Where Is Barry Goldwater Now? We Need His Political Integrity.

Per the Pew Research Center, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us that, not counting active-duty military personnel and postal employees, about 2.4 million people work for the federal government. Most of them work in the executive branch, which makes them at least in principle subject to presidential authority.

By common consensus, a president typically makes about 4000 political appointments. See here and here. No president has the capability of being a one-person operation, so to speak.

In theory, appointees are to serve the president but at the same time remain loyal to the Constitution. The question is, how do they navigate any tensions that might arise between those two obligations?

This past week we have witnessed the accelerating confirmation of several people President Trump has nominated for various important Cabinet and non-Cabinet positions in his administration. Beyond Pete Hegseth as our Secretary of Defense we now have, or are on our way to having, Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence, vaccine-denier Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services, and Kash Patel as Director of the FBI.

I know people who are quite happy with these and other nominations, but I also know others who are quite fearful—especially regarding Kennedy’s potential impact on health care in our country.

Despite all the talk about the central importance of merit, many critics of these and other nominees have argued that the fundamental job qualification that seems operative in the Trump administration is loyalty to Trump. If that is true, then the people running this nomination process from Trump on down have forgotten or ignored the wise words of Machiavelli.

In his classic work, The Prince, Machiavelli writes about the importance of advisors and what the ruler’s choices say about himself. He states in Chapter 22:

“The choice of servants is of no little importance to a prince, and they are good or not according to the discrimination of the prince. And the first opinion which one forms of a prince, and of his understanding, is by observing the men he has around him; and when they are capable and faithful he may always be considered wise, because he has known how to recognize the capable and to keep them faithful. But when they are otherwise one cannot form a good opinion of him, for the prime error which he made was in choosing them.”

It seems to me that anyone in a leadership position not only should but must be able to rely on advisors willing to speak truth to power, if only for the leader’s own sake. Anyone in such a position needs advisors to offer wise counsel about the merits and impacts of a leader’s policy and personnel choices.

We have not seen much of that willingness on the part of Republicans in Congress, as I noted in my recent column on checks and balances. Recall Trump’s infamous statement during his first campaign: “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” He certainly wouldn’t lose the vote of any Republican Senator or Representative. This, frankly, is so immensely disappointing. Barry Goldwater must be rolling over in his grave (see this from the Associated Press).

A leader’s choice of advisors, as Machiavelli notes, tells us something about that leader. Choosing independent, strong, and smart advisors says you yourself are a strong and confident person, while choosing sycophants says you yourself are a basically weak and insecure person afraid of being challenged even when it’s for your own good.

Above all else, a president’s advisors and political appointees are supposed to serve the country’s bests interests rather than to be the president’s agents of retribution against perceived political opponents.

Accompanying the nomination of personal loyalists for various political appointments in the Trump administration is a number of ongoing attempts to expand the discretionary powers of the president beyond the traditional understanding of separation of powers as shared powers in separate institutions. I don’t believe that Republicans are interested only in making a nonpartisan theoretical argument about the nature and extent of presidential powers. According to FactCheck.org, for example, they charged President Obama in 2014 with overreach of his executive authority. Not a problem.

Yet the only way to explain Republicans’ attempt to centralize power in the presidency this way is to say that they expect there never again to be a Democratic president. It would be one thing to argue that the Democrats are simply unlikely to create a substantial electoral coalition for the foreseeable future. Fair enough: absent some serious rethinking of their party, Democrats are likely to spend time in a political desert.

But it’s something entirely different to conduct government business in such a way as to make it impossible for any party other than Republicans to win the presidency. Too many Republicans have come to believe that there is no way the Democrats can win a fair and honest presidential election. For them, any Democratic victory is itself evidence of fraud. That is truly scary.

Where are the smart, honorable, courageous, and patriotic advisors when we need them? And we really do need them now. Sigh.