BY JAY WILLIS
4 days ago
In the 14 months that have elapsed since Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, Kellyanne Conway has slowly transitioned from one of the administration's most visible public faces to a new role as its token "BREAK GLASS IN CASE OF EMERGENCY" person, who is released from the West Wing storage closet in which she presumably sits only when the White House needs one of her patented inane talking-head interviews to divert attention from its latest humiliating scandal. Unfortunately, it turns out that instead of disappearing from public life altogether, Conway has busied herself in recent months with the task of running the government's response to the opioid epidemic — a public health emergency that kills 175 Americans every day — into the goddamn ground ...
The Office of National Drug Control Policy has been without a permanent director since the president's first nominee for that position, Pennsylvania congressman Tom Marino, withdrew from consideration in light of history of zealous advocacy for legislation friendly to narcotics manufacturers. As a result, the ONDCP was briefly led by a 24-year-old former campaign staffer who lied on his résumé about the length of time he served as vice president of his college fraternity — a distinction that makes him the least-qualified person to hold a White House job who did not marry one of the president's children ...
In response to the Trump administration's habit of failing to execute its basic responsibilities, an often-repeated reassurance is that there are limits to the impact that any single president can have on the government. Much of the day-to-day work of running a country is entrusted to civil servants and subject-matter experts who, while attuned to political realities, are nonetheless insulated from them to a certain extent. When Trump decides to announce sweeping changes to federal policy on Twitter, we count on those people to do what's best for the country and politely ignore him. If they are quietly being marginalized in favor of stooges like Conway, however, it's hard to see how one of this country's most pressing and tragic and preventable problems gets better anytime soon.
https://www.gq.com/story/kellyanne-conway-opioid-crisis-response
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