You’re (not) fired!
It turns out that the president has trouble firing people he’s appointed. Ironic!
Pick your favorite irony: 1) Donald Trump turns out to be terrible at firing people. 2) The White House celebrates its “American Heroes Week” by banning transgender volunteers from serving in the military.
3) Thanks to the president’s harangues, we are actually starting to feel sympathy for Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
I can understand if you want to pick No. 2, especially since Mr. Trump just finished observing “Made in America Week” with an application to hire 70 foreign workersat Mar-a-Lago.
But let’s talk for a minute about the way our president gets rid of unwanted members of his administration. It’s a monument to passiveaggressive ineptitude. With Mr. Sessions, Mr. Trump has been broadcasting his displeasure to the world for more than a week without making the obvious followthrough.
And this was the guy who made “You’re fired!” his calling card. Clearly, he brought a lot of fiction to reality TV. Clay Aiken, a onetime contestanton “The Celebrity Apprentice,” recently told an interviewer that Mr. Trump actually “didn’t decide who got fired on ‘ Apprentice,’” and had to be fed his lines by producers.
Not exactly a shock, but watching the president in action over recent weeks, you have to wonder how he’d have functioned if he ran that show without prompting.
OnSunday, “Celebrity Apprentice” promises “fireworks” when Donald Trump tells other people he has no confidence in Rhoda, the beleaguered fashion model and ferret breeder. It will be the seventh week in which the real estate superstar has said unpleasant things about Rhoda to her friends, family and American viewers. Tension rises as contestants wait to see if their mentor will continue his strategy or send a bodyguard to deliver the bad news to Rhoda in person.
Mr. Trump’s attempts to drive Mr. Sessions out of office without actually confronting him began last week with his famous New York Times interview and then escalated through press conferences and the social media (“VERY weak”). In one tweet, Mr. Trump referred to Mr. Sessions as “our beleaguered A.G.” Now, “beleaguered” means under attack, and this was sort of like taking a jackhammer to the street in front of your house and then complaining to the cityabout potholes.
On another occasion, Mr. Trump said he was “disappointed” in Mr. Sessions. This was during a press conference with Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri in which the president took a few questions after praising Mr. Hariri for being “on the front lines in the fight against ISIS, al-Qaida and Hezbollah.” Carping minds noted that Mr. Hariri actually has a power-sharing arrangement with Hezbollah, which controls most of the people in his Cabinet. But if you wanted a president who was going to split hairs, you should have voted for somebodyelse. OK,I know, I know. Mr. Trump appears completely unaware that he’s beginning to look like the worst terminator in history. Introducing Tom Price, the secretary of health and human services, at an event this week, the president jovially said that Mr. Price had better getthe health care bill passed through Congress, “otherwise, I’ll say: ‘Tom, you’re fired.’ I’ll get somebody.”
This was at that Boy Scouts jamboree when Mr. Trump did such a great job of impersonating your Uncle Fred Who Gets Drunk at Family Dinners. How many of you think the Boy Scouts have been yearning for the day when the president would come to their big event, tell the teens that their federal government is a “sewer,” recount a long and incoherent story about a real estate developer who went off to make whoopee on his yacht and brag incessantly about winning the election? On the plus side, Mr. Trump did not misrepresent the Scoutposition on Hezbollah.
Mr. Trump has been complaining a lot about Mr. Sessions’ lack of loyalty, which might have confused people who remembered that Mr. Sessions was the first senator to endorse his presidential campaign, back in February of 2016. You’d think that standing up to fellow Republicans who regarded Mr. Trump as a dangerous lunatic should have merited a little bit of long-run gratitude.
Mr. Trump cleared all that up, however, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal where he explained that Mr. Sessions’s endorsement was “not like a great loyal thing,” but merely an insignificant politician trying to feed off his star power and crowddrawing charisma. (“He was a senator from Alabama. … He looks at 40,000 people and he probably says, ‘What do I have to lose?’ And he endorsedme.”)
Now Mr. Trump wants Mr. Sessions gone so he can replace him with an attorney general who will fire special counsel Robert Mueller. Mr. Sessions can’t do it because he recused himself from all things Russia-related.
Mr. Mueller’s probe into the Trump camp’s relationship with Russia terrifies the president, especially if it involves an investigation of Trump family finances. So obviously, we are rooting for Mr. Sessions to stay right where he is … and, um, keep persecuting immigrants, ratchet up imprisonments for nonviolent crimes and maybe go back to his old dream of imposing the death penalty on marijuana dealers.
Well, I told you this was about irony.