Job Conditions
Imagine you are an ambitious career man being offered a prestigious executive position at a major corporation. You learn, however, that the last man who had that job was ordered by the boss to violate the fundamental law of his country, his personal principles, and a solemn oath sworn on the Bible; that the boss not only announced this demand to the whole company, right down to the janitors, but publicly mocked that former employee as a coward for hesitating to comply; and that, when he refused to comply with the boss’s orders and instead followed the law and his principles, he was not only fired, but soon found a violent crowd of the boss’s lackeys bursting into the building where he was working, chanting like a lynch mob for his murder. Knowing all that, would you still accept the job offer?
One step further. Knowing all that in advance, would you nevertheless actively pursue that job? What effect might such knowledge have on your way of approaching the job? Your way of responding to the boss? Your inclinations to think and act according to your own conscience, or to express your opinions openly to the boss? Your way of behaving around the lower-level employees and shareholders, many of whom were either involved with, or at least sympathetic to, the aforementioned lynch mob calling for the murder of your predecessor?
I have said since 2016 that it is impossible for me not to lose a great deal of respect for anyone who would legitimize the Trump destruction show by accepting a job in his administration. But there is one particular role in any prospective new Trump administration that, since January 2020, is effectively a brand on one’s head: “Sold.” It is not surprising in the least, then, that the man who won that role this time around is the only man among the short list of contenders who has no prior history indicating principles or consistency of any kind, who has conveniently changed his public positions on numerous important matters more often than Trump himself — including, famously, now praising as a demi-god the man who, in 2016, he compared to Hitler, and whose public effect he likened to heroin. Is it any wonder that Trump, who, when he follows his instincts, has a pretty good eye for lowly worms, the kind of compromised men he believes he can “work with,” chose J. D. Vance?