I wrote a book about enablers during the Trump administration in the year 2020, as Covid conquered America. Enablers are followers who allow or even encourage their leaders to engage in, and then to persist in behaviors that are destructive. The point might be obvious. But it’s nearly never made: that bad leaders depend absolutely on bad followers who enable bad leaders to do bad things.*
I could not know when the book was written – though I might have guessed – that once Donald Trump was out of office memoirs would appear, written by his enablers, justifying their enablement. Into this category falls one that just came out, Mark Esper’s, A Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a Secretary of Defense During Extraordinary Times.
Esper was, obviously, a leader. As Secretary of Defense, he led the federal government’s largest agency and the nation’s largest single employer. During his time in office Esper oversaw some 1.3 million active-duty service members, 750,000 civilian personnel, and well over 800,000 National Guard and Reserve service members.
At the same time, as is the case with many leaders, Esper was also a follower. He reported to President Trump and generally was subservient to him. Mostly he did what Trump told him to do, no matter how ill-advised, wrong-headed, or even downright dangerous.
But, as Esper is clearly eager to point out, he did not always do what Trump told him to do. Moreover, Esper believes that by staying in the administration as long he could – the president “terminated” him in late 2020 – he did the right thing. Esper thinks it was his patriotic duty to preclude the president (for as long as he could) from appointing a replacement who was more pliable. A replacement who would acquiesce to Trump’s every mood and obey his every order.
Esper describes the dilemma he faced – does someone like him, who believed Trump a national threat, remain in his post or resign in protest? – as the “existential question of the Trump administration.” Why, Esper asked, “did good people [like him] stay even after the president suggested or pressed us to do things that were reckless, or foolish, or just plan wrong?” Esper claims that quitting would have made him feel “good in the moment” – but that it would have been wrong.
The former Secretary of Defense seems a well-intentioned man trapped of his own volition between a rock and a hard place. I in any case strongly disagree with the decision he made. Enablers like Esper imagine themselves lone wolves. He imagines himself the only member of the Trump administration to resign in protest.
But what if over the four years of Trump’s term would have been repeated resignations, resignations over and then over again, by people in high places? What if many or even several members of Trump’s team would have resigned and then stated why – loudly, clearly, and publicly so every American could hear?
To be an American patriot is never to follow an American president who is, simultaneously, unethical and incompetent. But so long as apparently good men like Mark Esper continue to make bad choices so long will bad leaders continue to do bad things.
*The Enablers: How Team Trump Flunked the Pandemic and Failed America (Cambridge University Press, 2021)