THE king, wrote Charles de Marillac, the French ambassador to the court of Henry VIII, was so fickle he rendered even his word “as softened wax [that] can be altered to any form”. He was so suspicious he did “not trust a single man”. Some of the dramatic twists of Donald Trump’s month-old administration, including the removal on February 13th of Michael Flynn as national security adviser (NSA) after he allegedly made inappropriate comments to the Russian ambassador and fibbed about them, would have seemed familiar to de Marillac. They are not merely the teething troubles of an unusually messy administration, but seem rooted in Mr Trump’s idiosyncratic management style.
Demanding Mr Flynn’s resignation, due to an “erosion of that trust” which the president had formerly invested in the tough-talking former military-intelligence officer, was in fact one of Mr Trump’s better decisions. Abrasive, hot-headed and highly partisan, Mr Flynn was ill-chosen for the job. Yet the fact that Mr Trump so recently hired him, and the circumstances of his firing, which have flooded out of the administration in leaked reports from unhappy officials, are...Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/2lm38Ji
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