This Just In – I used to work with someone very similar to our current president. Insecure, poorly qualified and quite clever in the ways and means of accumulating power. Scary at first, but once revealed, just a toady.
We were colleagues in senior management of a federally funded agency. Thankfully, he wasn’t my boss, so this gave me some latitude in dealing with him. Some things were just laughable, some not. Among his dumbest habits (this happened a few times) was when I’d send him an email about something – maybe three or four paragraphs long.
Minutes after I’d sent it, he would appear at the door of my office, telling me he’d just received my email. “What does it say?” he’d ask.
Seriously. College graduate. Six figure salary.
His claim would be that he was too busy to read it and wanted me to summarize. Almost immediately, I arrived at “It can wait until you have time to read 300 words.”
Not too long later, it became “If the words are too big, let me know. Microsoft rates it at 4th grade reading level.”
Then “No. I’m just as busy as you are. Close the door on your way out.”
The way this guy acquired so much heft in our organization is that he waited for something chaotic to happen, then offered to jump in and fix it, requiring substantial unchecked authority. It didn’t matter that he might have contributed to the chaos that caused the problem. That would be long forgotten in the swirl of operational challenges.
To motivate myself in surviving all the mess, I promised myself that one day I would be standing on the porch overlooking the parking lot, waving goodbye to this joker, having survived his tenure (by a day, an hour, a month … I didn’t care). I’m happy to say that did happen. I left on my own schedule. He did not.
*sigh* Gosh, I miss that job … not at all.
This is much the way I feel about our current president … that I will be here to one day read the headline that his term is over – one way or the other. I endured two election night that ended with the unthinkable headline that Trump had been elect president, even after the delight of reading that the verdicts in New York were 34 x GUILTY.
The secret to what they do is the creation of chaos and the intent to keep us all off balance while promising to restore the much-needed stability and predictable nature of order. Checks arriving on time. Services delivered as expected. Top management acting in the interest of customers/taxpayers. When a firehose of disorder is blasting through, all we want is someone to take control and shut it off. On his side is the philosophy of move fast, break stuff. On our side, we urge calm and planning. It’s easy to understand how they seem unstoppable.
They’re not unstoppable though. As the Trump bull has been rampaging through the economic china shop threatening literally every country in the world with tariffs, he demonstrated clearly that he didn’t understand what they were, who actually paid them and who has the authority to impose them (Congress, not the president).
He moved fast. He broke stuff (the economic winning streak that was handed to him) and lagging behind were several states’ attorneys general, filing lawsuits. Yesterday, the Court of International Trade issued a decision that will be studied for generations. Two Republican-appointed judges (one appointed by Reagan, one by Trump) and one Democrat-appointed (Obama) issued a scorching, unanimous decision telling the current administration that the only thing they got right in their argument was when they said “Your Honors …”
They issued a summary decision, ending dozens of lawsuits immediately. This is rare. They blasted the administration for trying to invoke a law whose emergency powers have nothing to do with the power to levy tariffs and said that for a president to have this kind of power is unconstitutional and that if the Congress wanted to give that power to the president, that would also be unconstitutional.
From a court you never heard of based in New York. It took a while, but the Trump Tariff rampage is over. Now, we can carry on our discussion of how those West Point Cadets lost the commencement speaker lottery, but actually made a stunning demonstration of resistance within the rules. Trump didn’t stiff them by leaving early and not shaking hands (with the 1,200 graduates).
He left because the graduates were not willing to risk a violation of the honor code by shaking his hand.
Hundreds of protesters marched at Halifax Mall in Raleigh as part of the nationwide “Stand Up For Science” initiative.
Jean Bolduc is a freelance writer and the host of the Weekend Watercooler on 97.9 The Hill. She is the author of “African Americans of Durham & Orange Counties: An Oral History” (History Press, 2016) and has served on Orange County’s Human Relations Commission, The Alliance of AIDS Services-Carolina, the Orange County Housing Authority Board of Commissioners, and the Orange County Schools’ Equity Task Force. She was a featured columnist and reporter for the Chapel Hill Herald and the News & Observer.
Readers can reach Jean via email – [email protected] and via Twitter @JeanBolduc
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