U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo poses for a photo with (L to R) National Security Advisor of the United States John Bolton, President Donald J. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence before his swearing-in ceremony at the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C., on May 2, 2018. [State Department photo/ Public Domain]
Mike Pence, Bill Barr, Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley have all sounded a strong note of criticism in the wake of the Jack Smith indictment. You already have a plethora of former chiefs of staff as critics — how’s Mark Meadows doing again, anyway? But it doesn’t seem like the list is going to stop there. Will Betsy DeVos, Ben Carson, Steve Mnuchin, David Bernhardt and the rest put Trump in the rare position of having virtually his entire former cabinet criticizing him, with him blasting them as failures and losers in return? And what does that say about who will get to be in the next cabinet, and who will choose to stand for such a job next time, if there is a next time?
The Trump grievance message often depends on the idea that he is so often betrayed by others, given bad advice and the like. That had a certain heft to it when the people he viewed as betrayers were the likes of Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell (and Elaine Chao, he views them as a pair). He could reasonably frame them as being DC people who wouldn’t go along with his agenda. But from January 6 onward, the frame expanded. It included people who had been extremely loyal, like Pence and others who had worked very hard to advance his agenda for four years.
You can blame some Republicans for your failures, but you can’t blame them all. And when you didn’t aim your fire at the people who, from Republican voters’ perspective, did the most damage — in Anthony Fauci and the health bureaucracy — there’s a notable gap in who Trump chooses as his targets, to make everything bad someone else’s fault.
We’ll have to see how many more in Trump’s immediate circle criticize him after the anticipated Georgia indictment. If the Mar-a-Lago raid and the New York indictment benefited him, this one seems more muted, and the Georgia case could prompt even more criticism.
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