The impeachment inquiry and the events that led to it tell many stories. One, obviously, is about the abuse of power. Another illuminates the foul mash of mendacity and paranoia at the core of Donald Trump.
But this week, as several longtime civil servants testify at the inquiry’s first public hearings, a third narrative demands notice because it explains the entire tragedy of the Trump administration: the larger scandals, the lesser disgraces and the current moment of reckoning.
That story is the collision of a president who has absolutely no regard for professionalism and those who try to embody it, the battle between an arrogant, unscrupulous yahoo and his humble, principled opposites.
Right now the opposites have the microphone.
I mean William Taylor, America’s top diplomat in Ukraine, who is, tellingly, the first impeachment witness to testify on live television. Stephanie Grisham, the White House’s peerlessly nasty press secretary, has sought to discredit Taylor’s account of the pressure on Ukraine’s new president by saying that he belonged to a cabal of “radical unelected bureaucrats.”
Hardly. He’s a West Point graduate and Vietnam veteran with a half-century career that’s devoid of obvious partisanship and entirely about the public good. He took the Ukraine post despite profound qualms because he felt he owed his country his expertise. He’s a creature of duty and discipline and earnestly accrued knowledge — all precious commodities that are worthless in Trump’s eyes. In other words, he’s a true professional, and it was as such that he recoiled from what Trump, Rudy Giuliani and the wretched rest of them were up to.
Marie Yovanovitch, the former ambassador to Ukraine, has a diplomatic résumé that’s three decades long and includes three ambassadorships, an unusual feat. The fault that Giuliani and Trump found in her was her respect for correct procedure, her resistance to corrupt politics and her reluctance to tweet out dopey praise for the president. They quibbled with her professionalism, which had no place in their schemes.
Trump’s disregard — no, contempt — for professionalism is in some ways an anagram of his aversion to norms, to tradition, to simple courtesy. Or at least these attitudes exist as a Venn diagram with enormous overlap. They’re hostile to any set of values that places personal glory below other ideals.
But Trump’s war on professionalism and professionals is also its own distinct theme in his business career, which is rife with cheating, and his political life, which is greased with lies.
Go back to his initial staffing of senior posts and recall how shoddy the vetting process was. Also notice two prominent classes of recruits: people who had profoundly questionable preparation for the jobs that he nonetheless gave them (Ben Carson, Betsy DeVos, Stephen Miller, Javanka) and genuine professionals who wagered that their skills would be critically necessary — and thus highly valued — and that Trump would surely rise to the established codes and expected conduct of his office.
Now look at how many of those professionals (James Mattis, H.R. McMaster, Gary Cohn, Dan Coats) are gone. And tell me whether Trump has ever had the epiphany that the presidency is, in fact, a profession.
A crisis of professionalism defines his administration, in which backstabbing is the new glad-handing, firings are cruel, exits are ugly, the turnover is jaw-dropping, the number of unfilled positions is mind-boggling, and many officials have titles that are prefaced with “acting” — a modifier with multiple meanings in this case.
Trump slyly markets his anti-professionalism as anti-elitism and a rejection of staid, cautious thinking. But it’s really his way of excusing his ignorance, costuming his incompetence and greenlighting his hooliganism.
He rejects professionalism because it tempers self-promotion and forbids such grandiose claims as his insistence that he knows more about the Islamic State than any military general. “I alone can fix it,” he boasted at the Republican convention in 2016. “I’m the only one that matters,” he said the following year when dismissing any concerns about job vacancies. A true professional would have trouble uttering those words. They roll easily off a true huckster’s tongue.
Professionalism involves credentials, benchmarks, all sorts of yardsticks by which a person can be judged, sometimes unkindly. Trump wants only affirmation. And professionalism is a reality-based enterprise. Trump prefers fiction: The Ukraine call was “perfect.” “Read the transcript” because it exonerates him. His critics are partisan hacks. He’s the target of an interminable “witch hunt.”
But Robert Mueller was no more hunting witches than Bill Taylor is an agent of the deep state. In fact Mueller stands out as a consummate professional, so much so that he politically neutered himself, and “deep state” is Trump’s deeply cynical pejorative for “seasoned professionals.”
It’s the professionals who keep pushing back at him, whether at the Federal Reserve; the Birmingham, Alabama, office of the National Weather Service; or the State Department, which is where Taylor, Yovanovitch and this week’s other impeachment witness, George Kent, worked.
Michael McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, wrote about Taylor and Yovanovitch recently in an essay for The New York Review of Books titled “The Deeply Dedicated State,” observing: “Both always have struck me as first-rate government servants, singularly focused on advancing American national interests. Both have served Republican and Democratic presidents, and even after decades of interacting with them both, I could not guess how either of them votes.”
He characterized them as “accidental heroes” who aren’t “likely to seek the limelight.” “They are extremely well trained, competent, and highly regarded professionals,” he summarized.
That’s why they bucked Trump. And that’s why he can’t bear them.
