As unhappy as National Security Council staffer Mira Ricardel must be because of first lady Melania Trump’s office publicly calling for her firing, the real wronged person in this unseemly matter is President Trump.
What his wife’s office did put him in an awkward public position. It was disrespectful, downright emasculating, and undemocratic, considering that he was elected and his wife was not.
The fact that the president “reassigned” Ricardel to a new role in the administration rather than show her the door suggests that he may have been annoyed by his wife’s unprecedented public meddling. And good for him. The only reason she is first lady is because he was elected president.
Ricardel did not report to the first lady. She reported to the national security adviser, who reports to the president. And it was cowardly for Melania Trump to hide behind the “the Office of the First Lady” in conveying her personal distaste for Ricardel. If the first lady feels that someone should not be on the White House staff, she is certainly entitled to share that view with her husband. She might even be entitled to share that view publicly, but she should own it herself.
Melania Trump is not the first first lady to have strong opinions about who should serve on the White House staff. A president’s wife can be an invaluable set of eyes and ears for her husband, and successful presidents have often relied on their wives for unbiased advice on personnel matters. None did so more in recent times than former President Ronald Reagan. But as interested as she may have been in who served on her husband’s staff, Nancy Reagan had enough respect for him to convey her views privately. She was quite sensitive to being perceived as “the power behind the throne” and went to great lengths to make sure people knew that he was the president and that he made the final decisions.
To her credit, Nancy Reagan did not pretend to be completely uninvolved in personnel matters. And thank goodness, because she had better instincts than he did when it came to which staffers were there to pursue their own agenda and which were loyal to the president’s agenda. Ronald Reagan was by no means naive, but he liked people and trusted them. He was inclined to believe the best about people and gave everyone the benefit of the doubt. Indeed, he was always reluctant to come to the conclusion that people were acting unfaithfully or improperly.
Nancy Reagan, on the other hand, was less trusting. She had an uncanny ability to size people up quickly, and she could tell almost right away what their motivations were.
In interviews, she freely admitted that when she thought someone was not serving her husband well, she would “tell Ronnie.” Sometimes he acted on her advice, and sometimes he didn’t. From time to time, she could overplay her hand, such as when she relentlessly pressed her husband to get rid of White House chief of staff Donald Regan. It wasn’t just because Regan had rudely hung up on Nancy during a telephone call, it was because she knew that Regan put his interests ahead of the president’s. That was the bottom line for her.
But the president was disinclined to be pushed into jettisoning Regan, and he told Nancy to back off, which delayed his departure. She did, and eventually Regan was invited to leave, which allowed the Reagan presidency to regain its footing after the Iran-Contra mess.
When Nancy Reagan got involved in personnel matters, it was always because she was looking out for her husband’s best interests. It was never about her. I doubt she even knew who the deputy national security advisers were during the time her husband was president, let alone anything about seat assignments on aircraft. And she never made her opinions public. Even when pressed on Regan, she deflected questions. Everyone knew how she felt, but she would never have done anything that made it seem her husband was not in charge. From a practical standpoint, she knew he would not respond well to being pressured in public.
It is impossible for an outsider to know if Melania Trump was right or wrong in her desire to see Ricardel leave the White House. Regardless, my experience has been that it’s usually smart for a White House staffer to remain in the first lady’s good graces. After all, she is the first person to see the president in the morning and the last person to see him at night.
In the Reagan White House, the staff viewed ourselves as working for “them.” The Reagans were a unit. Hopefully, the Trumps similarly have each other’s backs. That means telling each other what they think but also remembering that when it comes to husband-wife conversations — especially when the husband is president of the United States — discretion is, indeed, the better part of valor.
Mark Weinberg, the author of Movie Nights with the Reagans, served as special assistant to the president, assistant press secretary in the Reagan White House and as director of public affairs in the office of former President Ronald Reagan.
