Let us commit a bit of sociology by proposing a typology, which means a systematic set of ways in which something can be accomplished. Here are the ways in which a subordinate can support their superior: the subordinate can agree or disagree or disregard or amplify the views expressed by his or her superior. All four of these options apply to one or another of the people who work for Trump, and so we can explore the dynamics of subordination as well as why Trump seems so difficult a person to work for.
A subordinate can agree with a superior. That is the case with President Trump’s Press Secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, who repeats rather than elaborates on the statements he has made in the course of the day, following the belief that Trump is his own best communicator and so his words do not need any adjustment, just rephrasing, if that. The same can be said of Chad Wolf, the acting Secretary of Homeland Security. who reaffirms that he does not need the approval of governors or mayors in order to send his own people to protect federal buildings, sidestepping the question of whether it wouldn’t be wise to consult with them. Then there are those like Dr. Fauci who disagree with the President. Fauci announces his contrary positions while the President is standing behind him, just not bothering to note that what he just said was contrary to what the President had said a few minutes before on the same platform. That earns Dr. Fauci a non-invitation to future press conferences and Trump and his aides to question Fauci’s judgment, though not to the point of firing him because Fauci is so well regarded that to fire him would be very politically troublesome, just as it would have been for George W. Bush to fire Colin Powell as his Secretary of State for his contrary views though Powell kept those to himself and supported the President in public. Fauci therefore is able to show up on cable news to say that there are no studies that say hydroxychloroquine works and doesn’t refer to the fact that the day before Trump had endorsed it as a remedy for Covid-19. Fauci talks about the need for masks but does not venture into the political arena, which is the discussion of whether the use of masks should be mandated.
A third possibility is to simply disregard what the President says and push ahead with one’s own professional opinion, which is what Robert Redfield of the CDC does, though he is caught in the trap of tacitly accepting and trying to make excuses for or act as a cheerleader for the President’s position, as when he explains why it would be so efficient to move coronavirus reporting to the HHS rather than keep it where it was in the CDC, which is what most experts would prefer, and that leads him just a little bit down the dark road that Michael Cohen says occurs to all those who try to work around Trump: they become tainted by trying to manage to be truthful but cut corners on the truth so as to do Trump’s bidding and remain on his good side.
A fourth possibility is to amplify the President’s position in a way that does credit to it. That is what Secretary of State Pompeo does when he simply carries out a foreign policy as he sees fit while within the general guidelines provided by the president so as not to offend him about matters the President might take seriously. So Pompeo is the one who gets blamed by the North Koreans for trying to lock down some terms that would make the North Korean agreement to eventually get rid of its nuclear weapons meaningful rather than just an empty verbal agreement between Trump and Kim Jong-un. There is a long tradition of Secretaries of State behaving in that way. Kissinger bought Nixon’s plan to leave Vietnam gradually but would have preferred to do it with less bombing. Schultz bought into Reagan’s idea to end mutual assured deterrence with some kind of peace treaty but all the negotiations over that were done by Schultz and his Soviet counterparts rather than between Reagan and Gorbechev, even if the two principles did meet and try to work things out by themselves. Schultz was there the next morning to get things back on track.
Georg Simmel, the turn into the Twentieth Century sociologist, provides a keen and very general perspective whereby to analyze the dynamics of the Trump Administration. He distinguishes between subordination under an individual, which means an individual leader, from subordination under a group, which means being a participant in a community, and subordination under a principle, or what we would call an ideology, such as socialism or fascism. His point about subordination under an individual is that people are not dependant on the caste or other group from which they came in order to have their power but, rather, are entirely dependant upon the leader who gives them power and so are equal in that they are all subject to his whims as well as his policies. So all those in appointive office to the President and even those who are the long term heads of agencies, are beholden to remain in his favor for he can either get rid of them or curtail their independent power. FDR was notorious for simply creating a new bureaucracy with a new person in charge when he was displeased with what a previously established agency had failed to accomplish.
What the dependence of each of the officials under a leader also means is that they will be jealous of one another, sort of like the harem wives Simmel mentions who want preference of their own children over the children of the other wives in the harem. So each of Trump’s underlings vie with one another for his favor and to get a moment in his limelight, and so they go to all different extents so as to make themselves shine, whether that is by flattering him or expanding on his policies. Wary of just this issue, leaders in most administrations work to diminish the infighting among their aides, careful to treat all of them as loyal and restricted to their own portfolio even if some aides are indeed given far more authority than some others. Joe Biden was given a very large portfolio by Obama but he did not talk about that very much while serving as Vice President, all of the horses in the team pulling together in the same direction however much they may have quarreled in private or made their case to the chief.
Another possibility that Simmel covers is that the subordinates can unite together and so pool their power and influence in a united front so as to confront a leader who seems to be getting out of hand. It seems that has happened recently when both Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader in the House and Mitch McConnell, the majority leader in the Senate, immediately denounced Trump's suggestion that election day be delayed until people could vote “safely”. That united front has not been prominent in this Administration when one might have assumed that the Republican congressional leadership, stuck with a President that they didn’t want, would have consolidated into a leadership to challenge rather than to go along as much as it could with Trump, more concerned with the future of the party than any short term gains they could make by getting the tax legislation they wanted onto his desk for signature, and getting the Federal judges and Supreme Court Justices they favored appointed. The congressional leadership could have negotiated with the President rather than followed his lead on any number of topics, just as happened in the George H. W. Bush Administration, when they got the President to leave domestic policy to them in exchange for giving him a free hand with foreign policy. But the current Senate chose not to do so, hoping to ride out Trump’s two terms getting spoils and not having to deal with anything seriously and not risk the ire represented in his tweets, those so easily turned against his enemies. But they had not reckoned with there being a real crisis that would require real leadership, and there not having been one for some ten years now in foreign policy, they thought that the prudent policy. They had not expected a hundred year pandemic to get in the way of that plan.
The main problem with Trump leadership is that he is mercurial. Yes, he is consistently against doing anything about immigration other than creating a border wall and having Mexico take in the people who would like to apply for asylum at the American border. He is consistent in his fealty to Republican plans for judges and tax breaks and his fealty to Vladimir Putin. But he changes his mind on most other things. He is hot and cold on both North Korea and China. He wants to delay the election or he wants to send federal troops into a lot of cities. These positions have the half life of a tweet in that they are not really positions at all but the expression of whatever crosses his mind at the moment. And so followers are left not knowing where to jump or what to disregard and so put in the position of the advisers I referred to earlier: whether to stand your own ground or at least a little bit mollify the President’s latest expressed sentiment, knowing it will pass away.
It should be remembered that most leaders do not act in this fashion. They stick to their positions until something grave makes them change their minds and then their followers have to rush to march in the new direction. Communists around the world sided with Stalin against Hitler until the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and then were a bit red faced until things switched back a little more than a year later when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. George H. W. Bush was in favor of no new taxes until he changed his mind and there was a burst of Republican opposition to the idea of coming up with a bi-partisan tax plan. Leaders are therefore wary of changing course lest their followers not follow. Trump reverses that, expecting his followers to follow wherever he leads, and they have not figured out a way to deal with this profound violation of the nature of leadership, and I am not at all surprised that so many of them sound weary of him although not willing, at the moment, to say so forthrightly.