the president would consider not even having a chief of staff. how would that go down? this is something that lendon johnson did. we reported previously that he was tickled by not having a chief of staff. the chief of staff job is important, even more so in this day and age. so i don t see that happening but it is something that he s thought about previously. and what about possible replacements here? so we ve heard the same thing that politico has. mulvaney seems to be the kind of mr. fix it guy in trump s mind. he was brought in when there was a va ccancy. it s not surprising that his name would pop up here and nick
front end, don t you want to be margaret smith who in 1950 opposed joe mccarthy and not in 54 when everybody else got there. you know, you want to be in the conversation going forward where you are on the right side of things early enough to make a difference. so that s one thing. the second thing on an analogous moment where presidents have tried to put fast ones past us, i think there is honest disagreement about the runup to the war in iraq. what there s not honest disagreement about is we have lendon johnson on tape talking to richard russell in 1960 late 1963 and 64 saying i just don t know how we win this thing. and then 55,000 american deaths later, more than a decade later ford pulls them out. you have johnson saying that
h.w. bush intelligence center? good lord. you know the quotation on the wall out there which is in the gospel of john. you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free. right. you know, not to be overly grand at this hour of the day, but there s an enormous amount of salience to that. presidents historically get in trouble when they think they can put one past the broad populous. if you president trump johnson in vietnam. president nixon in nearly everything. and there was a great test really proposed during world war ii by churchill about how the british people or the american people could react to a crisis, could undertake great public sacrifice, but they only did it if they were told the truth and he proposed a two prong test. he said that the british people can face any misfortune with