For much of Donald Trump’s first term in office, many of the president’s critics—Democrats and Republicans alike—clung to a simple, comforting idea: As bad as things were, they could be much worse. The president was obviously an idiot and a would-be authoritarian. But he was also surrounded by people who were competent and experienced, people like Defense Secretary James Mattis; his first chief of staff, Reince Priebus, a longtime Republican apparatchik; and his second, John Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general. These men, the theory went, acted as guardrails that kept the president in check—the widely touted “adults in the room” who watched over America’s first toddler president.
When Mattis resigned shortly after the 2018 midterms, I boiled over, writing that this pundit meme was an absurd and dangerous fantasy. There was “little evidence that these ‘adults’ did much of anything to restrain Trump or to talk him out of bad decisions,” I wrote at the time, arguing that this fantasy not only served as a distraction from just how chaotic and destructive Trump’s presidency was, but also let his enablers off the hook by suggesting he was solely responsible for that chaos and destruction.
We’re now barely more than half a year through his second term, and I have to admit: I miss the adults in the room. It is clear now what happens when Trump really is surrounded purely by enablers, sycophants, and true believers—and thus encounters zero resistance to his whims and abuses. Everywhere you turn, there is even more destruction and chaos, nearly all of it on a much grander scale than during his first term in office. And there is not an adult in sight—except perhaps the one man Trump is legally prevented from firing.
I was hardly alone, on the political left, in my disdain for the “adults in the room” theory. The problem wasn’t just, as Slate’s Rebecca Onion argued in 2018, that the theory was reductive and condescending—those who deployed it were implicitly suggesting that they too were “adults”—or that it let the president off the hook (Trump wasn’t a child, Onion wrote, he was “an adult who acts like a child. And that’s a meaningful difference”). The problem was that the proverbial “adults” weren’t apolitical figures who solely served as moderating forces. They had an agenda, too.
To embrace the “adults” theory, Danny Sjursen wrote in The Nation shortly after Mattis’s resignation, also meant embracing the adults’ agenda. Mattis wasn’t just working behind the scene to get the president to tweet less; he was an active opponent of Trump’s plan to reduce America’s military footprint in the Middle East. John Bolton, who served as Trump’s national security advisor from April 2018 to September 2019, was America’s foremost neoconservative hawk, a man whose solution to seemingly any problem was to bomb it.
For critics like me and Sjursen, embracing the “adults in the room” was a tradeoff that obviously wasn’t worth it. Although Trump was never the “dove” or “populist” some claimed, he won the Republican presidential primary in 2016 by rejecting the economic and foreign policy orthodoxies that had guided his party for decades. Rehabilitating figures like Bolton, in the interest of opposing Trump, risked validating a discredited political philosophy that had caused a litany of horrors, foremost among them the Iraq War. It also just seemed at odds with reality. Families were being separated at the border. Longstanding allies were being ridiculed and shunned while the president embraced dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin-Salman. If Trump was surrounded by adults, what precisely were they doing?
Well, now we know.
When Trump entered office in 2017, Republicans held a narrow advantage in both chambers of Congress and on the Supreme Court. Back then, there were a handful of Republicans—notably Mitt Romney, Jeff Flake, and, before his death in 2018, John McCain—who would occasionally stand up to the president, either via public statements or with votes, as McCain did when he killed the GOP attempt to repeal Obamacare with a Romanesque thumbs down. With a handful of mostly useless exceptions (I’m looking at you, Lisa Murkowski), the Republican resistance is almost fully extinguished. Congress is full of MAGA bootlickers. The Supreme Court has gone from a 5-4 conservative majority to an ironclad 6-3. The Democrats, meanwhile, are as powerless in the minority as they were during Trump’s first term, but they are somehow an even more feckless opposition party now.
As bad as Trump’s immigration policies were during his first term, he and his cronies—notably senior advisor Stephen Miller—have become downright fascistic. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, almost always wearing masks so they can’t be identified by the public, are terrorizing communities as they round-up undocumented immigrants, many of whom have no criminal history and have lived in the country for years, if not decades. His administration has deported at least 180,000 of them—including, in at least a few cases, legal U.S. residents—thus far. It has sent some to a gulag in El Salvador where they have been tortured and, in at least one case, raped; others are being deported to nations they have no connection to, such as Uganda. In Los Angeles, protests against these policies became a pretext for deploying the military, not just the National Guard but also hundreds of Marines (something Mattis never would have allowed). Once that pretext was established, it was extended—minus the Marines—to Washington, D.C., under the guise of fighting crime (even though violent crime has been decreasing for years in the nation’s capital, hitting a 30-year low in 2024). All of this amounts to a show of force aimed at cowing blue cities and a precedent for future action that may be far more significant.
Trump talked a lot on the 2016 campaign trail about raising tariffs, and once he took office it was a rare promise he fulfilled—but also a rare instance of real moderation. The tariffs were modest and often targeted at specific industries. During his second term, though, they have been massive and expansive. Although he has backed down somewhat from the slate of across-the-board tariffs he dropped on “Liberation Day” in April, the nation is currently engaged in a trade war with most of the world: Goods from India and Brazil are being hit with 50 percent tariffs—the latter in a blatant attempt to influence the nation’s politics—while China is being hit at 30 percent (though Trump is threatening to increase that number to more than 100 percent). Prices are rising and there is no end in sight. It seems likely that this will be disastrous in the short term (a potential recession) and the long-term (a rupture of America’s longstanding trading partnerships).
In other instances, Trump has empowered allies and loyalists to wreak havoc across the government and, in some cases, the world. Trump’s first cabinet was largely staffed with Republican stalwarts; his second is full of maniacs and slavish loyalists. The tech billionaire Elon Musk spent much of Trump’s first 100 days in office sending a roving gang of young men—many of whom, in the literal legal sense, were barely adults—to gut federal agencies across the country, firing thousands of workers and eliminating vital programs and entire departments, notably the United States Agency for International Development. Current estimates suggest that the Musk-driven cessation of foreign aid could cost millions of lives by the end of Trump’s term.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the conspiracy theorist who now leads the Department of Health and Human Services, may have irreparably harmed the nation’s ability to develop new treatments, track diseases, and fight pandemics. Last week, he pushed out the head of the CDC after she moved to accept vaccine guidelines issued by a panel of experts, rather than those from Kennedy himself. HHS then issued new eligibility recommendations for the Covid booster shot, severely restricting those who could get it. It is impossible to imagine Alex Azar, who served in the same position during Trump’s first term, doing any of this. Five years after Trump oversaw Operation Warp Speed—the only unqualified success of his first term, which lived up to its name by developing a Covid-19 vaccine in less than a year—the nation is on the brink of returning to the Dark Ages: Kennedy’s vision of the country is one where only the strong survive and immunity comes from contracting diseases, not taking vaccines.
The one member of Trump’s Cabinet who seemed like he could emerge as an “adult”—Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose appointment was praised by many who fretted over the direction of the administration—has shown no inclination whatsoever toward moderating the president’s impulses. He has overseen a foreign policy that is reckless, bellicose, and clearly undertaken in service of Trump’s personal ambition to win a Nobel Peace Prize rather than any strategic interest. As famine spreads in Gaza and America’s support for Ukraine seesaws between tempered support and complete disdain, Rubio has consistently stood behind the president. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, he harbors ambitions to succeed him.) That’s in contrast to Rex Tillerson, who routinely butted heads with Trump, smoothed over relations with miffed foreign leaders, and reportedly told other members of his national security team that Trump was a “moron.”
There is, however, one adult left: Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve. Powell was first appointed by Trump back in 2018, but the president quickly came to regret it. Trump spent much of his first term badmouthing Powell and has targeted him throughout his second, all because Powell has refused to slash interest rates, as Trump desires. Powell is doing this because, well, he’s an “adult”: Given the persistent problem of inflation, cutting interest rates carries enormous risk. Powell is holding the line, and his firing, which legal experts say would not pass muster, could cause the markets to tank. Trump may do it anyways—and Republicans and the conservative justices on the Supreme Court will likely sit idly by.
I still think we risk giving the “adults in the room” too much credit. Mattis et al were only there because there wasn’t a MAGA-groomed alternative back then—and because Trump, a neophyte president, didn’t really know what he was doing. And their record was mixed at best. Trump’s first term was still historically chaotic and destructive, after all. But would Mattis, Tillerson, and Azar be preferable Pete Hegseth, Rubio, and Kennedy? Absolutely. Maybe the “adults” were good for something after all.
The post I Miss the “Adults in the Room” From Trump’s First Term appeared first on New Republic.
