Unstopping Drive for Control
Terry H. Schwadron
Feb. 1, 2025
Donald Trump wants us to accept his full control over our lives — and the idea that he is not responsible for anything that goes badly.
Whether in errant ripples from the flood of instant, but incomplete executive orders, spending freezes that he then needs to rescind or fix, assignment of blame on bumbling past administrations, unfair diversity programs, undue foreign influence or just bad luck, the same Trump who claims to be all-knowing wants to be innocent of anything that looks bad.
Transparent moves to usurp spending decisions from Congress are forcing legal challenges that he apparently hopes will expand presidential powers. Trump is directing agency changes of personnel and forcing out employees without waiting even for his own Cabinet appointees to arrive on scene. Two weeks into this lame-duck term, Trump already is making noise about ignoring, sidestepping or changing the Constitution to provide him another term into his mid 80s.
In shifting moves and sometimes contradictory countermoves, he wants to spend less and more federal money at the same time, He wants to leave decisions to states and local government, unless, of course, he does not. Trump wants lower consumer prices but promised again to start tariffs today against Mexico and Canada, who will respond, all resulting in higher prices. That Trump wants to bully quick compliance with immigration, technology, environment, health and business decisions with international friends and to crush domestic enemies has been known, but he also seems to want our appreciation for doing so.
Along the way, what Trump says and what he does may well take different paths. In any case, the justifications uttered aloud to buttress his various pronouncements have tenuous tethers to demonstrable evidence.
Fact-Shy, But Loud
No, the air crash did not happen because of diversity and inclusion hiring policies at the Federal Air Administration, any more than Trump’s having just fired the head of the FAA, though it is true that understaffed air controllers were among those caught in his hiring freeze, and that the control tower was undermanned the night of the crash. Seven of 10 FAA air controllers are White men — some diversity hiring program. Indeed, The Washington Post tells us that during his first term Trump posted the diversity hiring rules he now criticizes.
No, we didn’t send $50 million to Hamas to buy condoms, as Trump said at a bill signing this week, but rather contributed $100 million to a group called the International Medical Corps. to run emergency trauma sites in bombed-out Gaza that included family planning, as the AP has found.
The two-page memo that set off confusion, if not panic among the nation’s nonprofits, local governments, researchers and Medicaid recipients, had to be rescinded because it was so poorly drawn. The pardon of all 1,600 convicted of Jan. 6 crimes, including those who violently attacked Capitol police, continues to reverberate politically. Even Trump’s diversity claims for air crash blame had to be rewritten to find fault with the Army helicopter pilot.
As we saw in Trump 1.0, fact-checkers of his presidential remarks cannot take a day off.
All these were avoidable errors if Trump had just asked his loyal staff to do the reading and checking that he declined to do before opening his mouth. Indeed, the most recurrent question among all the confirmation hearings for Trump’s own Cabinet members was whether the appointees felt they could give effective counsel to a president who evidently does not want to take in information that might run afoul of his personal political identity or whether they would ever dare to say no to him.
Yet, it is as if Trump cannot keep himself busy at work without the constant spotlight. Indeed, we wonder why Trump needs a Cabinet at all if he is going to try to run all from his desk or from his personal social media postings. His acting heads of agencies seem merely to add their signatures to prescribed, under-thought-through one-line policies straight from Trump.
Trump as Manager
We are left with a host of questions, including whether Trump can be an effective manager of complex systems. In decrying diversity as a hiring aspiration, he has substituted personal loyalty over even following the law. How is that illustrative of hiring “the best and the brightest”? If Trump were choosing the most effective, experienced people himself, they would be sailing through confirmations on merit, not squeaking by based on party membership numbers.
If Trump wants to save money by slimming government employee roles, sending a blanket “buyout” notice to two million federal employees hardly is the best or even recommended management tool to do so. Rather, Trump should be ordering a review of what various people do before sending them to the exits. But as with the pardons he ordered, a thoughtful review of what is at risk — intended or not — seems uncomfortably delaying and inconvenient.
The same notice, for example, just went to all air traffic controllers, who claim they are understaffed. How will departures of sizeable numbers of air controllers or FAA employees improve air safety, or how will paying current employees to do nothing for seven months while hiring and training trainees, personal loyalties aside, save any tax money?
Multiply that out against people who track hurricanes or inspect meat or treat veterans, and you get that just maybe Manager Trump, one of the jobs we just hired him to perform, has no idea about the consequences of the acts that he has set into motion, Even David Brooks, conservative New York Times columnist, can say, “ I’m sorry, but I look at the Trump administration’s behavior over the last week and the only word that accurately describes it is: stupid.”
News that scores of rank-and-file FBI agents and agency leaders are being scrutinized for dismissal if they had been involved in investigating Trump may lead to firings that will be challenged legally. But apart from all else, these dismissals almost certainly will put current investigations at risk, making us less safe.
You needn’t subscribe to anti-Trumpism or “woke” agendas to conclude that even in its early weeks, this White House is careening from one self-imposed error to the next in a series of bruising, often cruel and maligning ways, towards a hoped-for state of adoration just for being brutish in style.
An effective leader is one who can see the whole picture and who can bring people along to support his ideas. We’re still waiting to see one in the current White House.
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