Electing a billionaire agitator to the presidency may have its advantages. Such a man can break conventions that should long ago have been broken and advance policies that more established politicians might believe in but fear to execute.
But there are prices to pay for electing such a man, too, and one of those is that he will surround himself with people of limited experience and competence. Donald Trump has made some superb appointments to his cabinet—James Mattis at Defense, Scott Pruitt at the EPA—but far too many of his top-ranking staffers are bumblers and incompetents: well-meaning sycophants elevated to positions for which they were ill-prepared. They generate the sort of absurdities and scandals that distract an administration and threaten to wreck it.
Consider the case of Rob Porter. Last week, the directors of the CIA, the FBI, and National Intelligence publicly briefed the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence about global threats to the country—Russian maneuvers against Ukraine and our elections, Chinese intelligence targeting the United States. The national media, though, confined its coverage mostly to a few questions the senators posed to FBI director Christopher Wray about this man Porter and his personal behavior.
Porter was staff secretary to the president, responsible for managing the flow of documents shown to our head of state and to senior White House staff. Many of these documents are classified and contain highly sensitive data; they include, among other things, presidential schedules for the daily security briefings. Those who handle these documents must have virtually unblemished reputations, for the simple reason that they cannot be subject to blackmail. Hence the importance of FBI background checks. Porter’s security clearance was a problem for nearly a year. Wray told the Senate committee that his agency had briefed the White House on Porter’s background in March, in July, and again last November.
On February 6, the Daily Mail published on-the-record allegations from both of Porter’s ex-wives that he’d been physically abusive to them. It also reported the open secret that Porter was in a romantic relationship with Hope Hicks, the White House communications director.
The fact that a senior White House staffer was evidently guilty of beating two women would embarrass any president, but it is not the sort of association likely to roil an entire administration and dominate news coverage for a week and more. These things happen. Washington is full of extremely capable people who are nonetheless dogged by the consequences of dreadful impulses. In an ordinary administration, the president’s chief of staff would have quietly shown Porter the door months before his demons became the subject of international headlines. High-level politicians cutting off loyal staffers the minute they become liabilities is a common occurrence in the nation’s capital. Ugly, common, and necessary.
This should have happened and indeed nearly did. Last November one of Porter’s ex-girlfriends contacted White House counsel Donald McGahn to tell him that the staff secretary had serious problems with anger control. McGahn, who no doubt knew about the FBI briefings on Porter’s background, informed him that he should consider moving on. But he did not move on, and he was not forced to. The fact that we are living through a period in which almost daily we see successful and famous men lose their positions of eminence as a result of allegations that they debased and dishonored women did not lead senior White House officials to get rid of Porter as quickly and discreetly as possible.
Why did chief of staff John Kelly allow the man to stay? Why was Porter allowed to retain interim security clearance long after top administration officials knew the broad outlines of the staff secretary’s reprehensible record? Even after the accusations were published in the Daily Mail, both Kelly and the president defended Porter, the chief of staff calling him “a man of true integrity and honor.”
Why?
Almost certainly the answer is that Porter was a highly competent worker doing a difficult job in a White House populated by too many hangers-on. Porter, we’re left to conclude, was the one guy who could do the job reliably, and Kelly didn’t want to lose him. We sympathize with the chief of staff’s situation.
Kelly is an accomplished man and an effective chief of staff. But his position is nigh impossible. Scandals like this one spawn new troubles. And so last week White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders found herself offering contradictory stories about who knew what when and absurdly trying to blame the whole thing on the White House personnel security office.
All this is why the subject of global threats received almost no attention from the press. We may wish to blame the media, but there is no world in which news outlets will prefer substantive stories about national security to harrowing stories about White House officials resigning as a result of a history of domestic violence. Previous White House operations of both parties have gone long stretches without giving the media any such story to fix on. That Trump’s White House habitually generates these stories is a debilitating problem—for the administration and, more important, for the nation.
