Telling Truth to Power

What do you do when you work for a powerful person and they're doing things that you believe to be harmful?  That's the question that is being asked today as we hear that president trump's Chief of Staff and Secretary of State were trying to subvert his decisions.  It's a fascinating question.  I can actually see Nikki Haley's point of view.  Those who disagreed with the president should have told him so, and even should have been ready and willing to resign in order to stand up for their beliefs. Seems pretty straightforward and simple, in an ideal world.  But we don't live in an ideal world.  We live in the real world.  In the real world, people with power and money make decisions and get away with them.  In fact, they may feel empowered to make any decision they want, regardless of the consequences.  This matters for powerful people in industry, and it matters for the president of the United States.  Where do we draw the line?

I understand that there are many people who have gone to work for president trump, believing that they could be the "adult in the room."  Most, if not all, of those people are no longer there.  The adults in the room have been pushed out, leaving only sycophants who do whatever the president's whim is. This almost answers the initial question.  If the people who have left had stuck around, perhaps they could be modulating to some degree some of the president's worst decisions? Or, maybe they'd be gone by now anyway.  It's impossible to tell.  The same question occurs in industry.  Do you stick around, trying to make the best of a bad situation? Ethically, it's a very difficult question to answer, because staying around theoretically means being associated with the same bad decisions that you were fighting to prevent.  That's not something that makes it easy to go to sleep at night.

Ironically, while Nikki Haley is sounding so proper over telling folks they should have stood up to the president, she has her head so deep in the sand that she's going to suffocate.  president trump is a narcissist, and doesn't like to be told what to do.  He has said on many occasions that he is the smartest person in the world and he has all of the answers.  It only takes one disagreement to get on his bad side.  Furthermore, John Kelly and Rex Tillerson were not idiots.  They had pretty strong pedigrees.  If they were in agreement that the president was off his rocker, why not at least ask the question, were they right?

Maybe I've watched too many episodes of 24, but there needs to be some recourse for when the president of the United States goes rogue.  The question is what rogue means.  Sucking up to dictators from Russia and North Korea would have set off alarms if this were any other president.  Image President Obama doing the same?  The Republicans would have been apoplectic!  But this is president trump.  He can do no wrong.  How many of his people have to leave, or get let go, before his supporters will realize that either everyone else is wrong, or president trump is just always right, like he says he is?