Off the Rails Already?

What Susie Wiles and the other first selections tell us about Trump II

If anyone believed the nonsense about Donald Trump’s second term shifting away from chaos and towards ruthless efficiency his initial personnel rollout is putting that to rest. We’re going to have four more years of chaos and inept presidenting. Keeping in mind that incompetence is at least and probably more dangerous than ruthless efficiency.

A few things spark this. One is that he’s rolling out his picks in a totally arbitrary, willy-nilly fashion; presidents-elect who know what they’re doing don’t start with the UN ambassador and the head of the EPA before they get around Secretaries of Treasury and State (which is now to go to Marco Rubio, unless it doesn’t). And also neither of those selections, Elise Stefanik and Lee Zeldin, have subject-matter experience. Which isn’t the end of the world for a cabinet-level pick, but it’s not exactly a plus, either.

Oh, also, Trump has already selected two sitting Members of the House (Stefanik and National Security Advisor designate Micahel Waltz) for his administration despite the ongoing vote-counting still leaving the size of what appears to be a tiny Republican House majority up for grabs, with the most likely outcome a tiny 220-215 majority and a possibility of a more tiny 219-216 or even 218-217. Except that for the three months or so it takes to do the special elections to fill the vacancies those will be 218-215, or 217-216, or even (gulp) 216-217 and hello, Speaker Hakeem Jeffries.¹

We also have a White House Chief of Staff designee: Florida campaign consultant Susie Wiles, who was essentially Trump’s campaign manager in this election.

On the plus side, Trump legitimately deserves credit for selecting the first woman to serve in that job. And Wiles did make it through the entire cycle without being fired, which is a first for a Trump campaign manager and speaks well of her ability to keep on his good side, which is probably a positive quality to have in a Trump WH CoS.

That said, why Wiles?² She certainly has plenty of political experience, but it’s almost all campaign, not governing. The two best paths for a successful Chief of Staff have been White House and executive branch experience (such as Ron Klain, Leon Panetta, and James Baker) or experience in elected office (such as Panetta, Howard Baker and Sherman Adams).

Campaign experience isn’t a negative — see James Baker — but it’s not much of a plus, either. The same with a good relationship with the president. Worked well for Klain and Joe Biden, but not so well for Bob Haldeman and Richard Nixon. No one had more campaign experience or a better relationship with the boss than Hamilton Jordan, generally considered one of the worst of the lot.

And while it’s not exactly a concern, Wiles will be one of the oldest, along with Don Regan and John Kelly, on taking the job. Not a concern, but it’s not something one would want.

Now, I hear what you’re saying: Trump’s Chief of Staff doesn’t really matter, right? Nope. It really does matter.

Trump basically governed using the weak Chief of Staff model that Democrats used to use until they abandoned it for good halfway in the middle of Bill Clinton’s presidency. The idea basically was that the president would run things himself, whether or not someone technically had the Chief of Staff title. Republicans, from Dwight Eisenhower on, used the far more successful model of a strong Chief of Staff. That didn’t prevent disasters (see Regan and Haldeman, above), but it was generally more effective.³ Trump, however, doesn’t know how to manage anything or how to delegate. It worked out poorly in his first term.

Presidents, after all, can give all the orders they want, but even if it works — which it generally doesn’t — there’s far more going on than what a president can actually pay attention to. Even a well-briefed, hard-working president. If no one does triage, choosing carefully which things to bring to the president and which to handle at a lower level, there will be chaos. And if no one monitors what’s happening at all the executive branch departments and agencies? Once again, chaos.

Sure, Trumpists put in place might be eager to carry out what the president wants…but they may also have their own creative, or self-serving, or just wacky interpretations of what Trump may want about this or that issue that the president hasn’t actually spent a minute of his life thinking about (and while Trump is an extreme case, no president is expert or even has vague opinions about many of the things that government does; there are just too many of them). Or they may only have pretended to be Trumpists, and really be out after their own interests (including self-interest) in mind. One of the whole points of having a large, organized, disciplined White House staff is to fight for the president’s agenda in all of those departments and agencies — and to solve problems before they harm the president. Presidents simply can’t do it themselves.

Indeed, what Trump perceived as organized Deep State hostility to him was in most cases nothing more than his own inept management, which started with failing to empower the White House Chief of Staff the way that Ike and other effective presidents had done.

The first Trump term worked best during the early months of John Kelly’s tenure as Chief of Staff, when he seems to have tried hard to professionalize things. Unfortunately, he was ultimately no match for Trump’s ineptitude, and he spent the last several months of his nearly two-year attempt at the job in what seemed to be a sort of defeated stupor, perhaps just trying to prevent anything too disastrous from happening.

At best, Trump can hope that Wiles will sometimes prevent him from acting on his worst impulses. But it’s hard to see anything in her record to suggest she’ll be able to fight off his style and her inexperience to really establish a professional White House. Not that I would have expected Trump to hire anyone actually ready to do that job. He no doubt thinks of his first term as one where he did everything correctly only to be undermined by disloyal enemies scheming against him, and all he has to do is eliminate all his enemies and replace them with loyal allies to have everything work perfectly.

If so, he has no idea what the job entails. And so: Welcome back chaos. Dangerous, destructive chaos.

1. The GOP majority could be somewhat larger; there are still several seats undeclared with current Democratic leads. Both of these upcoming vacancies are in safe Republican seats. But safe seats can take strange turns, especially when some buyers’ remorse about a recent presidential election sets in, as Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown and Alabama Senator Doug Jones could tell you. I don’t expect anything like that, but I didn’t expect those, either. And at least a couple other House Republicans are rumored to be candidates

2. Is it relevant that her father was Pat Summerall? As older football fans know, Summerall was one of the lead broadcast voices of the NFL for some three decades. As even older football fans know, before that Summerall was an NFL star — including with the New York football Giants in 1958-1961, when Trump was a teenager in that city.

3. Regan, in particular, showed the dangers of an overly strong CoS combined with an inattendant president. Trump won’t exactly have that problem, but he is apt to have several different empire-builders who care about whatever they care about, preferably without involving a president they likely see as someone to be manipulated. Did I mention chaos?