Should-Read: Dan Drezner: Why it is impossible for Donald Trump to rise to adequacy: "A few days ago I suggested that Trump’s NATO speech was a powerful signal that we had seen the limits of adult supervision at the White House... http://delong.typepad.com/drezner-chaos-muppet.zip
...In response, Bloomberg’s Jonathan Bernstein suggests that an improved White House organization could make a huge difference. Going back to the days when a calming Howard Baker replaced the much-less-calming Donald Regan as President Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff.... It is possible that a strong White House chief of staff could help to bring some more order to the current clown car apparatus. And if one assumes that Donald Trump is like other politicians in that he wants to be reelected, this would be the rational course of action.
That said, there are two big honking problems with Bernstein’s argument.
The first one is simple: Who would agree to the job at this point?... Trump’s status as the Chaos-Muppet-in-Chief has made it harder to recruit competent people. This week alone Trump has been not-so-privately feuding with Attorney General Jeff Sessions. And despite grandiose plans to create a “war room” to handle former FBI director James B. Comey’s testimony today....
In the weeks leading up to Comey’s testimony, the White House had privately tried to erect a war room that would handle the communications and legal strategies for responding to the Russia matter. Former Trump campaign aides Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie were in discussions to lead it. But the plan was scuttled, as with so much else in Trump’s administration, because of internal disagreements....
Seeing Trump’s unconstrained id on full display has made the acute challenges of this job clear to any potential chief of staff.
But even if there was some Manic Pixie Dream Staffer just waiting in the wings to be discovered, we get to the fundamental problem with Bernstein’s proposed plan to improve the Trump administration—the president would continue to be Donald Trump. As I’ve noted previously, “The best explanation for Trump’s erratic shifts in behavior is Trump-specific.” Venues ranging from the Wall Street Journal to Vox have concluded that the president is his own worst enemy. For this new structure to exist, Donald Trump would have to sign off on it. He would have to be mature enough to recognize his own management problems. Why, after winning the presidency despite everyone telling him it was a futile quest, would he do that?... For the past six weeks or so, I’ve been chronicling when Trump’s staff describes him to reporters in terms that make him seem like a truculent toddler. There’s a lot of them. The fact is, the president appears to display massive insecurities, which causes him to turn on any staffer who rises to prominence. Any competent and powerful chief of staff would be the focal point for press coverage, which is the one form of printed matter that Trump ravenously consumes.... Imagine how Trump would feel about Time describing a competent staffer as the power behind the throne...
