Can Trump Govern?
By Daniel Henninger - a relatively sane WSJ columnist
The answer to the question—can President Trump govern?—is yes, but the window is closing.
In recent days, events outside and inside the White House have combined to produce an environment toxic to governing. The Comey circus, the internal tensions created by Mr. Trump’s tweets on the travel ban and Qatar, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s reported offer to resign: All this turbulence is pounding a ship of state that needs calmer waters if it’s going to get home in one piece.
This column raised the question in February of whether the Russia story was becoming Mr. Trump’s Watergate. Forever Trumpers objected to the analogy, arguing correctly that the legal particulars of the two events were not the same. The point, however, was not about the law or facts but about politics, which respects neither. A president’s blood is in the water, and a feeding frenzy is on.
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In the Trump trial, James Comey is playing the role of John Dean, the earnest lawyer who presented himself to the Watergate Committee as the last honest man in the Nixon White House. The media’s dramaturges love to fashion political saints, thus the elevation of Jim Comey.
The dangers to the viability of the Trump presidency’s agenda at this pivotal moment should not be underestimated. Successful governing means putting multiple players in motion toward a common goal—White House staff, Congress and its staffs, and the administration’s political appointees, whose job is to push presidential policy through the bureaucratic swamps. That effort goes forward on the shoulders of a skeleton crew.
We are into the sixth month of the Trump presidency, and of 558 key positions requiring Senate confirmation, 427 have no nominee, according to the tabulation by the Partnership for Public Service. The permanent bureaucracy is running much of State, Defense, Justice and Education.
At the State Department, virtually every position below Secretary Rex Tillerson and his deputy John Sullivan has no nominee, including assistant secretaries for every region of the world.
(snip)
The appointee holdup at State is due, in part, to the Trump White House’s virtual ban on anyone in the foreign-policy community who publicly opposed Mr. Trump’s candidacy. Presumably this is about loyalty. After this week, though, the White House’s fastidiousness may be irrelevant.
Three things happened that bear on the administration’s ability to recruit or retain good people: Attorney General Sessions’s reported offer to resign over the president’s unhappiness with his recusal from the Russia investigation; Mr. Trump’s tweet repudiating his Justice Department lawyers’ handling of the travel-ban case; and his tweet taking personal credit for Saudi Arabia breaking relations with Qatar. That required a stabilizing intervention from Secretary Tillerson because the U.S. has 11,000 troops based in Qatar. Welcome to team Trump.
One relevant footnote is George Conway’s unexpected decision to withdraw last week as Mr. Trump’s nominee to lead the Justice Department’s civil division, followed by his Twitter statement supporting the department’s handling of the travel-ban litigation. Who needs “House of Cards”?
One simply cannot duck the corollary question to these events: What top lawyer or professional at this juncture will join an administration whose ability to calm the political storms, execute policy or support its own people is in doubt?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-trump-govern-1496875130
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