How soon will the rats start to jump?

Are we getting to the stage of the Trump regime when we might begin seeing preparation for a rat exodus? The vermin that jump off a sinking ship, that is. It seems early, but there's evidence.

Trump's White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, gave a series of tell-all interviews to a reporter for Vanity Fair, Chris Whipple. Peter Baker at the New York Times (gift) provided a summary of these with some additions of his own.

Wiles here comes off as either ignorant, or stupid, or afraid of the consequences to herself of the bad company she's keeping. I doubt she's either of the first two -- but her behavior here carries a strong whiff of the last. Above all, she insists the crimes of the administration come from her boss, not from her.

Ms. Wiles described her own reservations about certain policies in real time to Mr. Whipple, author of a well-regarded book on White House chiefs of staff, even as debates raged inside the administration. She said she urged Mr. Trump not to pardon the most violent rioters from Jan. 6, 2021, which he did anyway. She unsuccessfully tried to get him to delay his major tariffs because of a “huge disagreement” among his advisers. And she said the administration needed to “look harder” at deportations to prevent mistakes. 

But she did not complain about being overruled and at various points said she “got on board” with the eventual decisions. “There have been a couple of times where I’ve been outvoted,” she said. “And if there’s a tie, he wins.” 

... Ms. Wiles does not view her role as constraining Mr. Trump. Instead, she makes clear that her mission is to facilitate his desires even if she sometimes thinks he is going too far.

This is someone who knows she is part of a crew that seems to be thieving and murdering for fun and profit. Wiles has some regrets, but mostly she hangs back and criticizes cautiously.

Mr. Musk’s demolition of the U.S. Agency for International Development including its lifesaving aid to impoverished people around the globe upset Ms. Wiles. “I was initially aghast,” she told Mr. Whipple. “Because I think anybody that pays attention to government and has ever paid attention to U.S.A.I.D. believed, as I did, that they do very good work.” 

Mr. Musk’s approach was “not the way I would do it.” She said she called Mr. Musk on the carpet. “You can’t just lock people out of their offices,” she recalled telling him. She said that Mr. Musk was a disrupter. “But no rational person could think the U.S.A.I.D. process was a good one. Nobody.” 

She offered no objection to Mr. Trump’s saber rattling against Venezuela and bombing of boats carrying alleged drug traffickers, suggesting that regime change against President Nicolás Maduro was Mr. Trump’s real goal. “He wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle,” she said. “And people way smarter than me on that say that he will.”

Oh yeah, and then there are those pesky migrants under assault by the Department of Homeland Security's new posse of masked thugs. Wiles has misgivings ...

Ms. Wiles expressed misgivings about how the roundup of immigrants has been carried out at times. “I will concede that we’ve got to look harder at our process for deportation,” she said. Criminals should be deported, she added. “But if there is a question, I think our process has to lean toward a double-check.” When two mothers were arrested and deported with their children after voluntarily attending routine immigration meetings, she said, “I can’t understand how you make that mistake, but somebody did.”

Josh Marshall sees successful guile in what Wiles chose to get spread around by Vanity Faire and Baker: 

If I’m not mistaken, Wiles seems to have tried to warn Trump off of his wildest and most malevolent actions. She tried. And she wants us to know she tried.

Well maybe. Maybe she's just trying to look less complicit. But I will not be surprised if she and other smarter Trump enablers are getting an inkling that one of these days there may be a personal cost from enabling Trump's criminal initiatives.

Just as the Wiles story took over the news, at the New Yorker, editor Michael Luo published History’s Judgment of Those Who Go Along. He writes about several lawyers who've left the Justice Department, refusing to violate professional standards. 

He recounts the story of the internment of Japanese-ancestry residents of the West Coast at the outbreak of World War II and how history has judged the high government officials who did that dirty deed -- and mostly privately knew better. 

... Anyone still serving in the Trump Administration must reckon with the reality that, when the government has previously perpetrated egregious miscarriages of justice, history has not been forgiving to those who’ve gone along, however reluctantly. ...

Luo believes that people choosing to carry out the Trump Administration's crimes may learn they've lost themselves in pursuit of not much more than permanent infamy.

Standing firm on principle sometimes sits opposite other factors, such as fealty to colleagues and professional ambition, but it invariably comes from within. During the early days of the first Trump Administration, Sally Yates, who had been Obama’s Deputy Attorney General and had stayed on as the acting Attorney General, directed her staff not to defend an executive order from Trump restricting travel from several Muslim-majority countries—his so-called Muslim ban. Trump fired her.  

Several months later, Yates delivered a commencement-week speech to graduates of Harvard Law School, in which she talked about the need to hone the “compass that’s inside all of us.” Introspection about difficult decisions that involve conscience, she said, helps “develop a sense of who you are and what you stand for.” 

For those in the second Trump Administration, the time to answer those questions could be now.