To paraphrase a onetime assistant to an earlier president, I sleep each night a little better, a little more confidently, knowing that “a senior official in the Trump administration” is in the White House—assuming, of course, that the senior official exists or works in the White House.
He tells us that he and his like-minded colleagues within the Trump administration’s “quiet resistance” have the country’s best interests at heart, which is reassuring when you gaze at the picture he paints in the op-ed pages of the New York Times of President Trump’s “amorality” and “impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective” leadership style. So we have reason to be thankful for Senior Official’s selflessness, along with the everyday acts of statesmanship he and the other “adults in the room” commit on our behalf in the Trump administration.
Or do we? As I have said before, I would be the first to acknowledge that Trump’s behavior and temperament are unprecedented in the modern presidency and they, along with his ubiquitous presence on Twitter, probably do him more harm than good. But just because I say this with a certain confidence based on experience doesn’t necessarily make it true. Nor am I the first individual to regard the personal conduct of a president in office as less than desirable—or, in the judgment of the “quiet resistance,” potentially harmful to the country.
The essential difference here is that I am a private citizen expressing an opinion while Senior Official is a political appointee (I am guessing) who knows better than the elected president what’s good for America and can do something about it and does it. Yet it may come as a surprise to learn that, in fact, Donald Trump stands in a long line of presidents whose perceived mental or physical deficiencies were regarded as political liabilities, even incipient dangers.
In the early years of the last century, for example, the British ambassador Cecil Spring Rice was a lifelong friend and admirer of the erratic and impulsive Theodore Roosevelt but liked to remind visitors to Washington that “you must always remember that the president is about 6.” So dolorous was the mood in the post-1929 White House of Herbert Hoover that Secretary of State Henry Stimson complained to his diary that “it was like sitting in a bath of ink to sit in his room.”
Woodrow Wilson spent the last year and a half of his presidency in a state of invalidism after a stroke, and the final year of Franklin Roosevelt’s tenure during the Second World War was a slow and steady decline unto death.
Depression, nervous exhaustion, even psychosis have all been variously diagnosed in the White House, from Calvin Coolidge’s deep melancholy after his younger son’s tragic death to the “paranoid” behavior of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon late in their presidencies. Older commanders in chief such as Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush were each regarded as mentally diminished by physical infirmity and age, and in the pages of Bush on the Couch (2004) a well-publicized professor of psychiatry at George Washington University declared George W. Bush delusional, unstable, mad for power, and, above all, cognitively impaired by alcoholism.
In nearly all of these cases there were varying numbers of people who, like Senior Official, saw things clearly in their own minds and felt constrained to take action, either to protect their patrons from exposure and inquiry—Wilson’s wife and physician took control of the White House in the president’s name while FDR’s resident doctor issued cheery bulletins—or, in more recent times, to ensure domestic tranquility while keeping a watchful eye on behalf of the 25th Amendment.
It may well be, of course, that Senior Official’s motives are as disinterested as he claims they are, and that the better angels of Trump’s nature are encouraged while his demons are thwarted. But I am not wholly persuaded that Trump’s successes in office—which are numerous and not trivial—are thanks to Senior Official and his sober friends and not the wild-and-crazy Trump himself.
Which brings us to Topic B in political Washington this past week: Bob Woodward’s new bestseller Fear, an exhaustive account of the “harrowing” life in Trump’s White House and (in its publicists’ words) the “explosive debates and the decision-making in the Oval Office, the Situation Room, Air Force One and the White House residence.”
As is always the case with this particular chronicler, trust in the authenticity of Fear’s content has much to do with the reader’s attitude toward its subject and, not least, faith in Bob Woodward and his formula of second-hand dialogue, voluminous memory, disguised sources, hearsay, and telepathy.
I have no way of judging such things in this particular instance; but I do know that Woodward is a creature of the nation’s capital and, as such, predictably preoccupied with the customs and processes of the presidency at the expense of substance. Accordingly, the “harrowing” quality of Fear is not so much where the Trump presidency is taking us as how we are getting there: the president’s volatile temperament and limited attention span, his casual approach to decision-making, his reliance on visceral instinct at the expense of administrative custom and Senior Officials.
Once again, I am not entirely convinced that this is a bad thing. One of the striking aspects of the postwar presidency is the extent to which it has become deeply bureaucratized, the product of a mechanical staff system that subsists on ever-wider consultation, memoranda in triplicate, strict chains of command, and limited options. The West Wing, like the State Department across town, is a giant mulching machine for ideas.
Dwight Eisenhower, who reorganized the White House staff in the 1950s with an eye to military efficiency, is partly to blame for this for, like most reforms, Ike’s vision of accountability and coherence has been transformed into a spectacle of administrative obesity and policy inertia. Presidents with creative instincts—Franklin Roosevelt was never happier than when playing one subordinate off another or unexpectedly switching gears—are now effectively bound by White House protocol and deftly maneuvered by Senior Officials into inaction. Or, in their view, stability.
In that sense, it seems an open question—at least a topic ripe for discussion—whether democracy is best served by a crockery-breaking president or a self-protective bureaucracy with friends in high places.
