In the wake of Trump's unprecedented tweet about the not-yet-released unemployment report, we learn that Gary Cohn specifically kept the monthly employment report numbers hidden from Trump until they were released because he knew that Trump would leak them. Normally, the head of the National Economic Council would receive those numbers late in the day on the Thursday before their official release on Friday morning at 8:30am. Cohn clearly knew better than to share that information with the President, but new NEC director Larry Kudlow was obviously eager to impress Trump and gave him the numbers of Thursday night. Trump promptly tweeted about them on at 7:30am on Friday and we can only guess how many of his unofficial advisers that he constantly calls on an apparently unsecure phone were also tipped off about the numbers and were able to get in front of the market.
Similarly, details about the ongoing negotiations with the North Koreans in preparation for the Trump-Kim summit are also being kept from the President so that he won't tweet about them and potentially ending up scuttling the summit. Joe Hagin, the deputy Chief of Staff in the White House is the man coordinating the negotiations over the proposed summit. Hagin is purposefully keeping those details from Trump for fear that he will tweet about them. Hagin used this same tactic when he was coordinating the summit at Mar-a-Lago with Chinese President Xi in April of 2017, just a little over two months after Trump was inaugurated.
Hagin had to adopt this tactic of keeping details from the President because of an incident during the transition, before Trump even actually became President. The Trump team was negotiating with Boeing about building a new fleet of aircraft for Air Force One. The discussions were begun under the conditions that the negotiations remained private. Instead, Trump immediately tweeted out the details of the meetings, complicating negotiations. That was a lesson learned for Hagin who uses the "remember Boeing" phrase as a reminder that the less you can tell the President the better.
With the realization of Trump's unfitness for the job as leader of the free world comes three separate options. The first and most honorable path is to simply resign in protest. This is the path taken by American heroes who are now largely ignored today but whom history will treat far more kindly than most. This group includes people like State Department Science Envoy Daniel Kammen, every single member of the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities, EPA adviser Mustafa Ali and senior EPA official Betsy Southerland, the majority of the U.S. National Park Service advisory board, James Schwab, the ICE spokesman in San Francisco, John Feeley, the ambassador to Panama, and even the aforementioned Gary Cohn who resigned over Trump's tariffs. There are many others as well, whose names should not be forgotten.
The second group, the polar opposite of the first, are those who treat Trump as a useful tool in order to advance their own ambition and agenda while desperately ignoring his clear unfitness and probable illegalities. This group includes people like Steven Miller, Steve Bannon, and Mike Pence, who are all interested in using Trump as a vehicle for their own vision of racial, economic, and religious nationalism, respectively. Then there are the lightweight grifters like Scott Pruitt and Ryan Zinke who are devotedly serving their corporate masters in the extraction industries while engaging in petty personal corruption as they wait for their million dollar paydays after their stint in government.
This group also includes the only group that could actually contain and restrain Trump, namely Republicans in Congress and the US business community at large. This "coalition of the unwilling" refuses to rein in Trump because they are largely getting everything they want from him in the way of massive corporate tax cuts, swaths of deregulation and a blind eye to blatant violations, deep cuts to the social safety net, and packing the courts with reactionary hacks. Trump is exactly the President they want.
The third group is made up of those who continue to serve the President but do as much as possible to protect the country from irreparable harm. We probably don't know who these people are yet, only time and history may tell. Are Cohn and Hagin part of this group or are they more aligned with Miller, Bannon, and Pence, simply using an unfit President to advance their own agenda, as illustrated by Cohn and the tax bill? James Mattis has been remarkably successful in using the bureaucracy to delay some of Trump's directives, as evidenced by his actions regarding transgender troops. Will there emerge stories reminiscent of Defense Secretary James Schlesinger's orders that he or Kissinger be informed by military commanders if Nixon ordered a nuclear strike in his last days as President? We will find out about these people in due course. But the legacy of this group of individuals will be decidedly mixed, at best.
The problem with all three of these groups is that none of them will restrain an unfit President. Those who have resigned have lost their power. Those that find Trump their useful idiot will continue to use him. And those that remain and fight from within are only having an impact around the fringes.
It is clear that Trump is temperamentally, intellectually, morally, and ethically unfit to be the leader of the country. Everyone who works with him knows it. And none of them are doing anything to stop him.
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