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His favorite technique was to keep grants of authority incomplete, jurisdictions uncertain, charters overlapping. The result of this competitive theory of administration was often confusion and exasperation on the operating level.

You could be forgiven for assuming this comment referred to Donald Trump, the 45th occupant of the Oval Office. But you would be wrong. It was rendered by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. about none other than Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the 32nd president of the United States.

I am not suggesting that Donald Trump ought to be mentioned in the same breath as someone who rightfully appears on every short list of the greatest presidents in American history. But the two share a penchant for a decision-making and governing style that can best be described as adhocracy, which favors the unstructured and at times downright chaotic.

Adhocracy offers a sharp contrast to more formal styles of decision-making, in which participants with a legitimate stake in the outcome are included and others excluded; options are rigorously weighed in memos and then discussed at carefully run meetings; and those meetings in turn lead to decisions followed by clear assignments, closely monitored execution, and periodic review. Ideally, assumptions are challenged and resource considerations taken into account.

Certain individuals are attracted to adhocracy since it tends to underscore the unique position and authority of the president. It puts him in a dominant position where he can reward some and penalize others and play staff off against one another. Secrets can be protected as access to meetings and information can be arbitrarily restricted. But these and other sometimes-attributes are mostly beside the pointadhocracy is generally not consciously chosen because of its relative advantages, but rather emerges as a default position that reflects the proclivities of the president and those around him.

In reality, the dangers of adhocracy are many. The consequences of choosing a particular option are often not fully assessed in advance. Priorities are neither set nor maintainedtrade-offs are often overlooked. Implementation tends to get short shrift. Turf wars tend to be common. Issues get revisited, not for good reason, but because a particular advocate is unhappy with what was decided and persuades the president that the decision needs to be overturned. Such behavior can quickly lead to a torrent of leaks. It all demands a great deal of the president, who effectively acts as his own chief of staff.

The Trump administration has been characterized by adhocracy during its initial months. The initiative limiting immigration is a case in point. The new policy was not vetted fully within the administrationindeed, then-Acting Attorney General Sally Yates first read the decision after the text of the new executive order was published online. Efforts by administration officials to argue that the policy was not aimed at Muslims were undermined by statements from the president suggesting the contrary. It comes as little surprise then that various courts have ruled against it and that many analysts have judged the new policy could diminish security by alienating and radicalizing some of the more than 3 million Muslims already living in this country.

The presidents address to the leaders of Americas NATO allies in Brussels in May offers another example of adhocracy. At the core of the alliance is the notion of collective defense (expressed in Article 5 of the Treaty that created NATO)that an attack on one is an attack on all. President Trump had raised questions in public about his willingness to stand by the commitment. The expectation in Europe was that he would reaffirm Article 5 in his speechindeed, the draft approved by the National Security Council and several members of the Cabinet did just this. But at the last moment several advisers reportedly intervened with the president and persuaded him to take out any reference to Article 5. An address that was intended to strengthen NATO did just the opposite. To be sure, the president declared his fealty to Article 5 on his next trip to Europe, but even this welcome clarification (which came during his Poland speech) could not undo the uncertainty the earlier incident had fostered.

A third example of adhocracy at work involves the Middle East, where the president signaled to his Saudi hosts when he visited in May that he had signed on to their policy of sanctioning and isolating Qatar. The problem was that the president appeared unaware of Qatars military importance to the United States (a base there is home to more than 11,000 American forces and much military hardware) and that neither his secretary of state or secretary of defense was on board with the policy.

The irony and tragedy is that an administration such as this, one that entered office having little experience with or knowledge of foreign policy and governing, is precisely the wrong kind to have chosen such an approach. It would have made far more sense to have chosen a highly organized decision-making system akin to that of George H.W. Bush.

Adding to the problem is this presidents penchant for tweeting, best understood as issuing modern-day White House statements that, for the most part, are not vetted by others, much less subjected to formal interagency review as actual statements or speeches would be. At least as consequential are the lack of senior appointments in both the State and Defense Departments, something that robs the president and his senior team of professional expertise and historical memory; the barely controlled access to the Oval Office; and the unclear and overlapping roles of powerful advisers (including Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon) whose influence is based on their relationship with the president rather than their organizational position.

What is obvious is that Donald Trump is comfortable with an approach to running his presidency based on what worked for him in the private sector. But there are few if any parallels between his former life and his current one. The political world is defined by relationships rather than transactions, and by numerous actors at home and abroad with independent power. Navigating such a world is difficult and precarious. Process and procedure offer protectionsomething George W. Bush learned the hard way when he launched the war with Iraq without having thought through many of the predictable consequences.

That said, no amount of formal process can guarantee that bad decisions will be avoided. The Trump administration apparently decided to pull out of the Paris accord after considerable discussion. President Obama unwisely removed U.S. troops from Iraq and intervened in Libya after multiple National Security Council meetings. And there is the reality that process can become an excuse for inaction, something demonstrated more than once by the Obama administration in Syria.

Still, by embracing adhocracy, the incumbent president has opted for a style of governing that reinforces his weaknesses and increases the chances of major blunders. What, then, should he do? For starters, the National Security Adviser needs to be empowered. There can only be one decision-making system. The president should reduce the number of senior White House staff with broad portfoliosor, if he is determined to keep them, they should be subordinated to Cabinet members or appointed to positions with defined rather than general, advisory responsibilities. Treating tweets as formal statements to be vetted would help, as would filling out senior levels of the administration. Whether Donald Trump will agree to any much less all of this is doubtful, as presidents gravitate toward the system they want, not the one they need.

Could Trump succeed if he refuses to change? As noted, FDR embraced adhocracy and succeeded. Still, he paid a price for it. He made his share of unforced errors, from a failed attempt to pack the Supreme Court to interning Japanese Americans. At the same time, he steered the nation through the Great Depression, the rise of fascism, and World War II. But FDRs success only underscores just how extraordinary he was. He was also experienced, having been assistant secretary of the Navy and governor of New York. Donald Trump, lacking FDRs gifts and experience alike, is unlikely to fare nearly so well.

The rest is here:
Donald Trump and the Danger of 'Adhocracy' - The Atlantic

Coal has been good to Donald Trump. He began denouncing Obamas war on coal long before he launched his run for President, apparently liked how it played, and has not stopped banging the drum since. Last month, when he announced the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris climate accord, he dwelled on the hardships that the agreement would allegedly impose on the American coal industry, adding, and I happen to love the coal miners. (The White House went a step further last week, suggesting that the United Nations Green Climate Fund be used to build power plants fired by clean coal.) The Washington Post reported recently that candidate Trump made two hundred and ninety-four references to coal miners during his campaign. He never appeared to know anything about the coal industry, as he promised to bring back jobs that every miner knows are not coming back, but his shtick drove Democrats and environmentalists crazy, which seemed to be good enough for him. It also helped to tip Pennsylvania and Ohio into his column on Election Day.

The symbolic appeal is obvious. Coal miners are hardworking, courageous, the salt of the American earth. Their heyday was the industrial age, the time before political correctness, which Trump has vowed to re-conjure. Thanks to a powerful union, built through brutal struggle (the history of American mining contains more than its share of massacres), the wages of modern miners are excellent. Strong communities could be built around them. The work is dangerous, its health consequences often disastrous. But the more general disaster came when the jobs began to vanish. Mining employment peaked at more than eight hundred thousand, in 1923. There were still a quarter of a million jobs in the early nineteen-eighties. Today, as Eliza Griswold recently wrote , there are fifty thousand. Its easy, but inaccurate, to blame the Obama Administrations Clean Power Plan or its efforts to mitigate environmental damage for the inexorable decline of the coal industry. The main culprits are automation, cheap natural gas, and, to a lesser extent, the development of renewable energy. Coal simply cannot compete, and coal-fired power plants have been closing by the hundreds.

Inaccuracy has never stopped President Trump, of course, who has instructed the Environmental Protection Agency (which needs a new name) to gut the Clean Power Plan. He has signed executive orders lifting a temporary ban on federal coal leases and removing a rule protecting streams near coal mines, and last month he took credit for the opening of a new coal mine in Pennsylvania that he and his Administration had nothing to do with. The mine, southeast of Pittsburgh, had been planned for years, and construction began last September (during a different Presidency), in response to a global shortage of what is known as metallurgical coal. This is the coal thats used to make steel. Production delays in Australia and China have created a demand spike, and the Pennsylvania mine, called Acosta, was developed to fill that demand. The Acosta mine will create up to a hundred much-needed jobs. But, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, exports of metallurgical coal , which accounts for only ten per cent of U.S. productionelectricity is generated by thermal coalare not expected to rise over the long term.

Nonetheless, Scott Pruitt, the E.P.A. administrator, has been so eager to get into the coal-promotion act that he claimed, on Meet the Press, that the Trump Administration had created fifty thousand new jobs in the coal sector. In fact, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the increase in the number of coal jobs since the end of last year is thirteen hundred. That rise is probably due to the increased demand for metallurgical coal. Indeed, during the last months of the Obama Administration, coal jobs had been rising at a slightly faster rate, probably for the same reason. The federal government does not create coal jobs.

One of the many funny-painful moments of the 2016 campaign came during a Trump rally last May in Charleston, West Virginia. Trump was presented with a white miners hardhat, which he reluctantly put on. Then he began to mug, very strangely, with pursed lips and thumbs raised, seemingly playing a pouting club character of some type. He pantomimed a couple of swipes with a shovelthat thing that miners presumably do. Afterward, he fussed for a long time with his hair, asking the crowd for reassurance that it looked okay after the hat interlude. The crowd cheered.

Trumps romance with coal country may be reaching its natural end. Since 1965, a federal program called the Appalachian Regional Commission has spent twenty-three billion dollars helping hundreds of counties in thirteen states cope with the decline of the coal industry, funding job retraining, land reclamation, and desperately needed social services. A.R.C. is credited with having helped to cut regional poverty rates almost in half, double the percentage of high-school graduates, and reduce infant mortality by two-thirds. Trumps first proposed budget, released in March, eliminates A.R.C. Even Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader (and the senior senator from Kentucky), quickly said that that was out of the question. Trump did not, as far as we know, respond. A more recent, more detailed White House federal budget again eliminates A.R.C. It was sweet while it lasted.

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Is Donald Trump Already Forsaking Coal Country? - The New Yorker

Green reminds us that it wasnt long ago that both men were looked at as political jokes, and not even bad ones. When Ivanka Trump told Rupert Murdoch over lunch that her father intended to run for president, the media baron replied, without even looking up from his soup: Hes not running for president.

As for Bannon, when Green first met him in 2011 he came across as a political grifter seeking to profit from the latest trend. Later, as Bannon took the reins of the Trump campaign, he was seen by Beltway Republicans as an Internet-era update of the Slim Pickens character in Dr. Strangelove who rides the bomb like a rodeo bull, whoopin and hollerin all the way to nuclear annihilation.

But whatever the pair lacked in conventional political experience, they made up for with other gifts. Both understood showmanship: slogans, narrative, put-downs and especially conflict. They knew the value of rage and outrage alike the first as fuel for a movement; the second as the indispensable foil for that movement.

They also grasped that much that was supposed to matter in politics no longer did detailed policy papers, for instance, or personal decorum. Trump, Green writes, figured out that the norms forbidding such behavior were not inviolable rules that carried a harsh penalty but rather sentiments of a nobler, bygone era, gossamer-thin and needlessly adhered to by politicians who lacked his willingness to defy them.

Thats why Trumps birtherism the support he gave to the lie that Barack Obama was born abroad never disqualified his candidacy, even as it helped him forge a powerful connection with party activists. Its a tactic he would repeat straight through the end of the campaign, when he took to denouncing international banks in terms that shaded into anti-Semitism.

Darkness is good, was Bannons advice for dealing with criticism from groups such as the Anti-Defamation League. Dont let up. At another moment, when the campaign feared House Speaker Paul Ryan would try to steal the G.O.P. nomination from Trump, Bannon threatened to rally Breitbarts army. Pepes gonna stomp their ass, he said Pepe the Frog being the alt-rights white-supremacist cartoon mascot on Twitter.

Green is consistently interesting on the subject of Trump. But the real value of Devils Bargain is the story it tells about Bannon, some of which has been previously reported (not least by Green himself) but never so well synthesized or explained as it is here. The product of a working-class family and a Catholic military high school in Richmond, Va., he was taught from an early age that the defining moment in Western civilization occurred in 1492 not with Columbuss discovery of the New World, mind, but with Ferdinand and Isabellas Reconquista from the Moors of the Iberian Peninsula.

The lesson was, heres where Muslims could have taken over the world, recalled one of Bannons classmates. And here was the great stand where they were stopped.

If that was an early hint of Bannons political vision (and now a staple of Trumps foreign policy speeches), other lessons suggested the means he would employ to achieve that vision. On Wall Street in the mid-1980s, he came to admire Michael Milken, the so-called junk bond king, who showed how a band of outsiders could set about laying siege to a comfortable, fattened and vulnerable establishment.

Later, while running an Internet business in Hong Kong, Bannon discovered the underworld of online gamers; intense young men who disappeared for days or even weeks at a time in alternate realities. One of those alternate realities was World of Warcraft, in which millions of people were digitally transformed into secret soldiers waging titanic battles in unseen worlds against mythical enemies.

Bannon seemed to intuit that this digital world could be recreated for his political purposes, by designing an apocalyptic narrative of righteous warriors waging an end-of-days battle by all necessary means against assorted enemies: jihadists, progressives, Acela-corridor Republicans, the Clintons. Republican political operatives had spent the Obama years wondering about the missing white voters who had failed to show up for John McCain and Mitt Romney. Turns out, they (or others like them) were online, and Bannon whose own fantasies were suggested by a portrait he had of himself in his office, dressed as Napoleon was proposing to supply this army with the necessary ammunition.

Much of it would come from the bile factory at Breitbart News. Another part would be supplied by the Government Accountability Institute, a Tallahassee, Fla.-based nonprofit that mined the deep Web and dug up the dirt on the Clinton Foundation for Peter Schweizers 2015 blockbuster Clinton Cash. There was also a data-analytics firm, Cambridge Analytica, an offshoot of a British company that advised foreign governments and militaries on influencing elections and public opinion using the tools of psychological warfare.

What all of this added up to was a kind of alt-G.O.P. agile and indifferent to norms and boundaries that could supply the Trump campaign with everything it needed to win. Bannon has described himself as a Leninist for wanting to destroy the state. Whether he will achieve that is doubtful, but he seems to share Lenins genius for building a secret party with radical designs, ready to pounce at the historically opportune time.

Now it has succeeded. To what end? As an electoral gambit, the honey badger approach was a good bet: Trump is president not in spite of the wretched things he said about Mexicans, women, John McCain, Megyn Kelly and so on, but because he said them. He sold his shamelessness as fearlessness and his charlatanism as charisma, and people believed. Lord save us when Democrats alight on a similar candidate.

As a governing principle, however, honeybadgerism has been less of a success. As an article in Mental Floss noted, honey badgers may be smart, resilient and incredibly tough, but theyre also lazy about housekeeping, mean and skunk-like, meaning they possess an anal gland that releases a suffocating smell when in distress.

Readers can draw their own parallels, but thats usually not a formula for political success. Bannon and his acolytes should beware: Sooner or later, theyll outstay their welcome.

Bret Stephens is an Op-Ed columnist for The Times.

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How Steve Bannon and Donald Trump Rode the Honey Badger Into the White House - New York Times

The event at the newly named Trump Village in a remote corner of India on Tuesday had all the hallmarks of a major unveiling: a ceremony, school kids singing inspirational songs and phalanx of national and international media in attendance.

There was only one problem: The Indian philanthropist who renamed the village in honor of America's president had no permission to do so and in fact officials asked his charity on multiple occasions to back off, warnings that were ignored.

We repeatedly asked them not to hold this event, but they did not listen," said Mani Ram Sharma, the deputy commissioner of the district where the farming village of about 600 is located. They did not ask for any permission, and none would have been given if they had.

The drama surrounding the renaming of tiny Marora began last month when Bindeshwar Pathak, the founder of water and sanitation charity Sulabh International, announced during a speech in Virginia that he wanted to change the name of a village, where he is building toilets, to honor Trump and improve bilateral relations between the United States and India.

The village elders happy to have the attention, and perhaps the development dollars that came with it gave their permission. Huge Trump Village billboards were erected with a grinning Trumps name and likeness. But Sharma quickly declared the rebranding illegal and ordered police to tear down the signs.

It was all fictitious and a fraud event by the organizers aimed at collecting money across the country and abroad, Sharma said in an earlier interview with the wire service IANS.

Nevertheless, Sulabh went ahead with a ceremony Tuesday to inaugurate a new vocational center and some toilets it had built for the villagers. Children waved (smaller) signs with Trumps photo and the words "Our Trump Village Will Be Clean!" and villagers sand songs praising the virtues of indoor toilet use. Nearly a third of Indians do not have access to proper sanitation.

We are trying for permission [for the name change] but we dont have it until now, said Monika Jain, a vice president of the charity. She said she expected it to be granted in the coming weeks.

Also attending the event was Puneet Ahluwalia, vice chairman of the Fairfax County Republican Committee and a member of Trump's Asian Pacific American Advisory Committee.

The Trump Organization did not respond to an email asking whether this use of the presidents name and likeness was appropriate.

Residents there know little about Trump or his policies but said they were happy to have their village named after him. Why not if it brings these facilities our way? said Mehboobi, one of the women who had received one of the freshly built commodes. Swati Gupta contributed to this report.

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A charity renamed an Indian village after Donald Trump. Then things got weird. - Washington Post

Former Vice President Al Goresays hes given up hope that President Donald Trumpwill act on key climate issues.

Gore recounted toLate Show hostStephen Colberthis optimism after his meeting with Trump to discuss climate change and the landmarkParis Accord. Trump hadpromised supporters during the campaign that he would pull out of the agreement, arguing it was a bad deal.

I went to Trump Tower after the election, said Gore, who was on the show to promote his new movie, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power. I thought that there was a chance he would come to his senses. But I was wrong.

Trump announced the United States withdrawalfrom the agreement last month, a decision widely met with criticism from business leaders, fellow politicians and longtimeU.S. allies. More than 350 mayorsin cities across the U.S. have since pledged to honor the Paris climate agreement.

Gore added he worried that Trumps decision to exit the agreement would be disastrous, but he was excited by the response of political leaders in the U.S.

A lot of our most important governors and mayors and business leaders said, Were still in the Paris Agreement, and were going to meet the commitments of the country regardless of what Donald Trump tweets.

Watch the whole clip in the video above.

This article has been updated with an updated figure for the number of mayors who have signed on to the Climate Mayors initiative.

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Al Gore: 'I Was Wrong' About Donald Trump - HuffPost