The Feather-Pillow Principle

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, November 29, 2024

 

I cannot quite congratulate my colleague Kevin Hassett on his new appointment as director of the White House National Economic Council, from which position he will be—or should be—among the most important shapers of the Trump administration’s economic policies. But I do wish him success in the role—assuming we agree about what constitutes success, and I am not sure we can assume that. 

 

I have three related thoughts.

 

First: I will try not to repeat this every time I write about a Trump nomination or appointment, but I do not believe there is an honorable way to serve in this administration. Trump attempted to stage a coup d’état in 2021 in order to illegitimately remain in power, and no serious patriotic person can associate with him at this point without being tainted by that fact. Even the gentle Amish have a tradition of shunning, and it is not as though Trump or those around him have repented of their crimes and sought reconciliation—they celebrate their crimes, revel in them, and endlessly justify them.

 

That being said, there is, of course, an argument that a Trump administration advised by capable and decent men and women—and Kevin Hassett is one such—will be more likely to do more good and less harm than a Trump administration where the only voices are those of grifters and fanatics such as Steve Bannon and Steve Bannon, respectively. I am not convinced that is actually true as a matter of fact, as Trump is not famous for taking advice on the big things: It is not as though he had to be persuaded by someone to try to carry out the attempted coup in 2021 or that the better angels of his advisers’ spirits, if they were anywhere to be found, succeeded in dissuading him. 

 

It is true that in some matters, including a considerable swath of policy issues that he neither understands nor cares about, Trump can be like Lord Derby, who, “like the feather pillow, bears the marks of the last person who has sat on him”—which is no small thing given the assortment of asses we are talking about. But Trump makes a big impression of his own on the feather pillows he encounters. 

 

The wise position may be found in some golden mean between two of my intellectual heroes: Milton Friedman, who defended his advice to Augusto Pinochet on the grounds that it was good advice and that Chile would have been better off if he had followed more of it, and F.A. Hayek, who once received a gently corrective letter from Margaret Thatcher about his excessive indulgence of the same dictator.

 

Second: I do wonder if Trump’s promises of economic radicalism breaking from Republican and old-school conservative approaches are very much helped by his naming to this top spot an American Enterprise Institute fellow and the former economics editor of National Review rather than, say, Sohrab Amari or Mike Lindell, whose pillows do not even have feathers in them. (They are stuffed with polyurethane foam.) For all his sneering at conservative intellectuals and institutions, Trump has relied on a number of National Review veterans for economic advice: Hassett served in the first administration, as did Larry Kudlow, another former economics editor at the magazine that led, for a moment, conservative opposition to Trump. 

 

In a similar way, I wonder whether Trump’s “drain the swamp” talk is at all diminished in the minds of his admirers by his nomination of a billionaire hedge-fund manager (Scott Bessent) as treasury secretary, the billionaire CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald (Howard Lutnick) as commerce secretary, and a registered lobbyist formerly on the payroll of at least one foreign government (Pam Bondi, registered henchwoman of the Qatari monarchy) as attorney general.

 

Third: Power tests character, as does mere proximity to power. The temptation to engage in policy-shop turd-polishing is very strong, and Hassett has in the past taken an implausibly rosy view of what he surely knows to be bad policies (particularly on trade) while developing a certain cultivated reticence regarding things he knows to be true, such as the role of immigration in supporting economic growth and dynamism. Kudlow also has at times practically sweated through the effort to put a happy face on economic positions he knows to be both daft and destructive. 

 

My hope is that Hassett will be able to shape the Trump administration more than the Trump administration shapes him. But I worry about the sobering example of J.D. Vance, who has allowed himself to be so awfully diminished by the pursuit of something of such modest value as the vice presidency.

 

Lord Derby is long gone, but the relationship between feather pillows and that by which they are shaped remains the same.