Dear emotional people who live on TV and Twitter: Stop pressuring President Trump’s sanest advisers to resign.
Seriously. Stop it. Now.
In the aftermath of last week’s fiasco – which shouldn’t be confused with any of the many and varied fiascos that have arisen in most of the weeks since Trump’s inauguration – pundits have been trying to apply moral pressure to those serving the president to resign in protest.
Trump’s reaction to what happened in Charlottesville, they argue, was an abomination and those who stick with Trump now will be forever tainted by association.
Former Obama Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, for instance, wrote an op-ed last Thursday for the Washington Post headlined: “Trump’s CEOs resigned. His Cabinet should do the same.” MSNBC host Nicole Wallace said of the White House staff the day after Trump’s bizarre press conference last week, “If they don’t resign en masse this morning, they are forever tainted by what he did yesterday.” CNN published an opinion piece that contemplated: “How much longer can decent people serve in Trump’s Cabinet?”
I understand the sentiment, but it can’t be overstated how genuinely crazy these calls for Trump’s Cabinet to resign are.
Look, I never thought Trump was particularly qualified to be president. I didn’t vote for him. I thought his suggestion last week that there were good people at an alt-right rally was as idiotic as it was contemptible. But as erratic and morally obtuse as Trump is, I fail to see how our country and our allies would be better off with a Secretary of Defense Joe the Plumber instead of Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis.
Do you think it’s in America’s interest to have White House chief of staff Kayleigh Mcenany instead of chief of staff John Kelly?
Trump’s worst impulses may not always be controllable, but they sometimes seem to be. We get crazy Twitter rants, but we have not yet declared war on Canada for allowing the shuttering of a Trump Hotel in Toronto. I don’t know about you, but I consider that a tremendous success.
OK, perhaps that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but on issues from NATO to NAFTA to Afghanistan, Trump seems to have so far been influenced by many of the saner voices around him. That’s no small thing.
Now, granted, even some of the inhabitants of TwitterVille, CableNewsLand and WashingtonPostIstan concede it might be a good thing if “the generals” stay, even if they believe everyone else tied to the White House should resign in moral outrage. But was it really in America’s interest that Trump’s CEO council was disbanded after Charlottesville? Or would we really be better off if Gary Cohn and Steve Mnuchin were replaced by Eric Trump and Trump’s favorite bathroom attendant from the 21 Club? How is it a positive that fewer rational people who actually know things are talking to Trump?
Since they rarely give interviews, I can’t say I am super familiar with the views of Cohn and Mnuchin on many issues. Given, like the president, they spent most of their lives as Democrats, I suspect I disagree with both of them quite a lot. But guess what? Neither seems particularly interested in starting trade wars. And with this president, that’s far and away the number-one economic position any outsider should care about. Treasury Secretary Michael Cohen might not have such inhibitions.
And if you think economic considerations are trifling when compared to the moral outrage of last week, you are probably rich enough to withstand an economic catastrophe — or simply not thinking things through. It is in everyone’s interest that Trump not pursue policies that would plunge America into a deep recession or, God forbid, a depression.
None of this is to say there is no line. There is even a point where it would be wise for Mattis and Kelly to resign in protest. Indeed, I suspect if Mattis and Kelly resigned in protest, it would begin a chain of events that might lead to Trump’s removal. But that process would be long and difficult and painful – and therefore should only be pursued in the most extreme of situations.
If Trump calls for, say, internment camps (as a man many Democrats believe was the greatest president of the 20th century did) then the call for mass resignations would be appropriate. But at this point, we are far better off having smart, sane advisers around Trump trying to constrain and persuade then to give Trump the excuse to surround himself with people content to allow him to let his freak flag fly without any pushback.
Jamie Weinstein (@Jamie_Weinstein) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He hosts The Jamie Weinstein Show podcast and is founding partner at JMW Strategies.
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