A colleague once described a certain international client as having a “medieval” management style. Lords and serfs stuff. With a nod to their corporate logo, a vendor called them “the blue Mafia.” They’d set arbitrary deadlines just to make you jump through your ass (or work through the weekend).
After a packed kickoff meeting in which a top manager pressured a sweating underling into agreeing to such a deadline, a pair of young, freshly minted trainees walked out ahead of me. The first marveled at how their boss had pressured the poor slob into agreeing to his demands.
The other replied, “Yeah, they didn’t teach us that one in the class.”
It was like a Trump cabinet meeting with less ass-kissing. But the whatever-the-king-wants was the same.
The king wants his name on stimulus checks he can throw to peasants from his coach. The king wants to defund the World Health Organization (WHO) to distract from his mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic. The king — he of the “acting” Everystaffer — wants to adjourn Congress for not approving his appointees fast enough. How dare they not say, “Yes, sir. How high?”
The withholding of funding from WHO looks identical to what Trump did with Ukraine (for which he was impeached), MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell observed Wednesday night. He asked former Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal for his take on Trump’s latest off-the-rails briefing.
“The president is trying to assert the powers of Congress,” Katyal said. Congress sets the budget. The president cannot simply “nix out” budgeted spending for foreign or domestic groups he doesn’t like.
“His claims here are very much King George-y,” Katyal said. The Supreme Court has ruled the president cannot use the recess power as “an end run around Senate confirmation.”
“Here, his reason is, ‘My judges aren’t being confirmed.’ Well, give me a break,” Katyal said, “He’s had 50 court of appeals judges confirmed in three years. Obama had 55 in his eight years. In the last two years of Obama, he only got two court of appeals nominees confirmed. Two. Trump gets that on any given Tuesday.”
Ron Klain, the “ebola tzar” during the Obama administration, said what’s worse is that under Trump we are going backwards on COVID-19 testing. Knowing who is infected and who isn’t is a necessary precondition for safely sending people back to work. But already inadequate testing rates have fallen since the first week of April.
Trump last week announced the federal government would stop subsidizing states’ testing regimes. The solution to the testing problem, Klain said, is for Trump to use his powers under the Defense Production Act to “order millions and millions of tests, and get them where they’re needed.”
“The funny thing … is that the president is claiming a lot of powers he doesn’t have and not using the one power he does have to get these tests made and distributed.”
But more tests would show more infections and Trump is very sensitive about how bad large numbers of infections make him look. So sensitive, in fact, that he’d rather not know the real scope of the pandemic and send people back to work, worsening it, causing another spike in infections and death. He cannot help himself even to help himself. He’s set an arbitrary May 1 deadline for “re-opening” the economy and White House advisers cannot get him to relent.
Not only does Donald Trump not have your back, he doesn’t even have your front.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.