David Brooks:
Yes, I think edging there. I think the Supreme Court will rule pretty heavily against a lot of these Trump things. If Trump defies the court, then we’re in a crisis.
Now, I wouldn’t call it a crisis. I’d call it an institution of state failure. I have lived in Washington a long time. I have a lot of friends who serve in government in various locations, and some of them serve in national security, and they think about nuclear codes. Some of them serve fighting sex trafficking. Some of them try to boost democracy in Africa. Some of them do biomedical research.
And I can’t tell you how many conversations I have over the last three weeks of people who are traumatized, who describe a reign of terror in their agencies, but not only that, a reign of incompetence. If you’re around the nuclear codes, you take this stuff so seriously, and then you have got a bunch of 23-year-old kids from Harvard coming in there.
Nobody knows what information they have access to. Nobody knows what their background checks is. And so basically you see the sacred values of trying to be a good civil servant, you see that trampled. And you see that trampled.
And so, to me, what’s going on is not so much — it’s an institutional failure if you care about the future of government, you want a government that will get you food stamps and renew your passport, but mostly it’s a form of psychological intimidation that is sweeping through agency after agency and making a government that is semi-functional.
