The palace intrigue is not what matters

By Dan Calabrese —— Bio and Archives August 1, 2017

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I feel like I already wrote this column the week before last, but if we have to keep going over this it’s fine with me.

It seems to now be a measure of your intellectual honesty as a conservative that you must be willing to admit the Trump Administration is a complete trainwreck. How can you say otherwise given the sudden rise and fall of Anthony Scaramucci?

Well. It’s not unimportant how the White House staff operates, but you have to keep in perspective both the palace intrigue and the bigger picture of which it is only a part.

When President Trump was elected, the choice of Reince Priebus as chief of staff was hailed because he was a Washington insider who “knows how things work in this town” and all that sort of thing. Now I don’t know for sure if Priebus was leaking or not, but clearly a lot of it was happening on his watch and he was either helpless to stop it or disinterested in doing so. Camps formed. Rivalries flared. This is not unusual in the early days of a new administration, but it got a lot more attention in the Trump White House partly because of the media’s interest in portraying Trump as ill-prepared for the job.

Obviously Trump has invited some of it with his tweets attacking Jeff Sessions, and with his choice of the bombastic and foul-mouthed Scaramucci to do what he did during his blessedly short tenure as communication chief.

But what you when you’ve got a problem is you solve it. The choice of John Kelly as the new chief of staff appears to have been an excellent step in that direction. Reportedly Scaramucci decided to test the general by insisting that he, Scaramucci, would not report to him. The general’s response? You’re gone.

If that really happened, that’s excellent. In less than two weeks, the White House has shed itself of milquetoast Priebus and Sean Spicer, and of bull-in-a-china-shop Scaramucci. And it appears to have a very strong new chief of staff in Kelly. None of this will matter if Trump himself undermines Kelly’s efforts, but it appears Kelly is in a strong position to right the ship.

Trump clearly chose some of the wrong people to start his presidency. Lots of top executives do that. The test is whether you correct the mistake as soon as it becomes apparent.

Now, the media loves all the palace intrigue, and they’ll talk about it endlessly. But just as I said after Spicer resigned, none of this has much if any impact on your life, or on the fate of the nation. The story there remains policy, and you probably don’t know very much about Trump policies because they don’t get reported much. You don’t know how Trump policies have helped unleash the power of domestic energy, or the impact of deregulation on business growth, or Trump’s reversal of the awful Obama policies on Cuba. You probably heard about Trump’s decision not to allow “transgender people” in the military, but you don’t really know that much about how it will impact the military’s ability to do its job.

These are the things that actually affect people’s lives, not who the White House communication director is.

It will be argued that perceived White House chaos affects policy because you can’t get the public behind needed policy changes, and that will prevent Congress from enacting them. Some argued that the reason the Senate didn’t repeal ObamaCare was a lack of presidential leadership. “No one is afraid of Trump.”

This line of thinking has never made sense to me. A senator’s job is to support good policy, not because they’re afraid of the president, but because the policy is good. John McCain, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski didn’t vote no on ObamaCare repeal because of anything Trump did or didn’t do. They voted no because they’re terrible senators and they refuse to support good policy. That’s their fault, not Trump’s. I don’t care what you think you need to explain to me about “how this town works.” Shove that where the sun doesn’t shine. Awful senators are responsible for their awful votes. No one else. Whether the White House is a finely tuned machine or in total chase, ObamaCare is just as bad a law either way. It’s your job to get rid of it. You didn’t. You failed.

When the White House is covered like it’s a prime time soap opera, the public gets the impression that nothing substantive at all is happening in the executive branch of the government. That’s not true, but what’s happening isn’t considered news. And of course, when the administration does something positive, then by definition CNN declares it’s not their job to tell you about it.

I said on Friday and I’ll say again today, Anthony Scarmucci seems like a miserable person to deal with, and the Beltway deserves to have to deal with a guy like that. John Kelly decided he didn’t want him around, and it’s hard to blame him for that. But the fate of Anthony Scaramucci isn’t very relevant to your life. Don’t get so caught up in the drama that you lose sight of that. There is substantive governance going on that matters to you. Find out about it. Granted, the headlines are probably not where you’ll do that.