During the 2016 presidential primary campaign, Jeb Bush took to calling Donald Trump the “chaos candidate.” It didn’t seem to have much effect at the time, but Bush was prescient: The chaos candidacy is now the chaos presidency. And yet, as Henry Adams once wrote, while order is the dream of man, “chaos was the law of nature”—and nature, although harsh and capricious at times, knows what it’s doing.
I was reminded of this the other week when, in the midst of the brown-red riot in Charlottesville and its disruptive aftermath, several CEO members of the president’s new manufacturing council resigned in protest at Trump’s maladroit public comments. This was followed by a White House announcement that the council—along with its sister agglomeration of CEOs, the president’s Strategic and Policy Forum—would be disbanded.
Critics of the president were swift to seize on this exodus of capitalists as evidence that the Trump presidency was a sinking ship. And of course, if titans of business were setting a trend, the arts community would follow swiftly behind. As if on cue, all 17 members of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities resigned en masse with a blistering letter to Trump laced with cringe-worthy jargon—“Speaking truth to power is never easy. . . . Art is about inclusion. . . . Ignoring your hateful rhetoric would have made us complicit,” etc.—and juvenile wit: The opening initials of each paragraph in the letter spelled out “RESIST.”
To be sure, the arts council members were all appointed during the Obama presidency and could hardly be expected to tolerate Trump. But the press seemed to regard the judgment of the council’s comparatively undistinguished roster—sometime actor and Democratic activist Kal Penn, British-born novelist Jhumpa Lahiri, “entertainment and brand entrepreneur” Fred Goldring, Jersey Boys star John Lloyd Young, and so on—as a verdict from the intellectual and creative heart of the nation. Maybe, maybe not. In my own case, I was abashed to acknowledge that until last week, I had never heard of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, and was intrigued by various press attempts (mostly unsuccessful) to describe what, exactly, the committee is supposed to do or has done since its establishment in 1982.
Which is precisely the point. The executive branch of the federal government is full of advisory councils and presidential committees that seem to duplicate, in miniature form, the missions of actual agencies and departments but are, in truth, largely sinecures for political (and of course financial) supporters of incumbent presidents. There are only so many embassies and minor commissions and vacancies on boards of visitors to go around; but a presidential council may be assembled ad hoc and allow corporate CEOs or stars of stage and screen to visit the White House, pose for a photo op, chat with President [Fill in the Blank] about inner-city arts programs or reviving the steel industry, and embellish their résumés.
In the case of the aforementioned arts and humanities council, for example, it should be noted that, since 1965, there have been two separate national endowments for both humanities and arts in the federal government—and even the website for the committee has some difficulty rationalizing its existence in light of the competing endowments. But of course, it’s obvious: The President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities was established by Ronald Reagan (in the words of the New York Times) “to advise the White House on cultural issues”—which surely explains the presence of “brand entrepreneur” Goldring, among others. And it has since become a needless appendage consuming federal largesse. In a savory moment of diplomatic clarity, the Trump White House declared that “while the committee has done good work in the past, in its current form it simply is not a responsible way to spend American tax dollars.”
Indeed, it may be said that the proliferation of such White House fundraiser/celebrity councils is a modern equivalent of those “blue-ribbon panels” of the previous generation, which were usually established to convey the message that something was being done about things that most presidents were powerless to do anything about: the 1968 Kerner Commission on civil disorder, for example, or the 1986 Meese Commission on pornography. You could argue that wartime exigencies perhaps justified the creation of such extra-constitutional bodies as the War Industries Board (1917), presided over by financier Bernard Baruch and charged with coordinating war production, or its World War II equivalent, the Office of War Mobilization (1943), headed by a Washington jack-of-all-trades of the era, James Byrnes. In both instances, however, such emergency boards not only duplicated the functions of existing departments but were deliberately designed to circumvent the authority of Congress and concentrate power in the White House.
Which is the paradox of the drain-the-swamp president setting up his own White House councils. If, in the chaos of post-Charlottesville America, Trump can follow through on his natural instincts and abolish such irrelevancies—as he seems determined to do, one by one—he will have genuinely accomplished something in Washington. And the arts and humanities will still thrive, as will the economy.
So will irony, for that matter, which is seldom in short supply here. One of the deserving Democrats who resigned from the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities and who signed Kal Penn’s RESIST letter, is Jill Cooper Udall, wife of the Democratic senator from New Mexico, Thomas Udall, and daughter-in-law of the late Stewart Udall. When he was secretary of the interior, a half-century ago, one of Stewart Udall’s pet projects was dismantling what he considered to be the obtrusive and obsolescent statues of (Union) Civil War generals in the parks and traffic circles of the capital city. He was unsuccessful, and the statues remain; but in the middle of chaos, for how long?
Philip Terzian is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
