No one listens to the President
David A. Graham
Staff writer at The Atlantic
... there’s a central tension between the president and aides who refuse to execute orders from him that they believe are illegal or foolish. Mueller’s report is packed with incidents in which White House staff not only didn’t do things Trump said, but never had any intention of doing them. In the case of the border, Immigration and Customs Enforcement staff rebuffed Trump’s plan to bus migrants on legal grounds; meanwhile, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan refused to turn away migrants seeking asylum, concluding that it was illegal. (Nielsen was sacked soon after, while McAleenan is now her acting replacement.)
... executive-branch employees are hearing orders from Trump and responding, I don’t have to listen to you—you’re just the president. On the one hand, the constitutional system depends on the president executing the law and executive-branch employees following his directives; after all, he is the elected representative of the American people, and they are civil servants. On the other hand, so many of Trump’s orders are in fact illegal or dangerous that it’s difficult to fault staffers who don’t want to endanger the country or legally expose themselves by executing them.
... Sometimes aides didn’t want to follow orders that would require them to lie—as when Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein refused to say that firing FBI Director James Comey was his idea. At other times, they resisted orders that would violate government guidelines, as when then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions refused to cancel his recusal on Russia-related matters. And in some cases, they refused to do things to protect Trump from his own worst impulses, as when then–Chief of Staff Reince Priebus told the president he’d ask Sessions to resign, but just didn’t do it.
... former White House Counsel Don McGahn .. first refused to fire Mueller and then refused to write a letter denying that he had refused to fire Mueller. Told he might be fired, he was defiant: “McGahn dismissed the threat, saying that the optics would be terrible if the President followed through with firing him on that basis.” McGahn was right, and he wasn’t fired then ...
The president has a right to deputies who are willing to carry out his orders and policies. The problem is that he doesn’t have a right to break the law, and these two imperatives are often at odds ...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/no-one-listens-to-the-president/587557/
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