This is a close call. There were a lot of candidates.
- The president suing the United States Treasury for a (legitimately objectionable) leak of tax information which occurred during the presidency of Donald J. Trump, and demanding damages of $10 billion, thus wiping out most if not all of the actual “DOGE savings.”
- The disturbing presence of the Director of National Intelligence at the FBI raid on an election center in Georgia–a presence justified neither by her remit nor, God knows, her expertise and intelligence, but by her understanding of the simple fact of court-politics geography dictating that the shortest path between her office and any chance of getting back into the good graces of the Oval Office runs through Fulton County.
- The spectacle of the president yet again taking to social media to order the Justice Department to arrest Barack Obama, on the basis of a conspiracy theory–like all good conspiracy theories, it involves Italian satellites–that was originally “brought to the White House by a woman who went by several aliases including ‘The Heiress’ and was known at the Pentagon for her claimed ties to Somali pirates.”
- The cult-of-personality antics of the premiere at the it’s-still-actually-called-Kennedy Center of the documentary “Melania,” a film which was the incidental byproduct of the $40 million in protection money paid by Jeff Bezos to Trump and, fittingly enough, was directed by an accused sexual miscreant.
- The fact that the “arrest Obama” order was one of literally dozens of deranged tweets and rants launched by the president on social media yesterday. This was, of course, just the latest example of the frequent manic phases that demonstrate his manifest moral and mental unfitness for the office he occupies. By extension, it demonstrates the manifest moral and intellectual unfitness of his enablers, apologists, and diligent blind-eye-turners, who will have gotten around to carefully deciding on a sound historical analogue for Trump right around the time he has finished raiding the public fisc, naming things after himself, propagating lies as official government propaganda, jailing his enemies, enriching his family and friends, disappearing individuals and leaving their cars running in the streets, and sending undesirables to foreign torture prisons and to what respect for the English language demands we openly and accurately call internment or concentration camps.
But I would like to make a case for another story: The president’s threat to decertify, and thus possibly ground, “all Aircraft made in Canada.” I note incidentally that the true mark of a Trump supporter is to approve of his eccentric and distinctly Germanic capitalization practices. But the true mark of a Trump apologist is his or her determination never, ever, ever to mention those practices, lest it take time away from making impassioned arguments that widespread American illiteracy is the fault of a failed progressive educational system, which must be replaced by a rigorous classical education.
Characteristically, the threat lacked specifics or a deadline. Also characteristically, it lacked specifics about either the precise meaning and contours of the threat or the precise legal authority for the threatened action. One hardly expects the latter from a tweet, but the reason for that is that one hardly expects a properly functioning president in a properly functioning nation to direct policy and enforcement through a tweet; the less the latter is true, the less forgiving or dismissive one should be about the need for the former. “It’s just a tweet” is a laughably inapt bit of rationalization in the context of the second Trump regime. The ambiguity and lack of clarity has, of course, led to an equally inevitable round of “what he meant was,” as administrators try to pick up the pieces and apply a bit of sanity around the edges, like makeup artists applying concealer to a bruised hand.
Trump was at least clear about his purported reasons, which centered around the Canadian delay in certifying several Gulfstream airplane lines. (One naturally assumes he recently spoke to or played golf with someone from or representing Gulfstream. As a reminder, tariff lobbying contracts are up roughly 500 percent since last year and 1,550 percent from 2016–one more reminder that it is either a foolish error or a lie to call Trumpism, in this or any other area, a war against elites and elitism; it is, at best, a war between competing elites. Often enough, it consists of Stanford and Yale grads railing at other Stanford and Yale grads.) There are two problems with that explanation, however. First, he is a liar, so there is no reason to believe him; it could just as easily be because he continues to be angry at Mark Carney for drawing more applause than him in Davos. Second, and also characteristically, he got most of the facts wrong.
National and international aviation, with the immense issues of coordination and safety it raises, is almost definitionally the sort of area that demands and justifies some form of administrative state. But my reason for suggesting that the airplane story–or, if you prefer, the Airplane story–should be front and center for people who like to theorize about and justify the unitary executive is not that it demonstrates the need for a non-unitary executive. Rather, it’s that it demonstrates yet again the need for UET writers to examine, theorize, and discuss what a proper approach to management under a unitary executive regime entails.
The simple possibility of a unitary executive is hardly inconceivable, although I only follow and certainly make no claims about what the history and theory ultimately suggest about its actuality. It is no more inconceivable than the possibility of a large corporation run by a single chief executive. But no one thinks that once you have determined to have a single corporate CEO, you have exhausted the topic of how that entity should be managed, or that nothing useful can be said about what it looks like to mismanage it. This, I take it, is why many fine people study management, and why the kiosks of airports across this great Canadian-plane-free land of ours are full of awfully written books about management.
I can understand why so much time is spent debating the fundamental question whether, under the Constitution, we have a unitary executive branch or not. But, for all the vast archives that have been pillaged to fuel that debate, it seems strange to me that much more time is not spent–especially by proponents of a unitary executive–on the then side of the if-then equation. If we have a unitary executive, then the discussion is just beginning, and much of the rest of that discussion should be filled in with examination–no doubt helped along by a century of adjacent writing about modern corporate management in addition to public administration literature–about how such an executive should or shouldn’t be run, what its particular risks are and how to manage them, and what misfeasance, malfeasance, incompetence, and impeachable conduct look like under such a regime. A unitary executive theory that fells whole forests to discuss the history but only sometimes gets around to normative questions of practice makes about as much sense to me as a definitive treatise on the hamburger whose first sentence states that questions concerning meat, condiments, and vegetables are no doubt interesting but fall outside the scope of the discussion.
As the airplane story illustrates, as well as the other stories listed above and several dozen more besides, just from the past 24 hours or so, both the materials for such a discussion and the urgent need for it are right in front of us.