Washington, it must be said, is an ugly town.
To some people this may come as a surprise. Those of us who have been here for any extended period of time know it to be full of snakes and worms and scrambling back-biters all looking for ways to climb ahead of the other guy. When President Harry Truman said anyone in the nation's capital who wanted a friend "should buy a dog," he was only scratching the surface.
It wasn't that long ago, for example, that someone whose opinion I respect and who generally seems to be plugged into what is going told me with some assurance that White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus would be "out" within six weeks. This, mind you, was before he had spent a single full day in his West Wing office.
Stories like this are exactly how the city operates. Where it might have come from, who's to say? Maybe it started with someone seeking to gain power within the White House at Priebus' expense. Maybe it started with someone who doesn't like President Donald Trump, has never liked him, and wants to cause chaos in his immediate circle. Maybe it started with some low-level functionary who wanted to sound more clued in – because knowledge is power – and therefore more important in front of someone they wanted to impress.
The point is, stories like this float around without anything ever coming to fruition because it gives people who don't really know anything something to talk about.
The topic de jour seems to be the division of power inside the Trump White House. The uninformed speculation reporters on television are tossing around is fascinating, reminiscent of the old story about the group of blind men trying to describe an elephant. No one really knows what's going on yet they are bold enough to suggest the president has deliberately set his closest advisers against one another because he thrives on chaos.
Having followed some of the folks in Trump's inner circle for some time now, the idea is poppycock. There may be competition among them for the president's ear but – and here's what most of the punditocracy doesn't yet get – it is not per se destructive to Trump, his administration or the country.
Most everyone in the White House and across the government is still getting plugged in. They're learning their jobs in full view of the country. Each and every honest mistake is, along with the few obvious blunders, amplified by an openly hostile press corps cheering for the new folks to fail. This makes things look more disorganized than they probably are.
Who has power inside the White House is a parlor game, something pundits can talk about without actually knowing anything and still sound smart. There are people the president seems to rely on more than others – any list of which would have to include Priebus, Vice President Mike Pence, counselors Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway, his daughter Ivanka and his son-in-law Jared Kushner. There are almost assuredly others but let's take just those centers of power, for lack of a better term, inside the West Wing,
They are all very smart people who are very good at what they do. These are the people that got Trump elected when most folks didn't believe he had a prayer of winning. They did it by being strategic and by being clever and by shrewd use of the resources available to them. If ever there was an example in American politics of a David slaying a Goliath it is Trump defeating former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
A smart person would, before announcing they were all locked in some kind of death struggle competing for the president's attention, try to figure out what their jobs were and if they in fact complimented one another more than they were in conflict. Creative tension based on a variety of experience can be a good thing; in this case, it probably is. It certainly forces everyone to come to the table each day with their "A Game" at the ready because the one who isn't prepared will get run over by the others.
People are starting to point to the first years of the Reagan administration as the gold standard for effectively organizing the White House. The one's with short memories – or who weren't yet born – are giving all the credit to James Baker, the Bush aide who became the 40th president's first chief of staff.
What those folks forget is it was Reagan who put the team who ran his West Wing together. Baker, while formidable, had to compete for the president's attention with Ed Meese, who came to Washington from California with the rest of the longtime Reaganites and who, more than any other, was the keeper of the ideological flame. Also in the mix was the late Michael Deaver, confidant of Nancy Reagan and the man in charge of the president's image in a White House where symbolic gestures and pictures mattered more than statements and press conferences.
Whatever bickering went on between Baker, Meese and Deaver, it almost always worked in the best interests of President Reagan – even if they sometimes used leaks to the press to tilt a story in a direction most favorable to the outcome they wanted.
As of yet there's no reason to presume the same is not true in the Trump White House. Let's say that, with Priebus handling the regular Republicans, Bannon on watch to make sure the "Trumpocraticans" remain on board, Conway overseeing the messaging, Pence handling Capitol Hill, and his family members looking out for his best interests first and foremost at all times, the president has assembled a strong team indeed, perhaps the strongest in recent memory, especially because each of them understands who ultimately is in charge.
