Served up by the boss

If you're Jeff Sessions, Rex Tillerson, James Mattis or H.R. McMaster, you will have learned by now what it means to have been served by your boss. If you are a less senior member of the administration, consider that your seasoning in government service has its own culinary contronym.

The attorney-general was reminded Monday of how ill-fated his voyage to Planet Trump is destined to be, after the President blasted the Justice Department for its "watered down, politically correct" travel ban.

"These tweets may make some ppl feel better," lawyer George Conway tweeted Monday, "but they certainly won't help OSG get 5 votes in SCOTUS, which is what actually matters. Sad." OSG is the Office of the Solicitor General, SCOTUS is the Supreme Court, and George is Kellyanne's better half.

Then it was the turn of the secretaries of state and defence, after the President blasted Qatar on Twitter for "funding of Radical Ideology". This was as Tillerson and Mattis were seeking to broker a diplomatic compromise between the Persian Gulf's sore thumb and its angry neighbours.

"His tweets, which a senior White House official said were not a result of any policy deliberation, sowed confusion about America's strategy and its intentions toward a key military partner," the Times' Mark Landler noted Tuesday. Qatar hosts thousands of US service members at the Al Udeid Air Base.

No giving Trump a pass

But even this was small beer next to the humiliation the president visited on his loyal national security adviser in Brussels last month. As Politico's Susan Glasser reported Monday, the President deleted a crucial reference to NATO's Article 5 mutual-defence provision from his speech at the alliance's headquarters without so much as giving McMaster a heads-up.


At the time of the speech I thought the omission was more of a squirt of Trumpian mindlessness than a recrudescence of Bannonite isolationism, and gave the President a pass for it in my column of May 26. Note to self: Next time I feel inclined to give this President the benefit of the doubt, I'll lie down till the feeling passes.

Now lessons must be drawn.

For those who serve the President: The price of your diligence is his flippancy. The price of your efforts to protect him is his willingness to expose you. The price of your sacrifice – of time, profit, career and, in the long run, reputation – is his indifference. The price of your loyalty is his contempt.

Checks and balances? One word: Twitter

For those who think the President's character flaws can be softened, or overcome, by the calibre of his advisers: You can't use water to put out a grease fire.

For those who believe that checks and balances will contain the damage that a president can wreak: Twitter. The President's digital compulsions may be less obscene than Anthony Weiner's, but they're more consequential.

Twitter is the electric current that connects populist to populous, demagogue to mob, the short circuit by which representative government becomes irrelevant. Trump may have hurt his chances of winning five Supreme Court votes with a tweet that betrayed the insincerity of his own "politically correct" travel ban.

But he has animated his base to blame the failures of his policies on someone other than himself. What's a loss at the High Court when he knows he can use it to capitalise politically from the next terrorist attack in the US?

On Thursday we may learn from James Comey's Senate testimony whether Trump will have to pay a political price of his own for demanding personal loyalty oaths from non-political appointees. If so, it would be fitting punishment for a man who so far has only known profit and advantage from his lack of loyalty toward those who serve him.

"Trust us," says the Kanamit, and mankind did. "Believe me," the President likes to say, and people like Sessions and McMaster did. As the narrator in The Twilight Zone observes, such is "the cycle of going from dust to dessert, the metamorphosis of being the ruler of a planet to an ingredient in someone's soup".

The New York Times