Scholars call this false equivalency. It means that when you find a mountain to expose in one person or party, you have to pick a molehill on the other side and make it into a mountain to avoid being accused of bias. The built-up molehills also have large benefits: increased coverage on the evening news, millions of retweets, and more talk-show fodder. When the mountains and molehills all look the same, campaigns and governments devote too little time and energy debating the issues that matter most to our people. Even when we try to do that, we’re often drowned out by the passion of the day.
There’s a real cost to this. It breeds more frustration, polarization, paralysis, bad decisions, and missed opportunities. But with no incentive to actually accomplish something, more and more politicians just go with the flow, fanning the flames of anger and resentment, when they should be acting as the fire brigade. Everybody knows it’s wrong, but the immediate rewards are so great we stagger on, just assuming that our Constitution, our public institutions, and the rule of law can endure each new assault without doing permanent damage to our freedoms and way of life.
I ran for president to change that vicious cycle. I hope I still can. But right now, I have to deal with the wolf at the door.
JoAnn walks in and says, “Danny and Alex are here.”
JoAnn used to work for the governor I succeeded in North Carolina. As he was leaving office and I was on my way in, she ran the transition with an efficiency that impressed me. Everyone was afraid of her. I was told not to hire her because she came from “them”—the opposing political party—but JoAnn told me, “Mr. Governor-Elect, I just got divorced, I have two kids in middle school, and I’m broke. I’m never late, I’m never sick, I can type faster’n you can spit, and if you’re acting like a donkey’s ass, I’ll be the first to let you know it.” She’s been with me ever since. Her oldest just started in the Treasury Department.
“Mr. President,” says Danny Akers, White House counsel. Danny and I were next-door neighbors in Wilkes County, North Carolina, growing up in a tiny town all of one square mile in area, nestled between a highway and a single traffic signal. We swam and fished and skateboarded and played ball and hunted together. We taught each other how to knot a tie and jump-start a car and string a pole and throw a breaking ball. We went through everything together—grade school through college at UNC. We even enlisted together, joining the Rangers as E-4s after college. The only thing we didn’t experience together was Desert Storm: Danny wasn’t assigned to Bravo Company, as I was, so he never saw action in Iraq.
While I was trying, unsuccessfully, to overcome my injuries from Desert Storm and play pro ball in Double A in Memphis, Danny was starting law school at UNC. He was the one who vouched for me to Rachel Carson, a 3L when I entered UNC Law.
“Mr. President.” Alex Trimble—the barrel chest and buzz cut practically scream out “Secret Service” when you first look at him. He’s not exactly a laugh a minute, but he’s as straight and strong as they come, and he runs my security detail as efficiently as a military operation.
“Sit, sit.” I should go back to my desk, but I sit on the couch.
“Mr. President,” says Danny, “my memorandum on title 18, section 3056.” He hands me the document. “You want the long or the short version?” he asks, knowing the answer already.
“Short.” The last thing I feel like doing is reading legal-speak right now. I have no doubt the memo was prepared with precision. I always loved the battlefield of the courtroom as a prosecutor, but Danny was the scholar, combing over new Supreme Court opinions for fun, debating fine points of law, and prizing the written word. He left his law firm to be my counsel when I was governor of North Carolina. He was great at it until the then-president nominated him to the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. He loved that job and could have held it happily for life had I not been elected president and asked him to join me again.
“Just tell me what I can and can’t do,” I say.
Danny winks at me. “The statute says you can’t decline protection. But there is precedent for temporarily refusing it as part of your right to personal privacy.”
Alex Trimble is already leveling a stare at me. I’ve previously broached this topic with him, so this isn’t coming completely out of the blue, but he was obviously hoping Danny would talk me out of it.
“Mr. President,” Alex says, “with all due respect, you can’t be serious.”
“Serious as a heart attack.”
“Now, of all times, sir—”
“It’s decided,” I say.
“We can do a loose perimeter,” he says. “Or at least some advance work.”
“No.”
Alex clutches the arms of his chair, his mouth slightly agape.
“I need a minute with my White House counsel,” I say to him.
“Mr. President, please don’t—”
“Alex,” I say. “I need a minute with Danny.”
With a heavy sigh and a shake of the head, Alex leaves us.
Danny looks back at the door to ensure we’re alone. Then he looks at me.
“Son, you’ve gone crazier’n a March hare,” he says, a hint of the old twang in his voice as he invokes my mama’s favorite saying. He knows them all as well as I do. Danny’s parents were good, hardworking people, but they were away from home a lot. His dad put in a lot of overtime for a trucking company, and his mom worked the night shift at the local plant.
My father was a high school math teacher who died in a car crash when I was four. So when I was a kid, we lived on a grade school teacher’s partial pension and what Mama earned waiting tables at Curly Ray’s by Millers Creek. But she was always home at night, so she helped the Akerses out with Danny. She loved him like a second son; he spent as much time at our house as his own.
Normally when he triggers those memories, it brings a smile to my face. Instead, I lean forward and rub my hands together.
“Okay, you wanna tell me what’s going on?” he tries. “You’re starting to freak me out.”
Join the club. I feel my guard slowly lowering, being alone with Danny. In this job, he and Rachel were always my ports in a storm.
I look up at him. “We’re a long way from catching brookies at Garden Creek,” I say.
“Good. Because you could never cast a line to save your life anyway.”
Again, I don’t smile.
“You’re right where you’re supposed to be, Mr. President,” he says. “If the shit’s hitting the fan, you’re the guy I want in charge.”
I let out air, nod my head.
“Hey.” Danny gets up from his chair and sits down next to me on the couch. He lightly punches my knee. “Being in charge isn’t being alone. I’m right here. Same place I’ve always been, no matter what your title is. Same place I’ll always be.”
“Yeah, I—I know.” I look at him. “I know that.”
“This isn’t about the impeachment bullshit, is it? Because that’ll work itself out. Lester Rhodes? That boy’s so dumb he couldn’t pour piss out of a boot if the directions were on the bottom.”
He’s pulling out all the stops, dusting off another of Mama Lil’s greatest hits. He’s trying to take me back to her, to her strength. After Daddy died, she cracked the whip as hard as any drill sergeant I’d later meet, smacking me in the head if she heard a double negative or an ain’t, telling me I’d go to college or she’d tan my hide. She’d go to work early and come home in the afternoon with two Styrofoam cartons of food that would be dinner for Danny and me. I’d rub her feet while she checked our homework and interrogated us about our day at school. She always said, You boys aren’t rich enough to afford not to pay attention.
“It’s that other thing, isn’t it?” says Danny. “That thing that you can’t tell me, that’s had you canceling half your schedule for the last two weeks? The reason that you’ve suddenly become so interested in martial law and habeas corpus and price controls? Whatever it is that’s kept you quiet as falling snow about Suliman Cindoruk and Algeria while Lester Rhodes beats the snot out of you?”
“Yeah,” I say. “It’s that thing.”
“Yeah.” Danny clears his throat, drums his fingers. “Scale of 1 to 10,” he says. “How bad?”
“A thousand.”
“Jesus. And you have to go off leash? I gotta tell you, that sounds like a terrible idea.”
It just might be. But it’s the best one I have.
“You’re scared,” he says.
“Yeah. Yeah, I am.”
We are quiet for a long moment.
“You know when the last time was I saw you this scared?”
“When Ohio put me over 270 electoral votes?”