Oh, Now It’s Bad to Ask If the President Is Really in Charge

By Dan McLaughlin

Monday, April 12, 2021

 

Aaron Blake of the Washington Post is upset at John Cornyn. The Texas senator had the effrontery to tweet that the careful stage-managing to limit access to the visibly-slowed 78-year-old president raises a serious question: Is the oldest man ever to hold the office really in charge?

 

Blake finds it offensive and maybe racist (of course) that anyone is even talking about this:

 

Cornyn’s tweet builds upon a whisper campaign among conservatives that perhaps Biden isn’t actually engaged in doing his job. Some have even suggested Vice President Harris is actually in charge or will be soon — a suggestion that, at its worst, carries real dog-whistles given her status as the first woman and first Black person to hold that job. It’s a baseless and ugly bit of innuendo. There is no question that the White House — just as the Biden campaign did — has motives beyond good government for keeping a lower profile and keeping Biden on-script. He has for years made a habit of stepping in it with his public comments. And the stakes are significantly higher now that he’s the leader of the free world. But there is no legitimate reason to believe he’s not making all the kinds of decisions a president usually makes behind closed doors.

 

First of all, it’s not supposed to be the job of the Washington Post to run interference against Congress questioning the president. Second, since when is this an improper line of criticism? “He’s not really running the show” has been a staple of attacks on Republican presidents for my entire lifetime. Blake himself even throws some of that in here about Donald Trump: “Trump often seemed unaware of basic policies and key legislative initiatives, and repeatedly contradicted his own officials.”

 

Blake’s own Post colleague Paul Waldman, in 2018, published a column entitled “Is Donald Trump even in charge of this government?”

 

A year and a half into his presidency, one has to ask if we’d be better off if we all agreed to have Trump do some ribbon-cutting, hold rallies for his rabid supporters and leave the governing to people who have some clue what they’re doing. In fact, in some ways that’s already happening. NBC News has a good piece documenting the remarkable number of Trump administration officials who have publicly contradicted the president on matters related to Russia in the past couple of days . . . since Trump doesn’t care one way or other what the EPA does, the ideologues are left to do whatever they want. . . .The chances that Trump even knows that’s what the EPA is doing are somewhere between small and none. . . . We still have a system in which the president is supposed to be running the government. As time goes on, more and more people in this administration may decide that they can ignore what the president says or does and carry out whatever policy they think is best.

 

This was hardly an isolated example; similar themes could be found from the early days in 2017 (Timothy O’Brien at Bloomberg: “Who Runs Trump’s White House?”) to the very end in 2021 (David Graham at The Atlantic: “Is Trump Actually Still in Control?”). There were constant stories about, say, Trump not getting his way on his own Afghanistan policy within his own administration or not knowing what his subordinates were up to.

 

It wasn’t just Trump. Hardly anything was a more common attack on George W. Bush than the claim that Dick Cheney and/or Karl Rove were really running the show. As the Law and Politics blog observed in 2006, “the standard storyline is that Cheney runs this administration.” One of the most popular anti-Bush books, by Texas reporters James Moore and Wayne Slater, was Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential. Its popular thesis, summarized by one commentator:

 

The authors . . . describe how political consultant Karl Rove remade George W. Bush, got him elected, and now is essentially running the show from behind the curtain. Has an unelected consultant really assumed presidential powers?

 

Peter Preston in The Guardian, in mid-December 2000, before Bush was even sworn in, profiled “The man who is really running the USA”:

 

There can be no clearer demonstration where the power will lie these next four White House years: with the supposed first reserve a heart beat from the presidency, Dick Cheney. He will be a Vice-President unique in American history. He will call the shots of detail and decision.

 

No less a figure than Barack Obama cracked at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner in 2015: “A few weeks ago, Dick Cheney says he thinks I’m the worst president of his lifetime. Which is interesting because I think Dick Cheney is the worst president of my lifetime.” That summed up the liberal conventional wisdom of the day.

 

The Reagan years, too, were full of insinuations that the president was senile, checked out, letting other people run the show or run around unsupervised. From an op-ed in the New York Times in 2015 on “Parsing Ronald Reagan’s Words for Early Signs of Alzheimer’s”:

 

Even before Ronald Reagan became the oldest elected president, his mental state was a political issue. His adversaries often suggested his penchant for contradictory statements, forgetting names and seeming absent-mindedness could be linked to dementia. . . . In 1984, Mr. Reagan’s poor performance in his first presidential debate with Vice President Walter Mondale renewed questions about his mental capacity. A study published in 1988 suggested that Mr. Reagan had some cognitive impairment . . .

 

I do not recall any great indignation, outside of conservative media, at the persistent efforts by Democrats and their allies in the commentariat to suggest that Trump, Bush, and Reagan were either not really in charge or not really all there. No howls of “dog-whistle” were hurled at Obama. The only thing wrong with Cornyn’s criticism is that you’re not supposed to say these things about Democrats.