Recently, Thom Tillis sat opposite Stephanie Ruhle and attempted to clarify why the president continues to refer to the affordability crisis as a hoax. “I think he got bad advice,” the senator stated. Ruhle wouldn’t let it go. “Why do you talk about advice?” she asked. “He’s the president!”
Tillis did not have a response, and he is scarcely alone. In September, María Elvira Salazar ran an ad addressed to Trump personally, telling him that “some of your advisers are giving you bad advice“ on immigration enforcement. In June, Ted Cruz stated that the president, “unfortunately, is receiving bad advice“ on a deal with Iran. On Friday, Roger Wicker, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, wrote that Trump’s “instincts have been to finish the job he started in Iran, but he is being ill advised to pursue a deal.”
Wicker and Cruz believe the advisers are overly lenient toward Tehran. Salazar believes they are overly harsh on immigrants. Tillis has faulted them for Greenland, the attacks on the Fed and the cost of groceries. The advisers, seemingly, are mistaken about everything, in every direction simultaneously. The president’s instincts, however, are always fine. Whatever a Republican disapproves of originated from the staff, and whatever he approves of came from the man.
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There exists a traditional term for this. Historians of imperial Russia refer to it as naive monarchism: the peasant’s belief that the tsar was benevolent and just, and that every injustice in the village was the result of the actions of the officials around him, who deceived him about what his people endured. The tsar desired it, the expression went, but the boyars were resistant. Were the tsar only aware.
The notable aspect of naive monarchism, as historian Daniel Field demonstrated, is that it was not always naive. Peasants who rebelled against their landlords did so in the name of the tsar, and by declaring a naive devotion to the crown they earned themselves a degree of immunity from prosecution. The dedication was occasionally a tactic. You might resist the system as long as you claimed that you were protecting the person at the top of it.
This is what the Republican version entails. Nobody in the Senate really thinks that Donald Trump is a blank slate on which Stephen Miller writes. They use an old peasant tactic: register the complaint, protect oneself, remain loyal to the base. It allows a senator to inform his constituents that he is against the tariffs, or the war, or the raids, without having to tell them that he is opposed to the president who initiated them.
The distinction is that the Russian peasant had no vote, no subpoena authority, no place on the Armed Services Committee, and no constitutional obligation to check the executive. The tsar’s people had no alternative way to speak. Tillis has every other way to speak, and selects this one.
There is a particular type of person who deals with their cognitive dissonance regarding their support for Trump and his apparent insanity by convincing themselves: “No, Trump is fine. He’s just got crazy people in his ear.” It’s a fairly amusing kind of cognitive dissonance, and you have likely encountered it. I, personally, believe we ought to accept the premise and say: Alright, yes, Trump is getting poor advice. Yet if he’s so good in other respects, why can’t he recognize the poor advice?
Identifying poor advice is the task. Every president is surrounded by individuals who desire different things and inform him of different stories, and most of what they inform him of is incorrect in some manner. The office is there to assess it. Harry Truman, who had “The Buck Stops Here” on his desk, stated it simply in his farewell address: “The President--whoever he is--has to decide. He can’t pass the buck to anybody.” A president who cannot distinguish good counsel from bad has failed in the one part of the work that no one else can do for him. Viewed seriously, the defense amounts to an indictment, and a more harsh one than many of his critics bother to articulate.
However, the premise doesn’t withstand the record either, much of it provided by the president himself.
In February, following reports that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs had cautioned him about the risks of striking Iran, Trump contested the account and then made the relevant point: “I am the one that makes the decision.” When Goldman Sachs forecast that his tariffs would increase prices, he didn’t call upon his economists to reassess; he stated that the bank was “wrong, just like they are wrong about so much else.” And those around him have ceased pretending otherwise. Top advisers and elected Republican officials informed Axios that they do not even attempt to change his mind. “Why bother?” a longtime adviser remarked. “He’s the boss.”
The advisers who stay are those who learned not to inform him of what he does not want to hear, and they discovered it by observing what occurred to everyone who attempted. Selecting an adviser is in itself a decision, and so is retaining one. Trump selected the individuals around him because they concur with him, and he retains them for the same reason. When Tillis states the president is being poorly served by his staff, he is describing a staff that serves the president precisely as he wishes to be served.
Even Jonathan Martin, who spoke with Tillis regarding his new book, noticed the problem. The thesis of How to Lose Friends and Antagonize Presidents, Martin told him, is that Trump is being ill-served by the people around him, but he kept writing “him” in the margins, because so many of the examples were things Trump had said and done himself, from the tariffs to the Easter post threatening to bomb Iran. “Trump appointed these folks,” Martin stated. “Trump has stood by them.” Tillis’s response is worth reading carefully. He stated he hadn’t discovered any section in the Constitution “where you can fire him, and I’m not going to impeach him,” so the only thing he could alter was “the people around him.” There is indeed such a section, and Tillis has sat through two impeachment trials of this president and voted to acquit in both. What he implies is that he has eliminated the solution the Constitution provides and opted for the one the court permits.
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The strongest evidence opposing the bad-advice theory is that Trump also uses it.
When a federal court decided the previous year that he was without the authority to impose most of his tariffs, Trump didn’t fault himself for the appointments. He criticized the Federalist Society, which he claimed had provided him “bad advice“ on judicial nominations, and he labeled Leonard Leo a “sleazebag.” He is indebted to Leo, however: for his near-complete criminal immunity against any crimes he commits in office, for the end of the independent agencies, for his power to remove the inspectors general and make it stick, and for the notion, which individuals like Sarah Isgur argue the Constitution demands, that Congress oversteps its authority when it interferes with the president’s unified control over the executive branch. All three justices that Trump selected from a list reportedly curated by Leo were part of the majority in both of those rulings.
At an event at Stanford Law that I attended, someone who did not subscribe to the unitary executive theory nonetheless informed me it was “a respectable theory with a respectable scholarship among conservative jurists.” It’s actually not. It’s utter nonsense, and the absurdity of it is evident in what is unfolding at the White House daily. They were concerned about “unaccountable bureaucrats” who were “unelected” interfering with a legitimately elected president’s ability to implement his agenda. So we removed all the safeguards, exactly as they demanded, and just as Leonard Leo and individuals like Sarah Isgur argue is a respectable mainstream view, and we now watch as our country is ravaged and exploited. Isgur would respond that it had never been the role of an unaccountable, unelected inspector general to halt them, and that this was instead Congress’s responsibility. But we have factions, and when one faction controls all three branches, independent IGs would have been helpful, yes. Isgur likewise referred to the cover-up meeting regarding the Epstein files as a typical “dumb-dumb meeting,” one that any other administration in a similar situation would also have conducted. However, has any other administration been similarly positioned? Obama and Biden do not appear in the Epstein files like Trump does.
And now, with his support waning and the midterms just nine days off, he is blaming his own aides for a struggling strategy: questioning how MAGA Inc. spent $200 million, criticizing the redistricting effort he personally backed, reevaluating candidate selections.
Thus the senators fault the advisers, the advisers fault one another, and the president faults the advisers as well as the senators. One person described the result to Reuters as “a circular firing squad.” What nobody in this arrangement ever does is say that the man who made the decision made a bad one. Poor advice is the administration’s grammar: a manner of speaking in which mistakes occur without anyone making them.
A courtier cannot say that the king is incorrect, only that he was poorly informed, which leaves open the possibility that the king’s favor will return. The reason given is, ultimately, a request to be permitted to remain at court.
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I recently wrote about individuals in my former industry who send me private messages agreeing with me and then praise Trump publicly. The quiet agreers desire recognition for knowing better without incurring the cost of stating so. The poor-advice line is the elected version of the same move. It is disagreement designed to cost nothing: aimed at people the public can’t name, about decisions everyone knows the president made, phrased in a way that preserves the speaker’s standing with the man responsible.
It does not even work. Following Salazar’s ad airing, Trump stated that he merely disagreed with her, and she characterized their conversation as “courteous.” A week later he was amplifying posts calling for her to be replaced. Tillis has criticized the “amateurs” around the president since last year, and Trump referred to him as “weak and ineffective“ nonetheless. The device shields the speaker from nothing, since Trump comprehends perfectly well what it means. He is aware that the advisers are being held responsible for his decisions. He is aware of it because they are his decisions.
What the device actually achieves is something different. It informs voters that the war, the tariffs, and the raids are not the president’s policy but rather a series of unfortunate personnel mistakes that a few dismissals could rectify, which is the same reassurance the myth of the benevolent tsar provided to the peasants: that the person at the top is on their side, and that someone else is at fault. Every senator who uses it is telling their constituents that the president would do right by them if only he were aware.
He is aware. He essentially told us that he is the one who makes the decision. At the very least, his party can believe him.
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We know that Trump isn't getting bad advice because he has, from the beginning, assured us that he knows more than all the generals, that his own morality is what keeps him inside the guardrails, and that he's a genius, a stable one. He brags about how much he knows, and that he doesn't need advice because he's smarter than everybody. That's all you need to say.
It's the typical good czar bad officials cope. "If the czar only knew, this wouldn't be tolerated.... they serve him poorly!"