The former secretary of homeland security, the jettisoned attorney general and the embattled secretary of defense have often seemed like President Trump’s ideal cabinet officials: selected for televisual looks and energy, lacking any political constituency apart from Trump himself, serving without qualm as pure conduits of his will. So their struggles offer a lesson for Republicans contemplating service in this administration’s 33 (but who’s counting?) remaining months: What Trump appears to want and what he actually wants are not exactly the same thing.

The seeming desire of the president is for loyalty, sycophancy and TV-ready swagger. He wants to turn on Fox News and see his top officials performing like reality-show characters in the drama of his administration. He wants to sit in a cabinet meeting and listen to a litany of his accomplishments. He wants the decisions made in the West Wing or at Mar-a-Lago to be simply rubber-stamped in his departmental fiefs.

He wants all that, but at the same time he also wants victory rather than defeat, and he definitely doesn’t want embarrassment. His metrics for success are unusual by normal presidential standards: He has a high tolerance for unpopularity, to put it mildly, and a remarkable shamelessness around corruption. But there is a point at which, even inside his cocoon, Trump senses that things aren’t going well for him. And then sycophancy doesn’t work, and it doesn’t matter if you were acting on his orders; you will be punished for that unsuccessful service just as surely as if you’d tried to thwart his aims.

That’s the position Noem found herself in after the immigration enforcement debacle in Minneapolis. The fact that the sweeping crackdown in Tim Walz’s state and Ilhan Omar’s city was almost certainly what the president wanted earned the former South Dakota governor no political protection after it all went wrong.

It’s also the position Bondi found herself in after doing the president’s bidding with the Epstein files and various politicized prosecutions. The unpopularity of the former and the courtroom losses of the latter transformed her from sycophant to scapegoat, even though at every step she was expressing Trump’s own wishes.

Likewise, when Hegseth reportedly told the president “let’s do it” in the run-up to the war, he was merely being an enthusiastic yes man for a bellicose boss. But there’s no reward for being a loyalist if Trump’s grand plans don’t actually work out: In that case, you own the failure, not him.

Contrast this pattern with that of the cabinet officials whose jobs seem reasonably safe, like Scott Bessent and Marco Rubio. They, too, go along with the president in public without complaint or cavil. But then they find ways to manage his preferences, whether in trade policy or Russia-Ukraine diplomacy, such that the results are Trumpy enough to satisfy the boss but aren’t a blind expression of his whims. The fact that they have political capital while the pure sycophants flail implies that Trump’s revealed preference is for a version of that balance, not the more slavish alternative.

What might a more successful balancing act have looked like for an attorney general, defense secretary or homeland security chief? For all the talk about how Bondi tried to do everything Trump asked, it might be that she didn’t need to prosecute a string of the boss’s perceived enemies to stay in his good graces; she just needed a clear lawfare victory *somewhere*.

Likewise, Hegseth, if he had the sense God gave a goose, could have tried to steer Trump to a purely military campaign against Iran — bombs and missiles without the strikes that targeted its leaders — satisfying the president’s hawkish impulse without putting the Iranian regime’s back against the wall.

As for Noem, well, maybe her own self-dealing and limelight thirst would have doomed her anyway, but in a timeline where the Minneapolis operation was condensed to a few theatrical raids rather than a near-occupation of an American city, she might still be starring in homeland security infomercials.

These alternate scenarios are implausible, of course, because they envision hacks and yes women suddenly discovering a different set of capabilities. But if there is to be any improvement at all across the (did I mention this number yet?) 33 months of Trumpism ahead of us, it can only come from officials able to learn something from their failures and give the president a taste of what he wants, at a dose the country and the world find easier to take.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5853478&forum_id=2в#49793490)