Why I am not a Fan of Donald Trump, 8/12
He does not surround himself with quality people
Q: Dr. Birx, you were officially hired as White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator on February 27, 2020. Who offered you the job?
A: My friend Matt [Pottinger], the deputy national security advisor (p. 32)
Pointer from Donald Boudreaux. In fact, if you read Lerman’s whole piece, you find that Dr. Birx was friends with Pottinger’s wife. And check out the Scott Atlas book, which I could not bear to finish because it was so depressing.
I cannot get too worked up about Fauci and Birx. They are who they are. The ultimate blame rests with the man who gave them their outsized roles in the pandemic. That man is Donald Trump.
The pandemic was barely underway when some of us sensed something wrong in the bureaucracy. I was not the only one, but please note that as early as March 19 of 2000, I wrote Fire the Peacetime Bureaucrats. President Trump never got around to doing that.
A leader can only be as good as his selection of personnel will allow. President Biden also suffers from not having quality people around him. I fear that we are going to get a 2024 election between two men whose egos far exceed their leadership abilities.
Note: I composed this post days before the FBI raid. How that turns out will affect my opinion of the FBI. It will not raise my opinion of Mr. Trump.
As of now, I expect that the next step is for the FBI to sift through all of the documents seized, find some that can be edited to portray Mr. Trump in a bad light, and then leak these “redacted” documents to the NYT and WaPo.
But maybe I am being too cynical. Perhaps the FBI will just turn the documents, unread, over to the National Archives, which would satisfy the purported purpose of the raid.
It seems to me that you don't like Trump because he was unable to be Trumpian enough. The theory of Trump was that he would come in like a bull in the china shop and beat the bureaucracy into line. The reality is Trump had much less actual power to do that than imagined and the bureaucracy had much more power to run things than most people thought.
I always think back to the American Civil War. Firing the peacetime generals wasn't easy. Lincoln had to go through McDowell, McClellan (who later ran against him for president), Burnside, Hooker, and Meade before effectively giving command to Grant.
There's no guarantee you can actually find wartime generals.
Does anyone think that Obama would've rammed through Warp Speed? Maybe, but remember the Obamacare website. And no chance Obama fires Fauci. It was Trump who brought Atlas to the WH in the first place. No way that Obama even listens to Atlas or even knows his name.