Trumpists, of course, claim that Shallow Throat should simply reveal him or herself publicly. To do otherwise is "cowardly!" I am rather sick of the linguistic tic that anyone you don't like is a coward. If Shallow Throat wrote without anonymity, he/she would be fired. That would accomplish... what? That's not bravery. That's stupidity. You want to see cowardice? Look at the paperwork that got President Bone Spur out of Vietnam. That's cowardice.
So, what are the other options? Public resignation to make a statement? This is sort of the less stupid version of writing without anonymity. What would happen? To some degree, that would depend on who Shallow Throat is. If it's Pence... that'd be "yuge." It's not Pence, though. C'mon. You know it's not Pence. That hypocritical little fuckin' weasel would never either take the chance, nor care enough. He's right where he wants to be. The thing is, we've seen resignations in disgust. Does anyone remember when the Ambassador to Estonia resigned because Trump is a lying fuckwit? Nobody cared. OK, you say, we don't know how high up Shallow Throat is. What if it is someone higher than Ambassador to Estonia. Could it be someone high enough for people to pay more attention? How high would that have to be? Mattis? That might do it, but bluntly, the GOP would turn on Mattis in a femtosecond and the whole thing would become just another game of partisan bickering in the minds of most observers since... c'mon. You are reading a political scientist's blog. I typed, "Mattis," and you knew who I meant. Most people don't have a clue who that is, so why would it matter to them? They'll turn to cue-givers, and Republicans will have Republican cue-givers telling them to ignore it because some traitor isn't loyal to Dear Leader and there's a conspiracy and chemtrails and aliens and pizzagate, or something. Ah, Fox News. Mattis would be the worst case scenario for Trump, and that'd blow over in a weak, once Trump tweets some new white supremacist garbage, threatens to nuke Sri Lanka over something he heard Alex Jones say, or something like that. Whoever Shallow Throat is, a public resignation in disgust would accomplish nothing. Not even if it were Mattis. And I doubt it's Mattis. We are beyond a point in our politics when a MacArthur firing can matter, not that this would be really analogous beyond the president vs. general structure. Again, though, not Mattis.
What's left? Two options: trying to invoke the 25th Amendment, as the op-ed mentions, or just staying and trying to put out what fires he/she can in order to manage Trump's batshit craziness. Reference time: Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action. This is a classic in the social sciences. Whenever there is some collective good, which requires the input of many people, no one of whom is pivotal, and which benefits everyone once provided, getting anyone to contribute to the provision of that good is a "collective action problem." Invoking the 25th Amendment is a classic collective action problem. Most of the people in the White House know that Trump is coo-coo for cocoa puffs, too stupid to handle the duties of office, corrupt beyond the telling of it, and putting the nation in danger. It's hard to ignore, unless you are either an idiot yourself, or just such a hardcore partisan hack that your own sphincter chokes off blood-flow to your brain. The 25th Amendment absolutely should be invoked. Here's a nice piece from The Conversation about our very-stable-genius in chief. I have my usual warnings about psychology as a field, but... dude's crazy.
But let's say you are in the White House, and you recognize that. How many people have to go along with that in order to remove him under the 25th Amendment? In game theory, there is a critical concept: Nash equilibrium. That is when everyone is behaving optimally given everyone else's strategy. The problem, and specifically the collective action problem, is that too many people have to go along with invoking the 25 Amendment for it to happen. So, if I'm Shallow Throat, I don't start pushing for it because I look around, see that nobody else is, so my actions without others accomplish nothing. I just stick my head out, get it chopped off, and the Mad King keeps doing crazy shit because nobody else was sticking their heads out. There is an equilibrium at which nobody pushes the 25th Amendment (the collective action problem), and perhaps one at which it gets invoked, but if I think nobody is going along with the 25 Amendment, I keep my head down. That's rational.
I would accomplish nothing by being the one guy pushing for the 25th Amendment. I'd just get my ass fired. What, then, could I do? Quit in disgust and accomplish as much as the Estonian Ambassador?
Or stay, and try to put out the fires I can? Like when Gary Cohn swiped papers from Trump's desk to keep the Idiot in Chief from signing them. One way accomplishes nothing. The other accomplishes something.
The problem, of course, is that of being a collaborator, and in some ways, working to legitimize something as horrid as Trump. But if you can't stop that, shouldn't you just stay, and do what good you can? Containing Trump's stupidity, insanity and evil may be the most difficult and thankless job in the world right now. Even the people who recognize Trump's threat to everything aren't necessarily on-board with what Shallow Throat is doing because he/she isn't actively pushing for the 25th Amendment. If that won't work, though, what he/she is doing may be the best of the bad options created by a Republican Party that put a crazy, incompetent person in the White House, and refuses to do anything openly about the danger he poses.
For now, I think I'm probably on Shallow Throat's side.
This is insane. We have come to this.
