Just yesterday, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos was belligerently defending the Trump budget's zeroing out of all federal education support for the Special Olympics. She was quite angry with her detractors.
There are dozens of worthy nonprofits that support students and adults with disabilities that don't get a dime of federal grant money. But given our current budget realities, the federal government cannot fund every worthy program, particularly ones that enjoy robust support from private donations.
This led to Olympic amounts of bad press, and so this afternoon, Donald Trump announced that he was magnanimously ordering his staff to restore that Special Olympics funding after all. Within hours, Betsy DeVos had dispensed a public statement in which she (1) effortlessly reversed yesterday's position, (b) praised Trump for reversing it, and (III) maybe threw her boss under the proverbial bus a bit in order to re-polish her own dodgy reputation.
I am pleased and grateful the president and I see eye to eye on this issue, and that he has decided to fund our Special Olympics grant. This is funding I have fought for behind the scenes the last several years.
So DeVos went from defending the move as a necessary, tough decision in these post-Republican-tax-cut times to suggesting that Well Actually, it was never her idea and it's super that Donald is finally on board with her original plan of not doing that. That is ... well, rather on-brand, actually. You'd be hard pressed to prove any of these people had any notion of what was in their own budget presentations. If it's not a picture of a yacht or a golf course, they're not interested.
The problem with the Dear Leader mentality is that sometimes requires herculean leaps to keep up with what Dear Leader thinks on any particular day, so that you can keep on his good side. It's not an Olympic event yet, but it probably should be.
As an aside: The Trump budget is, of course, dead on arrival in Congress. The Special Olympics cuts were never likely to happen, because even Senate Republicans are not insane. It does, however, function as a detailed public description of where the Trump team’s priorities lie.