Why exactly is the Trump White House so royally screwed up? Is it because so few of the top staffers have any prior experience in government? Or might it be because Trump and his team tried to do too many difficult things too quickly?
According to GOP strategist Rick Wilson, the blame lies squarely with Donald Trump himself because, as Wilson notes in a piece he wrote for The Daily Beast, institutions tend to resemble the people who lead them:
“As long as Trump is president, there will never be a pivot. There is no better version of Trump, simply waiting for the right org chart or the right staffer.”
Wilson adds that while Trump may think can fire or change staff members around to solve the problem, but that won’t help, either:
“Trump is faced with terrible options when it comes to rearranging the deck chairs on the SS White House, and those of us who warned you this was inevitable are ordering popcorn. The cancer in the presidency isn’t his staff — though they reflect his shoddy intellect, his shallow impulsiveness, his loose grasp of reality, and Chinese-menu ideology. The problem is Trump himself, and nothing and no one can change that.”
And should the pretend president want to fire chief strategist Steve Bannon, that too has serious repercussions, Wilson writes:
“Another reason firing Bannon is fraught with risk: Bannon is running the Russia pushback operation from inside the White House
“Bannon doesn’t just want to protect Trump over the Russia allegations, he wants to protect Russia, a nation he sees as an essential ally in his new alliance of white Christian nations against the Muslim horde. Does Trump really want Bannon, angry and in the wind, declaring his own jihad?”
Wilson ends his Daily Beast article by recalling a line from Ralph Waldo Emerson:
“I’m always struck with how a simple phrase from Ralph Waldo Emerson captures politics over time, and how it captures the Trump administration perfectly. That phrase? ‘An institution is the lengthened shadow of a man.’”
In that case, Trump is more screwed than he can even imagine.
This article was originally published by the same author at LiberalAmerica.org