Saturday, November 19, 2016

Praise for Reince Priebus is another sign of how we’re lowering the bar for Trump

Matthew Yglesias in Vox a few days ago, Praise for Reince Priebus is another sign of how we’re lowering the bar for Trump

Trump landed on Priebus, fairly clearly, because he gets along with him personally and because Priebus also gets along with congressional Republican leaders. That’s nice. But for a president with no relevant experience or qualifications to be picking key staff positions largely on the basis of their ability to be nice to Donald Trump is a disaster. Some are sketching out the Priebus/Bannon relationship as analogous to the dual power structure of Andy Card and Karl Rove in George W Bush’s White House. But the analogy fails entirely.

Priebus, like Rove, is a professional political operative with no experience in government. Card was a veteran elected official who served four years as deputy chief of staff in the George H.W. Bush administration. And Bush himself served six years as governor of a large state. In the Trump/Priebus/Bannon axis that’s running the government, there’s nobody who has any idea how to run the government.

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