Leadership Quote by Donald Rumsfeld

In eight words, Rumsfeld lays down a hard-edged warning about the kind of reasoning Washington runs on: the argument that’s useful now will become the liability you can’t outrun later. “Convenience” isn’t just laziness here; it’s expedience dressed up as principle. He’s talking about the rhetorical move every administration makes when facts are messy and the clock is loud: pick the justification that fits the moment, even if it doesn’t fully cohere with what you’ve said before or what the public can later verify.

The punch is in “lack integrity.” Rumsfeld isn’t offering a moral homily so much as a survival tip. Integrity functions like structural engineering: it’s what keeps your story from collapsing when pressure hits. An “argument of convenience” might win a vote, a headline, or a hearing, but it creates weak joints - contradictions, selective definitions, shifting standards - that opponents and history can pry open.

“Inevitably trip you up” carries the bureaucrat’s worldview of consequences as procedural, not poetic. The reckoning doesn’t have to be divine; it can be a memo, a FOIA request, a congressional record, a deposition transcript. The subtext is almost Machiavellian: truth isn’t only ethically preferable, it’s strategically safer.

Coming from a defense secretary associated with disciplined messaging and, later, the credibility fallout of the Iraq era, the line also reads as inadvertent self-indictment - or at least a recognition that in national security politics, the most dangerous weapon is a rationale that can’t survive its own paper trail.