Response to When Not To Explain Anything

(See: Just Above Sunset: When Not To Explain Anything)

"Trump should give [Sarah Huckabee Sanders] new instructions. Don’t explain. That only makes things worse.”

But in fact, one of the faults of Sarah Sanders is she never explains anything.

In fact, think about it: Has she ever really fully answered a question? Responding to every other question with, “I think we’ve been very clear about that…” is just a way of not answering questions, just another way of saying “Go back through your notes; you’ll find that we’ve answered that question already.”

Maybe what we’ve got here in the White House is what someone in some movie once termed “a failure to communicate”. Every day, reporters show up to get information to relay to the public, get some administration abuse instead, giving the networks a few of Sarah Sanders's useless wisecracks to chew on until the next day. She doesn't seem to understand her own job.

General Kelly has the same problem. The effectiveness of his job depends on his looking like the impartial enforcer of order in the West Wing, which was destroyed that day when he appeared in the briefing room and gave his own opinion. The world didn’t need to know that he thinks the whole idea of the Gold Star Family was destroyed by a Pakistani family mourning their soldier son back at the Democratic Convention, or the idea of women no longer deserving of being treated with “honor” simply because his old world is falling apart. He shoulda just stood in bed that morning, to coin an old phrase.

I’m sort of surprised not to hear Trump bragging about him saving the government so much money by not filling all these positions in his administration. Trump's got the average poor-man’s conception that government would work better if it didn’t have all this bureaucracy getting in the way, not realizing that sometimes things work the way they’re supposed to work if you let the bureaucracy automatically do what it’s supposed to.

The problem with using so-called “common sense” is that that means you think you’re smarter than the “institutional memory” of the White House, which only exists if you hire people who know how the system works. Unfortunately, Trump seems to have gone out of his way to not hire people who had experience running a White House, and he is now paying the price.

For instance, this “interim security clearance” stuff.

It sounds an awful lot like the FBI told the White House Security Office at some point that Rob Porter will not qualify for a permanent clearance, and it was then decided Porter would just work indefinitely on the temporary clearance — at least until it became a problem, "at which point we’ll deal with it."

I wonder how many others in his White House are doing that? There seems to be nobody working there who knows what to do about that, which is a problem previous administrations didn’t have, maybe because they were not such know-it-alls who were reluctant to fill job openings.

But it’s no wonder Trump can’t find good help. It’s not hard to imagine someone might be afraid that they’d be looking for a job some time in the future, and would come just this close to getting it, but then, their prospective employer takes a closer look at the resume and would notice the guy had once worked in the Trump White House — and the next thing he’d know, he’d be back out on the street.

I suppose he could always leave the fact that he’d worked for Trump off his resume, but then he runs the risk of the Russians finding out, leaving him open to being blackmailed. It’s probably better to just lay low, at least until the good guys come back in power.