The secret of Jay Clayton’s success in in landing various positions in various Trump administrations is that Trump nominates him either after someone else fails, or in the middle of chaos, and the Republican caucus breathes a big sigh of relief. He’s been the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Manhattan U.S. attorney, and now he is poised (probably) to be the director of national intelligence, although his nomination is now stalled.
He doesn’t really have a constituency within either the MAGA hordes or the conservative movement generally, as evidenced by this unenthusiastically noncommittal semi-endorsement from Senate Majority Leader John Thune: “I think he’s considered to be a very qualified professional with a great skill set for managing a complex problem set.”
Does Thune say, “I think he’s the right person for this job?”
Nah.
He says that Clayton is “considered” by some unnamed person or persons to have various unenumerated office-speak skills of some sort that might be useful to tackle something-or-other. He doesn’t necessarily have the skills for this job. But Thune “thinks” (he’s not sure) that Clayton may be “considered” by someone to be good at something.
This actually makes him head and shoulders above the typical good-at-nothing Trump nominee. It also means that, while no one will be upset if Clayton’s confirmed, no one is upset that his nomination is currently stalled.
Clayton has had a terrific career within the legal profession — it’s not easy to make partner at Sullivan and Cromwell, that’s for sure — but before his nomination during Trump One, no one suggested that he might be the perfect person to head the SEC. At the time (the year was 2017), I was a financial services attorney, and I was kind of dumbfounded that someone who’d spent his career as a deal lawyer was now going to be my regulator.
I mean, I’d never heard of him before!
Had I?
Actually, his name sounded a little familiar, didn’t it?
Then it struck me, probably in the middle of the night, why his name sounded familiar. I pulled out my old rolodex and there he was: Jay Clayton, my summer associate officemate back in 1992, at that law firm where I had bellyflopped loudly and spectacularly, and where he had succeeded quietly but also spectacularly. His wife, Gretchen, was also on the rolodex.
Jay’d really wanted to keep in touch. I hadn’t reciprocated, I guess, although he didn’t follow up, either. He went off to clerk for two years, and by the time he returned, my bellyflop was complete, and I was gone.
He was a nice fellow. He didn’t seem like a MAGA, that is, a loud partisan blowhard; we had MAGA types before MAGA. And it speaks to his lack of prominence as a politico that I had not heard of him nor thought about him for decades.
Here’s one more thing: Trump may prefer loyalists who loudly insist that Trump (the finest president in the history of the United States) won the 2020 election; but those who insist that Trump won the 2020 election may have trouble procuring other employment, post-Trump.
When pressed by a reporter whether our elections have been fraudulent, Jay found a sweet spot.
“There is a great phrase,” he replied. “ ‘Opportunity for fraud.’ Some of the things you do in designing laws is reduce the opportunity for fraud.”
He didn’t say that fraud has occurred. He didn’t even exactly say that the “opportunity for fraud” has occurred, just that it is a “great phrase” (it sure is!) and that sometimes one passes laws to reduce the opportunity for fraud (that’s certainly true — sometimes people do that). He also added that the opportunity for fraud “is not necessary.” This is ambiguously untrue, although undeniably inoffensive-sounding. Whenever Americans communicate with other people, there are opportunities for fraud. Having a front door offers the world an “opportunity for fraud.” Communicating is “necessary” in any functioning economy, and “opportunity for fraud” is inevitable. (Is something that is inevitable also necessary?) He knows that no one can eliminate “the opportunity for fraud,” which is why he endorses “reduc[ing] the opportunity for fraud.” But this language is just enough to keep MAGA partisans happy while not enraging traditional Republicans.
Floating around from job to job in TrumpWorld doesn’t sound like a lot of fun, but he seems to have positioned himself to thrive in that hothouse and also to emerge in four years unscathed without a lot of quotable lunacy that will bar him from later administrations.
He’s done a pretty good job of keeping his hands clean. I just wonder why he’s done it, and what my old friend really thinks about all of this.
^^^
Steven S. Drachman is a writer.