The Courtier Game
When Presidential aides are intoxicated with the thrill of being close to power
First, an update on the Current Thing
A commenter points out that Kevin Drum has joined the unhinged brigade.
this 90-minute look into Biden's mental state—temporary or not—makes it clear that he shouldn't be president any longer. It's too risky. He should resign the office immediately and turn the reins over to Kamala Harris.
Finally! someone else who seems worried about what Biden’s infirmities mean for the country, not just for the election.
Drum goes on to propose that Kamala Harris choose a moderate Republican as a Vice President. But my guess is that such a person would be thrown off the ticket by the Democratic convention.
In fact, if Harris gives the Democratic pros second thoughts about dumping Biden, imagine what thinking about the convention delegates does to them. I doubt that the party leaders relish creating a situation that puts the focus on convention delegates. If I were a party leader, I would not look forward to giving lots of TV exposure to the grass roots as represented at the convention, much less giving those assorted nuts real power to choose the nominees.
Now, on to the topic at hand:
The Courtier Problem
Reading one report after another about the Biden-Harris camp’s appalling damage control operation, I could feel the presumption-of-competence I’d implicitly extended to them leaving my body.
…I for the first time truly felt in my gut the raw cynicism of the Democratic Party’s governing caste. I felt, vividly, why a sane person might prefer to vote for Trump over an asshole who insists we’re better off trusting them than our lyin’ eyes.
Biden’s closest associates who urged him to run for a second term gave zero thought to the well-being of the country. If you think that I am entitled to feel angry about that, then you will be pleased to read the rest of Toro’s essay. If you don’t think that my anger is justified, then. . .thank you for not unsubscribing.
A courtier is someone who is dedicated to living close to the king. You are thrilled to be part of the king’s court. You engage in intrigue to try to elbow others out of the way so that you can become closer than they are to the king. You devote yourself to flattering the king, anticipating what the king wants, and doing his bidding. For you, being part of court makes you feel alive, and to lose your position would feel worse than death.
The President of the United States and those who serve him can resemble a king and his court. This is particularly true for the most charismatic Presidents.
For example, President John Kennedy attracted aides with a courtier mindset. Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara behaved very much like courtiers, at least if David Halberstam’s description in The Best and the Brightest is reliable. But in Halberstam’s telling, Kennedy was somewhat put off by sycophancy. Instead, he preferred his brother, who would tell the President what Bobby thought Jack needed to hear, not what he guessed would advance his standing at court. Bobby was secure in his position in a way that the fawning courtiers were not.
As Halberstam narrates the story, when Lyndon Johnson took over as President, he was not as good at seeing through the courtiers. The dynamics among Johnson, Rusk, and McNamara were such that the painful escalation of the Vietnam War proceeded without examining key assumptions.
One moral of the story is that a President can be ill-served by officials playing the courtier game. He is better off setting a tone in which aides are focused on getting to the best decisions, not on obtaining a seat closer to the king.
When I think of the people around President Biden who months ago encouraged him to run for a second term, I think of them as playing the courtier game. Had he not chosen to run, they would have lost their place in court. And that was all that they cared about. The damage that he could do to the safety and well-being of the citizens of the United States meant nothing to them. Even now, it means nothing to Jill Biden.
Another individual who must have known of President Biden’s infirmities and who could have influenced his decision to run for a second term is Barack Obama. But with the safety and well-being of the citizens of the United States at stake, Mr. Obama chose not to get involved.
In fact, I suspect that during his own Presidency Mr. Obama encouraged those around him to play the courtier game. He had Kennedy-like charisma, attracting people who were thrilled to be in his presence. He is an extreme narcissist, which I infer from the way that his speeches were filled with first-person pronouns.
I conjecture that the Biden Administration selected for courtier players. Partly this is the nature of the Presidency. But partly it is the fact that so many of his people came from the Obama Administration, with its especially heavy courtier atmosphere.
Journalists can get caught up in the courtier mindset. This was true during the Kennedy Administration, and also during the Obama Administration and the Biden Administration. Journalists do a better job when they maintain a more adversarial stance toward public officials.
In the New York Post, Steven Nelson writes,
President Biden’s inner circle has gotten smaller following his disastrous debate last week — with his wife’s top aide Anthony Bernal emerging as one of the 81-year-old’s key advisers alongside longtime confidante Mike Donilon, four sources close to or inside the White House tell The Post.
Bernal, 51, is a divisive figure …and his influence was likened by three sources to that held by the mystic Grigori Rasputin over the family and court of Nicholas II, the last czar of Russia.
Pointer from Steve Sailer. Rasputin is the most notorious courtier in history.
Of course, one move to play in the courtier game is to plant a story that one of your rivals is comparable to Rasputin. So we cannot be certain that Mr. Bernal really deserves the accusation in the article. But in any case the story reinforces my suspicion that the Biden White House hosts a very active courtier game.
In the modern Presidency, the courtier game is probably an occupational hazard. I wish that there were a way to avoid it. The COO/CA model that I have proposed might help.
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Courtiers we will always have with us. Biden's were just incompetent and he needed smarter ones. There is a long history of people closest to power successfully hiding the infirmities of the figurehead from the public. That was their main job and they failed badly, and there are a number of distressing implications to that fact.
Several commentators on the right who anticipated a bad performance like this were already coming up with quite clever and plausible ideas on the ways those close courtiers could successfully spin the decision to not have any debates at all.
For example, they could have said something like, "The President refuses to sully the dignity of his office and lower himself to the level of a treasonous insurrectionist by allowing a convicted felon with no sense of decency and with a long track record of total disrespect for our institutions to harm our democracy and create a divisive spectacle solely for his own corrupt purposes. Instead, President Biden is happy to embrace an alternative way to share his ideas for the nation's future and how he plans to continue Building Back Better by giving in-depth interviews to this country's most trusted news anchors."
Thus, no debates, a lot of heavily edited interviews, and a whole left-media ecosystem which would have repeated these lines over and over as if no reasonable person could possibly disagree with the validity of this 'explanation' and that, yes, while it was historically extraordinary to not have Presidential debates in the run-up to an election, Trump is so extraordinarily bad, that extreme times force good people into extreme positions. Biden wanted to have good, fair debates, he really did, after all, beating Trump would be a cake walk. But alas he was compelled by public spirit to refrain from doing them just this one time, because Trump just can't be trusted to behave himself in the manner befitting a candidate for our nation's highest office.
The anti-Biden commentators who wrote this script for the Biden people to follow all but confessed to the fact that it would probably have worked like a charm. And yet, the courtiers didn't do it! Instead, they thought it would be clever to bluff and insist on debate rules so lopsided in favor of Biden that they could position the Trump campaign into rejecting them as 'unfair' thus both being able to avoid debates while also being able to say, "See, WE wanted to have a debate, and it's TRUMP that refuses to!"
Then Trump called the bluff, and they had painted themselves into a corner and could no longer back out.
> Journalists do a better job when they maintain a more adversarial stance toward public officials.
This has become an underestimated reason for voting Republican. Since ~2008, whenever the Democrats have held power, the press has gone from providing some oversight to acting as a de-facto arm of the party.
If you believe oversight of government is important, the only way to get it is to vote Republican. Then you may get too much of it, but too much is better than none at all.