Should We Stay Or Should We Go: Lessons From the Trump Administration

Should We Stay or Should We Go: Lessons from the

Trump Administration

KATHLEEN CLARK*

ABSTRACT

After the 2016 election, commentators published a flurry of essays with

advice on whether lawyers and federal officials should remain in government

during the Trump administration. In this article, I review those essays, includ-

ing Professor David Luban’s stern advice about the risk of remaining. I also

discuss three key concepts from Professor Luban’s article for this symposium:

desk perpetrators, desk mitigators, and operational maneuvering room, and

explore how they apply to Trump administration officials who engaged in inter-

nal resistance or principled resignation. More than one hundred federal offi-

cials in the administration engaged in principled resignation, many acting in

concert with each other. The power of concerted action is most evident when a

group of powerful officials together threaten to resign as a way of deterring

abusive conduct. Many of these officials wrote letters or op-eds explaining their

decision to resign, often sounding in the language of morality, emphasizing

their disagreement with Trump policies and rhetoric they found repugnant.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 706

I. ADVICE PUBLISHED IN THE WAKE OF THE 2016 ELECTION . . . 708

II. DAVID LUBAN’S EVOLVING VIEWS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 711

A. 2016. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 712

B. 2020. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 713

III. RESISTANCE AND RESIGNATION UNDER TRUMP. . . . . . . . . . . . 715

A. INTERNAL RESISTANCE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 715

B. PRINCIPLED RESIGNATIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 718

* Professor of Law, Washington University. © 2021, Kathleen Clark.

705

1. CONCERTED ACTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 719

2. LETTERS AND OP-EDS EXPLAINING DECISION TO RESIGN . . . . . 721

a. Purpose in Resigning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 721

i. Avoid Participation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 721

ii. Disassociate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 723

iii. Acknowledge Futility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 726

b. Language of Morality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 727

c. Areas of Sharpest Disagreement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 729

CONCLUSION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 731

INTRODUCTION

After Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, many commentators

and scholars recognized the grave threat to democratic governance that his presi-

dency posed. Within days, Masha Gessen’s essay, Autocracy: Rules for Survival,

went viral.

1

Classic dystopian novels, such as George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous

Huxley’s BRAVE NEW WORLD, became best sellers,

2

as did non-fiction books by

historians and political scientists, such as ON TYRANNY and HOW DEMOCRACIES

DIE.

3

The mood in the country veered toward the apocalyptic. There was a spate

of articles and blog posts examining whether federal officials could responsibly

1. Masha Gessen, Autocracy: Rules for Survival, N.Y. REV. BOOKS (Nov. 10, 2016), https://www.nybooks.

com/daily/2016/11/10/trump-election-autocracy-rules-for-survival/ [https://perma.cc/CUC5-G2TV]; Ezra

Klein, Masha Gessen on the frightening fragility of America’s political institutions, VOX (July 10, 2020, 7:30

AM), https://www.vox.com/2020/7/10/21318625/donald-trump-surviving-autocracy-masha-gessen-the-ezra-

klein-show [https://perma.cc/R58B-WHB3] (“Within 48 hours of Trump’s victory, their essay “Autocracy:

Rules for Survival” had gone viral”); Masha Gessen, One Year After Trump’s Election, Revisiting “Autocracy:

Rules for Survival,” NEW YORKER (Nov. 8, 2017), https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/one-

year-after-trumps-election-revisiting-autocracy-rules-for-survival [https://perma.cc/JV4M-N2UQ] (indicating

that her earlier essay was “read by millions of people”).

2. Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura, George Orwell’s ‘1984’ Is Suddenly a Best-Seller, N.Y. TIMES (Jan. 25,

2017), https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/25/books/1984-george-orwell-donald-trump.html [https://perma.cc/

77SA-MWJV]; see also Sophie Gilbert, ’1984’ Isn’t the Only Book Enjoying a Revival Under a Trump

Presidency, THE ATLANTIC (Jan. 25, 2017), https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/01/1984-

george-orwell-alternative-facts-trump-kellyanne-conway/514259/ [https://perma.cc/MR78-SPHF] (indicating

that in the third week of December, 2016, Hannah Arendt’s THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM (1951) was

selling at sixteen times its normal rate).

3. See Hillel Italie, Yale professor discusses best-selling book ‘On Tyranny’, SEATTLE TIMES (May 10,

2017), https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/yale-professor-discusses-best-selling-book-on-tyranny/

[https://perma.cc/Q9XF-K4TN] (indicating that TIMOTHY SNYDER, ON TYRANNY: TWENTY LESSONS FROM THE

TWENTIETH CENTURY (2017) “quickly reached high on Amazon.com’s best-seller list”). STEVEN LEVITSKY &

DANIEL ZIBLATT, HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE (2018) spent five weeks on the New York Times best seller list. See

Hardcover Nonfiction, N.Y. TIMES (Mar. 4, 2018), https://www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/2018/03/04/

hardcover-nonfiction/ [https://perma.cc/CE6F-ZM2X].

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