A warning from the Jimmy Carter era
Trump's slow-motion Cabinet purge
On the last Saturday in April, 1979, President Jimmy Carter and first lady Rosalynn Carter met in the Oval Office with one of the people who helped put them in the White House: pollster Patrick Caddell.
The 28-year-old former campaign aide had developed a back-channel connection to Rosalynn, who fretted about the president’s failing political fortunes. Her husband was at first reluctant to meet with Caddell, according to one of his former White House staffers, but on that day, “Jimmy Carter began to come under his spell.”
We know that because of former White House domestic adviser Stuart E. Eizenstat’s thousand-page memoir, President Carter: The White House Years. Eizenstat was not only a trusted aide to the president but also an industrious note-taker, who documented Carter’s single term in microscopic detail.
What happened after the Saturday Oval Office meeting was extraordinary.
As an oil shortage following Iran’s Islamic …
