President Donald Trump joined Tuesday’s White House briefing to mark the one-year anniversary of his second term in office. And while joking about the “Gulf of America,” Trump inadvertently revealed the level of near-absolute compliance he receives from his inner circle of advisors and administration officials.
“I was going to call it the ‘Gulf of Trump,’ but I thought that I’d be killed if I did that,” Trump said of his original plan to rename the Gulf of Mexico. “I’m joking, you know, when I say that.
“I was not going to call it the Gulf of Trump. Because tomorrow (the headlines) will be, ‘Trump wanted to call it Gulf of Trump but he was rebuffed by his people.’
Trump then turned and grinned at White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. “My people don’t rebuff me too much,” he said.
Though Trump was lightly teasing his closest allies, the remarks underscore a common concern among critics of the president’s administration.
Early in Trump’s second term, The Guardian’s Washington DC bureau chief David Smith slammed Republicans for “trying to lionize him.”
“The unsubtle exercises in ring-kissing and genuflection demonstrate that, buoyed by election success, Trump’s control over the Republican party is now all but absolute,” Smith wrote in his Feb. 22 column. “From Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” to the upending of US policy on Ukraine, few Republicans are willing to speak out against the president-cum-monarch.”
Former Clinton administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich raised similar concerns in an Aug. 22 op-ed for The Hill titled: “Why Trump built a staff of incompetent sycophants.”
“Leaders who value loyalty above all else find themselves surrounded by sycophantic crackpots and fools,” Reich wrote. “As a result, they receive no objective or useful feedback about their actions – no warnings beforehand and no criticism afterward. All they get are commendations – ‘Wonderful idea, sir!’ ‘Brilliant execution, sir!’ “
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who ranks among Trump’s foremost GOP detractors, has also heavily criticized congressional Republicans for rubber-stamping the president’s agenda in order to retain their seats.
“The political reality is that they’re dead in the water if they call out the president,” Massie told the New York Times last week.
