Personnel Is Policy

How Many in the Foreign Policy Establishment Fooled Themselves About Trump

Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash

“Personnel is policy. This is a major improvement over Biden.”

That was a message from a well-connected friend that I received in a text exchange earlier this year. From my friend—I’m not sure he’s a friend anymore—who was intimating that my “Trump Derangement Syndrome” was showing, in that, from my perspective, the appointment of Rubio said a lot more about Rubio than it did about Trump.

He was bouncing off the ceiling with joy when Marco Rubio was tapped for Secretary of State, convinced that this appointment vindicated his faith in Trump’s foreign policy instincts. Finally, he seemed to think, we’d have adults in the room. Finally, we’d get the grown-up conservative foreign policy that America needed. The chaos of Trump’s first term was constrained by competent people who understood how the world actually worked.

I tried to explain that he had it backwards. The Rubio appointment wasn’t evidence that Trump had learned to value competence—it was evidence that Rubio had learned to value access. Trump doesn’t get constrained by his appointments; he corrupts them. The appointment said everything about what Rubio was willing to become and nothing about what Trump was willing to accept.

My friend dismissed this as another case of my supposed derangement. Like so many in the foreign policy establishment, he desperately wanted to believe that institutional competence could somehow contain presidential chaos, that having a “serious” person at State could counteract having an unserious person in the Oval Office.

But foreign policy flows from the president, and when the president is fundamentally unserious, competence just executes unseriousness more efficiently.

The India Catastrophe

Trump pushing India into China’s arms was not actually on my Trump Administration bingo card. But that’s exactly what’s happening, and it represents perhaps the most strategically disastrous foreign policy move of this administration—which is saying something.

The entire post-Cold War American strategy in Asia has been built around containing Chinese expansion by strengthening ties with regional powers, especially India. This was one of the few areas where there was genuine bipartisan consensus in Washington: Democrats and Republicans both understood that India’s rise as a democratic counterweight to Chinese authoritarianism served fundamental American interests.

Decades of patient relationship-building across multiple administrations, careful diplomatic work to overcome historical suspicions, strategic investments in economic and military partnerships—all of it designed to ensure that the world’s most populous democracy would see its interests as aligned with ours rather than with Beijing’s.

But Trump launched a trade war with India, slapping tariffs on Indian steel and aluminum while restricting H-1B visas that Indian tech professionals depend on. Then he took to Truth Social—“bleeting,” as his posts are apparently called—to publicly antagonize Modi over trade disputes and immigration policies. While Modi was photographed shaking Xi’s hand on the banks of the Yangtze, Trump was bleeting at him about butterfat quotas. The consequences aren’t just symbolic: the Malabar naval exercises have been delayed indefinitely, and India just announced its first major defense purchase from China in decades.

The pivot toward China isn’t happening despite American pressure—it’s happening because of American incompetence.

The Rubio Tragedy

Where was Marco Rubio while this strategic catastrophe unfolded? Delivering polished keynote addresses about countering China to think tank audiences in Washington while his boss was handing Beijing the greatest gift possible: pushing the world’s largest democracy into their sphere of influence. Rubio isn’t just a failed secretary—he’s the embodiment of what happens when competence conscripts itself to chaos.

The hollowness is breathtaking—elegant speeches about Indo-Pacific strategy while the actual strategy collapsed under his watch, sophisticated analysis of great power competition while Trump systematically strengthened our primary competitor. His silence during Trump’s India blunders reveals everything about what “adults in the room” actually means: sophisticated people providing sophisticated cover for fundamentally unsophisticated policy.

This is what “personnel is policy” actually means in practice: competent people implementing incompetent policies because that’s what the job requires. Strategic thinkers abandoning strategic thinking because that’s what loyalty costs.

The America First Incoherence

The fundamental problem is that “America First” as Trump understands it is completely incompatible with the kind of alliance management that effective great power competition requires. You can’t contain China while simultaneously alienating every potential partner through tariffs, immigration restrictions, and general diplomatic incompetence. You can’t build coalitions while treating every relationship as a zero-sum transaction where America must “win” and everyone else must lose.

When you’re pushing neutral countries toward your primary strategic competitor, when you’re alienating democratic allies through sheer diplomatic incompetence, when you’re turning areas of bipartisan consensus into sources of international friction—you’re not pursuing “America First” foreign policy. You’re pursuing America Alone foreign policy, which inevitably becomes America Last foreign policy.

The Real Trump Derangement Syndrome

The real “Trump Derangement Syndrome” wasn’t my supposed inability to see Trump clearly—it was my friend’s inability to see Trump clearly. The real derangement was believing that competent people could impose coherence on chaos, that institutional norms could constrain someone actively destroying institutions.

The accusation of derangement wasn’t just about me—it was about preserving their own access. That’s how Trump corrupts: by making reality itself a loyalty test. What Trump does to friendships, he does to alliances: he makes loyalty to delusion the price of entry, and when reality intrudes, the relationship collapses.

The people who warned about Trump’s unfitness for office weren’t suffering from derangement—they were demonstrating the kind of clear-eyed assessment that actual foreign policy competence requires. We understood that character matters more than credentials, that presidential temperament shapes policy more than personnel choices, that you can’t build effective strategy on the foundation of fundamental unseriousness.

The Friendship Casualty

I said I’m not sure my friend is still my friend, and I mean it. Not because we disagree about policy—disagreement can strengthen friendship when both sides engage in good faith. But because he accused me of derangement for accurately predicting what’s now obviously happening.

This is what Trump does: he forces everyone around him to choose between truth and access, between principle and convenience, between friendship and tribal loyalty. My friend chose access over truth, convenience over principle, tribal loyalty over friendship. That’s his right, but it’s also a choice that reveals character in ways that make continued relationship impossible.

You can’t maintain genuine friendship with people who require you to share their delusions as the price of their company, who demand that you pretend not to see what you’re seeing, who treat clear-eyed assessment of obvious character flaws as psychological pathology.

The Establishment’s Reckoning

The broader tragedy extends far beyond one friendship to an entire class of foreign policy professionals who convinced themselves that they could use Trump while remaining untouched by him. They thought they could maintain their respectability while enabling his chaos.

But Trump doesn’t work that way. He doesn’t allow people to use him—he uses them. He doesn’t permit limited partnership—he demands total submission. The foreign policy establishment that thought it could manage him is learning that you can’t impose competence on someone whose entire worldview is built around rejecting competence as weakness.

Personnel is policy, but not in the way my friend imagined. The personnel reveal what the policy actually is, not what sophisticated observers wish it could be. When serious foreign policy professionals are reduced to providing intellectual cover for fundamentally unserious foreign policy, the seriousness was always an illusion.

The Choice Ahead

We’re watching the systematic destruction of American strategic relationships by people who claim to be defending American strategic interests. We’re seeing decades of careful diplomacy undone by someone who treats international relations like a personal brand management exercise.

The friends I’ve lost along the way, the relationships that couldn’t survive contact with truth, the establishment professionals who chose access over principle—they all made their choice. They decided that maintaining their position within a corrupt system mattered more than preserving the system that made their positions meaningful.

I made a different choice. I chose truth over access, principle over convenience, clarity over relationship. It’s a lonely choice sometimes, but it’s the only choice that makes sense if you understand what’s at stake.

Personnel is policy. And the personnel Trump attracts, corrupts, and ultimately discards reveal everything we need to know about what his policies actually serve: not American interests, but Trump’s interests. Not strategic thinking, but ego management. Not the national good, but personal brand elevation.

My friend was right about one thing: personnel is policy. He was just wrong about which direction the causation flows. The appointments don’t constrain Trump—Trump corrupts the appointments. The personnel don’t improve the policy—the policy degrades the personnel.

And anyone who couldn’t see that coming wasn’t suffering from clear-eyed analysis—they were suffering from the delusion that competence could coexist with chaos, that principle could survive partnership with the unprincipled, that America could be put first by someone who puts only himself first.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And personnel is policy—just not the policy they thought they were getting.

The wire hasn’t just trembled—it’s been cut by people who convinced themselves they were stabilizing it. The center hasn’t held because the people who claimed to be holding it were actually pulling it apart.

Remember what’s real. Reject the comfortable delusions. Choose truth over access.

The circus continues, but some of us have stopped pretending we can’t see what’s happening in the ring.