When Donald Trump’s administration runs aground, an almost-cliched response from his disappointed supporters is that “the president is getting some very bad advice.” That bit of blame-shifting exonerates Trump from the consequences of his decisions and actions and lays responsibility at the feet of whichever cabinet member or top staffer has Trump’s ear at any given moment. Trump cannot fail, he can only be failed.
With that said, every president needs a good team around him, and just because the buck stops with the president doesn’t mean that he isn’t getting bad advice and marching into box canyons because of that advice. Trump made a lot of unorthodox picks for his cabinet, and now he’s living with the consequences.
It appears that a significant factor in the difficulties in Trump’s endeavors at the start of his second term are a predictable consequence of getting who he wanted in his administration around him.
On several of the administration’s top priorities, it’s not clear that everyone’s oar is in the water and rowing in the same direction.
And this isn’t getting into other minor headaches like Education secretary Linda McMahon repeatedly referring to “A1” in America’s schools when she meant AI (artificial intelligence), or Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem feeling a need to hold a rifle while making a public statement at a deportation raid in Arizona. And this is just the formal cabinet members and White House staffers; somehow the likes of nutjob influencer Laura Loomer ended up getting six officials of the National Security Council replaced.
Doris Kearns Goodwin famously described President Lincoln’s cabinet as a “team of rivals,” and Cliff Sims – who came back to work on Trump’s transition team — described Trump’s first-term staff as a “team of vipers,” obsessed with conflicts and jealousies and vendettas and constantly undermining each other, to the detriment of the administration’s agenda.
The short-lived nomination of Matt Gaetz to be attorney general demonstrated that Republican senators could derail a bad cabinet pick by quietly (or not-so-quietly) communicating their concerns to Trump and Susie Wiles. But for a lot of other cabinet picks and other top posts, GOP lawmakers didn’t object too loudly. The country, and the president, now live with the consequences.