In his White House drama, Trump’s favorite word is ‘acting’
HENRY FORD, famous for both revolutionising the auto industry and his anti-Semitism, declared more than a century ago, “History is more or less bunk.”
Donald Trump doesn’t even think history is that important. He remains a bit shaky about whether anything of significance ever occurred before the world was graced by his presence on June 14, 1946. Trump, after all, is a president who believed that it was necessary to build up Abraham Lincoln because most people did not know that Honest Abe was a Republican. And during a tour of Mount Vernon last year, according to Politico, Trump faulted George Washington for not branding his Virginia estate. As Trump explained to French President Emmanuel Macron, “You’ve got to put your name on stuff or no one remembers you.”
He needn’t have worried. The Trump presidency will be remembered even if future generations somehow fail to rename the Washington Monument after him. And Democrats will be certain to remind the world that Trump was a Republican, aided and abetted by a slavishly loyal GOP, from Mitch McConnell on down.
But there remains the beguiling illusion that everything in Washington can be reset once Trump leaves office. History, alas, cannot be eradicated that easily.
Beyond specific policies and the viciousness of his tweets, Trump has left his fingerprints on a bold assertion of presidential power that makes Richard Nixon look timid in comparison.Nixon, after all, released all his tax returns from his presidency in 1973. At the time, Nixon offered a justification that seems particularly apt today: “The people have a right to know whether or not their president is a crook.”
In contrast, Trump has safeguarded his own tax returns with a zeal that national security officials wish that the president also applied to top-secret information.
Making scant secret of his own loyalties on the matter, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said, “The general public when they elected President Trump made the decision to elect him without his tax returns being released.”
Mnuchin is getting to be a rarity in the Trump Cabinet, since he was formally nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. But now in the third year of Trump’s chaos-theory presidency, such constitutional arrangements are as outmoded as George Washington’s understated approach to real estate.
Since Trump views governing like a TV show, it should be no surprise that a key word in his limited vocabulary is “acting.”
Nearly four months after James Mattis was forced out at the Pentagon, we still have an “acting” Defense secretary. We also have an “acting” White House chief of staff, an “acting” OMB director, an “acting” Interior secretary and an “acting” ambassador to the United Nations. This is about as accidental as the way that foreign diplomats and companies with mergers before the federal government book suites at a Trump-owned hotel a few blocks from the White House.
Trump gleefully explained his appointments strategy to reporters in January. “I like acting,” he said. “It gives me more flexibility. Do you understand that?”
Oh, yes, it came through loud and clear.
An acting Cabinet or sub-Cabinet official is a guarantee of a sycophant begging Trump to keep his or her job. Also, many of these temporary officials like former “acting” Attorney General Matt Whitaker (a onetime “masculine toilet” entrepreneur) probably could not be confirmed for anything major even by the rubber-stamp GOP Senate under McConnell.
All this brings us to the Department of Homeland Security, where the executive suite has been depopulated by Trump’s version of the neutron bomb. Almost all the Senate-confirmed officials are gone, beginning with the smiling face of family separations at the border, Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who, under Trump, lost her reputation, her soul and ultimately her job. The Trump reign of terror at Homeland Security has created so many other vacancies (deputy secretary, ICE chief, inspector general and Secret Service director) that any random anti-immigration zealot who sets foot in the cafeteria may be drafted for a top “acting” position. What this means, in practice, is that power flows to White House aides like Stephen Miller, whose views are so extreme that they make Trump himself seem like an apostle of open borders. The loser in all this, of course, is the Senate and its cherished advice-and-consent powers.
McConnell and company should know that the next Democratic president will be tempted to use the same “acting” shell game to get around Senate confirmation fights. In fact, the more that Trump is willing to stake his presidency on his draconian border policies rather than the economy, the more likely it is that a Democrat will be occupying the Oval Office in 2021.
Presidents, even those willfully ignorant of history, set precedents. And Senate Republicans will be living for decades with the legacy of a Trumpian power grab.