America Descending: The Reality TV Presidency
“I’m going to surround myself only with the best and most serious people…”
– Donald Trump
It’s no secret that coverage of the Trump White House has been an unabashed three ring political circus of scandal, confusion, and incompetence from the word go, though, to be fair, some of the insanity has clearly been manufactured by a hostile media firing off everything they can lay their hands on to take Donald Trumpdown. That’s not to say that not all of it has been serious (it has), or that the morally sordid stuff doesn’t matter (it does). It’s simply that the revolving door of “the best and most serious people” at the White House should start to be a concern to Americans, even those in the MAGAmovement.
Running the massive bureaucracies in Washington, DC will never be an easy job, and the resume of anyone qualified to run even the smallest of these titanic organizations has to be as extensive as it is rare. Consider for a moment how many people in the entire United States possess simply the barest necessary qualifications, including even those people who are philosophically incompatible with Donald Trump’s undeniably incendiary and often utterly unpredictable political methods, who would never for a moment put up with Trump’s knee jerk public humiliation and criticism.
Could there be even a hundred qualified candidates for the dozens of cabinet positions and key staff positions, out of 327,000,000 Americans? Now take out the roughly half (understatement) of these candidates politically opposed to Donald Trump? Now cut that list down to only the short list of candidates who would even be willing to drop what they were doing and work in a White House, according to Fire and Fury, in total chaos? And what of those few candidates that haven’t made some public or private statement that Trump didn’t like? At this point, so now the available candidates is what, dozens?
Now, realize that twenty people have either resigned or been fired by Donald Trump, and are unlikely to consider working for Trump again. The math doesn’t add up.
“The supreme rulers are hardly known by their subjects. The lesser are loved and praised. The even lesser are feared. The least are despised. Those who show no trust will not be trusted. Those who are quiet value the words. When their task is completed, people will say: We did it ourselves.”
– Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
Even while the sheer size and scope of our national government demands leaders of the highest caliber, Trump has done everything possible to ensure “the best and the most serious people” available consists of the smallest number willing to work with him or his reality TV administration, but, even if the math is off, if we assume Trump has indeed already picked “the best and most serious people“, by definition, anyone he replaces these people with simply can’t be “the best and most serious“. At this rate, assuming Trump survives to 2020, his administration is going to be running on 3rd and 4th stringers.
Anyone should be able to see that this isn’t the best way to run a government, not long-term, and, considering Trump’s ferociously loyal supporters are still convinced that he’s going to be in office until 2024, even they should realize the conspicuous problem that Trump’s inability to retain key staff about him represents (don’t worry, they stopped reading this article as soon as they realized it criticized Trump and have long ago retreated to their ideological safe spaces). For those who oppose Trump especially, this should simply keep us up at night.
Remember when Trump’s handlers and supporters claimed that the Republican Party would work with Trump to keep him focused on “making America great again“, doubling down on the promise that the men and women around Donald Trump would be capable of driving Trump’s agenda while allowing “Trump to be Trump“? It simply cannot be said with any credibility that this plan has born out. Trump’s entire inner circle has either been terminated or resigned, leaving only Mike Pence, thanks only to a permanent “reality show immunity“, thanks to the US Constitution, making him one of the very few people Trump simply can’t dump on in his infamous Twitter tirades.
“Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain – and most fools do.”
– Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People
During George Washington‘s presidency, he had as his Vice President, John Adams, his Secretary of State, John Jay and later Thomas Jefferson, his Secretary of State, Alexander Hamilton, his Secretary of War, Henry Knox, Timothy Pickering, and James McHenry, and his Attorney General, Edmund Randolph, William Bradford, and Charles Lee. These men are legends in their own times, and their legacies remain illustrative of the great quality and personal authority that each man had, even among his peers.
Can the same be said of Trump’s revolving cabinet of men and women who rose to prominence from his internal circles and corporate syndicates and their financial backers? Among those who’ve been eliminated from the reality TV White House are game show contestants and disgraced generals, uncouth loudmouths and spouse abusing thugs, and the ejections aren’t over, and “The Donald” seems to think that his reality game show mentality is how one responsibly runs a national government. It’s about time someone told Donald that it really isn’t.
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