His resignation is a warning to all Republicans.
Like a lot of guys, I’ve watched “The Shawshank Redemption” more times than I can count. Which is why, when I heard the news that Gary Cohn had resigned as Donald Trump’s top economic adviser, I thought of Red’s (Morgan Freeman’s) somber line: “Every man has his breaking point.”
In the film, the remark is followed by the tale of how Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) busts out of Shawshank Prison. Dufresne, a former banker with a gift for numbers and a taste for risky trades, tunnels through a concrete wall and then crawls through a 500-yard sewer pipe to freedom, riches and a beach in Mexico.
Then he tells the press everything he knows about Samuel Norton, the evil prison warden, and his corrupt minions. Justice is richly served.
That could yet be Cohn’s story, too.
O. K., I’m getting carried away. Dufresne is a Christ-like figure, innocent of crime but wise to the world, who suffers grievously and gives greatly. Cohn is a Goldman Democrat who went into the White House with his eyes wide open, seemed to enjoy treating Steve Mnuchin as a finger puppet, and chose not to resign over Donald Trump’s shameful Charlottesville equivocation. Whether he quit out of horror of the president’s protectionist turn, or merely out of the pique of losing a policy argument, is an open question.
Whatever the case, Cohn couldn’t take it. His departure demolishes three theories, cherished by administration apologists, as to why the Trump presidency will be a success (or at the least not a disaster) despite the temperament of the man at the top.
Theory No. 1: The grown-ups are in charge .
Except they aren’t. In the trade debate, Cohn lost out to the third-tier White House official Peter Navarro, who likes to hang around the West Wing in hopes of sneaking in to see the president. On immigration, 32-year old Michele Bachmann acolyte Stephen Miller runs the show. H. R. McMaster, the national security adviser, is widely reported to be seeking an exit. His deputy Dina Powell already made her escape. Reince Priebus was once supposed to be a White House grown-up, and look at what happened to him. His successor, John Kelly, was supposed to quell the disorder, but has just as frequently contributed to it.
In most administrations, senior officials strive to stay in office a full term, or two years at the least. It’s supposed to be the honor of a lifetime.
But service in the Trump White House has been described as a form of divine punishment — and that’s according to the incumbent chief of staff. Cohn’s tenure as director of the National Economic Council, at 14 months, was the shortest in the office’s history. That fits with a pattern of staff turnover that, in its first year, set a modern presidential record.
After Cohn, how many grown-ups are going to volunteer for duty that guarantees routine humiliation by their boss and the permanent disdain of their peers?
Theory No. 2: Trump doesn’t believe his own crazy rhetoric.
Except when he does. Ignoramuses often think of themselves as men of ideas, and even opportunists can have their convictions. The trade deficit has been a fixation of Trump’s since at least the 1980s. Withdrawing the U. S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership was his first shot at it. Last week’s announcement of steel and aluminum tariffs were the second. Terminating Nafta will be his third.
What makes the tariff episode more alarming is that Trump announced the policy without any effort at a coherent policymaking process. It simply landed on Cohn much as news of a North Korean nuclear test might: radioactive and beyond his control. If Trump feels no compunction doing this to Cohn, what’s to stop him from behaving similarly with, say, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis?
Trump’s supporters often note that some of the other crazy things he threatened during the campaign, such as letting NATO collapse or cozying up to Vladimir Putin, didn’t come to pass. But the only reason Trump reaffirmed NATO’s Article V commitment was that McMaster all but forced it on him. As for Russia, Bob Mueller’s probe into potential collusion has made foreign policy cooperation untenable — but that only holds as long as the probe continues.
Theory N o . 3: Serious Republicans will contain Trump’s follies.
It’s nice to see Paul Ryan and Lindsey Graham contradict the president on tariffs. But they and other so-called principled Republicans will surely fold on this, just as they have folded on immigration, the border wall and Trump himself. That goes especially for a subject like trade, a subject easy to demagogue among the increasingly nativist G. O. P. base.
It was always a fantasy to think the weight of the Oval Office would discipline Trump as it has other presidents. It was equally a fantasy to imagine that establishment Republicans would mold Trump in their image, rather than the other way around. Now the party’s steady transformation into an American version of France’s National Front is probably unstoppable.
Republicans unhappy with that drift — paging Nebraska Sen. Ben. Sasse — should leave while they can with honor intact. Gary Cohn’s exit isn’t just another resignation. It’s also a final warning.
