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Faculty & Staff Media 

Infectious Incompetence of the Populists

Yelyzaveta May 0 Comment

By Daniel W. Drezner, Professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University

Late last week, William Davies wrote about how the populists in government in the United States and United Kingdom are making a complete hash of things. This part stood out:

One way to understand the rise of reactionary populism today is as the revenge of sovereignty on government. This is not simply a backlash after decades of globalization, but against the form of political power that facilitated it, which is technocratic, multilateral and increasingly divorced from local identities.

A common thread linking “hard” Brexiteers to nationalists across the globe is that they resent the very idea of governing as a complex, modern, fact-based set of activities that requires technical expertise and permanent officials. Soon after entering the White House as President Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon expressed hope that the newly appointed cabinet would achieve the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” In Europe, the European Commission — which has copious governmental capacity, but scant sovereignty — is an obvious target for nationalists such as Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary. . . .

But another byproduct of the anti-government attitude is a constant wave of exits. Britain leaves the European Union, Mr. Johnson resigns from the cabinet. The Trump White House has been defined by the constant churn of sackings and resignations…. Meanwhile, someone has to keep governing.

The hard-working staff at Spoiler Alerts will leave it to European observers to evaluate how well Davies’s hypothesis works on the continent. In the United States, however, it is hard to deny that Donald Trump is dumbing down the federal government.

We can see this most evidently within his handpicked White House staff. Consider press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. She has had, to put it gently, a God-awful European trip. First, she lied about why Chief of Staff John F. Kelly seemed so perturbed at Trump’s opening NATO breakfast. No one believed her claim that it was due to a lack of breakfast choices rather than Trump’s ill-mannered, badly timed rant on Nord Stream 2. As Esquire’s Charles Pierce noted, “This is a lie made more audacious by the fact that it is such an obvious one. She is not even trying hard anymore to disguise her contempt for the media and the audiences they serve, including the people who support this administration.”

Then Sanders tweeted the following after the White House yanked John Bolton off CNN’s “State of the Union” show:

Here’s the video of the alleged disrespect. It seems hard not to conclude that Sanders no longer cares whether she’s telling the truth or not, which is a very bad quality for a press secretary.

Speaking of Bolton, the New Yorker’s Susan B. Glasser describes the prep work that is going into Trump’s summit with Putin in Helsinki. Or, rather, the lack of prep work:

There is no agreed-upon substantive agenda for the meeting, as Trump himself confirmed on Thursday, and the session will take place only a couple weeks after the date was finalized. The sum total of the preparation was a single trip by Trump’s national-security adviser, John Bolton, to Moscow. He came out of the trip with none of the “deliverables” typically determined in advance of such high-level summits. (“The meeting is the deliverable,” the Russians apparently told Bolton.) Few details about the summit have been released by the White House, given Trump’s penchant for last-minute changes, but as of now it appears that it will be a four-hour affair (rather than the seven hours requested by the Kremlin), with a lengthy one-on-one between Trump and Putin first, followed by an expanded meeting to include Bolton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and the U.S. ambassador to Russia, Jon Huntsman. Fiona Hill, the top National Security Council adviser for Russia, isn’t going to be in the meeting, though a White House official told me she was going to be on the ground in Finland, and even a talked-about preparatory session between Pompeo and the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, is not going to happen. According to current and former officials, Bolton’s N.S.C. has not had a single principals-level meeting to discuss Russia policy or the plans for the summit in advance of what will certainly be one of the most important sessions of Trump’s presidency.

Let me get this straight: The negotiator whose genius idea for Brexit was for Theresa May to sue the European Union is going into a one-on-one meeting with one of the longest-serving leaders in Russian history with no agreed-upon agenda and zero preparation. If Trump gets through the day without selling Alaska back to Russia, it will be a major diplomatic victory.

This also speaks badly of Bolton. No national security adviser should let his president go into this kind of high-level meeting with this little preparation. This is particularly true given that Bolton possesses actual government experience — a rarity for this White House. If even Bolton cannot do the fundamentals of his job correctly, the rest of this White House will continue to screw up the little stuff and the big stuff.

It is not surprising that an administration with no exit strategy for Iranor for its trade wars looks set to blunder yet again. The real concern, however, is the degree to which Trump’s incompetence spills over to the rest of the government. NSC staffers are now being unceremoniously escorted out of the White House for, according to Politico’s Nahal Toosi, trying to “correct misleading information about refugees and migrants provided to the president by [White House aide Stephen] Miller and the [Domestic Policy Council.]” This is the second NSC staffer to exit under murky circumstances in the past month.

More significantly, the Trump administration’s incompetence is lowering morale and encouraging trained senior civil service employees to leave the government. On morale, the FBI’s own internal surveys reveal that confidence in political leadership has fallen over the past year.

On the exodus of trained officials from government service, Bloomberg News’s Saleha Mohsin reports about how the Treasury Department’s international affairs office is hemorrhaging staff:

About 20 career staff have quit the U.S. Treasury Department’s international affairs unit in less than a year, draining resources from a key office in the Trump administration’s escalating trade battles with China and Europe.

The wave of departures began in September, shortly after David Malpass — a champion of President Donald Trump’s protectionist message — took over the division. The unit employed about 200 people at the end of the Barack Obama administration. . . .

Some of the former officials decided they couldn’t support the administration’s trade policies; others chafed at Malpass himself, whom they’ve described as disdainful of some civil servants and often unprepared, according to six people familiar with the matter.

I worked in this part of Treasury earlier in my career. The ratio of staff to policy purview is impressive, which was one of the reasons that working there was so exciting. There is no bloat in this unit. It cannot afford to lose 10 percent of its staff because of this administration’s incompetence. And yet it has.

There will be at least 2½ more years of foreign policy incompetence from this administration. That is now baked in. What is terrifying is that this administration appears to be intent on razing the infrastructure of government before it leaves. Trump and Bannon are accomplishing their stated aim: the administrative state is rapidly deconstructing.

This piece was republished from The Washington Post. 

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