Trump is crazy. Trump is unpredictable. Trump doesn’t know enough about policy to make intelligent decisions.
Or so the hundreds of thousands of federal workers who hate Trump (but not enough to quit their jobs) would have you believe.
One likely reason so many in the government can’t stand their new boss is that Trump is pushing for results, a foreign concept for millions of federal workers who are used to producing nothing. Even worse, Trump often wants results that (gasp) these workers oppose.
[Also read: Obama unloads on Trump, warns of ‘dangerous times’ in fiery speech]
You can tell Trump wants results every time he gets frustrated with one of his Cabinet members, who he frequently fires. In his new book, Bob Woodward said Trump once got testy with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis over when the U.S. will start seeing results in Afghanistan.
“When are we going to start winning some wars? We’ve got these charts. When are we going to win some wars?” Trump reportedly said. “You should be killing guys. You don’t need a strategy to kill people.”
Trump has been wondering for months why Attorney General Jeff Sessions isn’t pursing charges against Democrats who he believes stacked the deck in 2016 to build an investigation against his campaign.
When Sessions replied in public that he was not operating under any political influence, Trump said he agreed, and said that way of thinking should free him to look into corruption on the Democratic side.
“Jeff, this is GREAT, what everyone wants, so look into all of the corruption on the ‘other side’ including deleted emails, Comey lies & leaks, Mueller conflicts, McCabe, Strzok, Page, Ohr,” Trump tweeted.
And in the summer of 2017, Trump famously stood in front of a crowd and warned that his HHS secretary, Tom Price, would be fired if he didn’t help gather enough votes to repeal Obamacare.
“By the way, you’re going to get the votes?” Trump said. “He better get ’em. He better get ’em. Oh, he better. Otherwise, I’ll say, Tom, you’re fired. I’ll get somebody.”
Two months later, Price was fired amid a travel scandal, but the failed Senate vote on Obamacare repeal was also seen as a major factor.
In Washington, Trump’s calls for victory in war and justice and economics are seen as crass, in part because of the way Trump talks. Without a doubt, Trump is blunt and uses a demeaning tone at times to bark out exactly what he wants, and may not fully understand the bureaucratic hurdles he faces as he tries to roll some kind of product off the government’s tired, old assembly line.
But the problem here is more than just style. Trump is also demanding results in a city that simply isn’t used to delivering them, and for that, he is hated and cursed, sometimes even in anonymous missives from senior officials in his own administration.
In the meantime, whatever will Washington do in the face of such a demanding boss? Some have learned to start getting results.
In May, Trump wondered why Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen wasn’t doing enough to stop illegal immigrants from crossing the border.
“Why don’t you have solutions? How is this still happening?” Trump said, according to the New York Times. “We need to shut it down. We’re closed.”
Nielsen later won praise from Trump after she pushed Congress to write new laws to boost border security, and publicly rejected the idea that Trump was trying to separate families at the border — she explained that family separation is a consequence of enforcing border laws that need to be changed.
But it’s going to be a steep learning curve for many other officials, including the mystery author of the New York Times op-ed. Trump immediately called on the author to resign, another result he’s unlikely to see.
