If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them; but the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn