Voters asked for change and got it; quibbling about the direction is mere pedantry

I disagree.

Not with the facts. The facts are these: the president’s party lost heavily at the midterms; on Monday a new chief of staff takes over; the new chief of staff is the adviser most closely associated with the administration’s most controversial immigration policies. From this, commentators on both sides of the Atlantic have concluded that the president is not listening. I have studied the matter carefully, and I believe he has listened more closely than anyone in Washington for decades.

Consider what voters actually said. They said, in effect, change. They did not say reversal. They did not say “change, but towards the other lot, by roughly the following margin”. The electorate requested a magnitude. It did not supply a direction. To demand that the White House infer one is to ask it to read minds, which is surely the sort of overreach voters were complaining about in the first place.

And change has been delivered in full. The person at the desk is different. The name on the door is different. The letterhead will, I assume, be reprinted. By an estimate I made over breakfast, approximately 100 per cent of the chief of staff has been replaced, a rate of turnover most British government departments fail to achieve in a decade, and they do try. Whitehall has renamed the same department four times without anyone demanding that its policies change as well.

Critics call this doubling down. But that confuses responsiveness with obedience. A waiter told that the soup is too salty, who promptly sends a different waiter, has plainly heard the complaint. He has responded to it in personnel terms. Whether the soup itself changes is a matter for the kitchen, which is a separate workstream.

Note, too, the speed. The president told 60 Minutes to expect a shake-up, and within hours the shake-up arrived. In Britain a comparable response would require a consultation, a cross-departmental working group and an interim report recommending a further consultation on the direction of the change, closing in the spring, subject to purdah.

The deeper problem is our habit of demanding that change be meaningful. Meaningful is doing a great deal of unpaid work. Once we insist that change be meaningful, we will next insist that it be in the right direction, then proportionate, then independently evaluated, and before long nothing changes at all, which is the one outcome nobody voted for.

I therefore propose a modest reform. If voters wish their appetite for change to have a direction, the ballot paper should carry a small compass at box 7b, to be completed in black ink. Until that box exists, I am afraid the electorate has received precisely what it ordered, and should consider, before Monday, being more specific next time.