Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

Never Trust a Friend

Greene’s second law says friends betray you and enemies can be won over. The New Hampshire Executive Council spent eighteen months testing that on Kelly Ayotte. The betrayals came from exactly where the law predicts, and for none of the reasons it gives.

On February 11, 2026, the New Hampshire Executive Council confirmed Kelly Ayotte’s second nominee to the state Supreme Court. Superior Court Judge Daniel Will got through 4 to 1. The single vote against him came from David Wheeler, a Milford Republican. One of the votes for him came from Karen Liot Hill of Lebanon, the only Democrat in the room.

Five months earlier the same five people had confirmed Ayotte’s first Supreme Court pick, Bryan Gould, by the identical 4 to 1 margin. That time all four Republicans voted yes and Liot Hill voted no.

Same governor. Same council. Same tally. The dissent moved from one end of the table to the other, and both times the governor got what she wanted, and neither vote had much to do with whose team anybody was on.

Robert Greene’s second law of power says never put too much trust in friends, and learn how to use enemies. Friends betray faster, he argues, because they are easily moved to envy. A former enemy works harder because he has something to prove.

Part One of this series took Greene’s first law and ran it against three New Hampshire careers. This one takes the second law and runs it against the strangest institution in state government.

The verdict: Greene identified the right hazard and the wrong cause. Kelly Ayotte’s friends have cost her far more than her opponents have. Envy has nothing to do with it. The reason is arithmetic, and it is written into the state constitution.

The body that can tell a governor no

Most states hand a governor’s appointments to a senate. New Hampshire hands them to five people elected from five districts on the same two-year clock as the governor herself.

That structure creates something a president never faces. A White House chief of staff serves at will. A councilor serves at the pleasure of about 275,000 constituents in a district drawn by the Legislature, and the governor has no say over any of them. She cannot promote a councilor, demote one, or fire one. She can ask.

Ayotte took office in January 2025 with four Republicans and one Democrat on the Council, the same 4-1 margin Chris Sununu enjoyed for four years. On paper it is the friendliest arrangement available to a New Hampshire governor.

What the friends did

The Gould confirmation in September 2025 went the way the paper suggested it should. Four Republicans yes, the Democrat no. Liot Hill raised concerns about Gould’s prior work on election-law cases for Republicans and about school-funding precedent. The party-line reading held.

It stopped holding four weeks later.

On October 15, 2025, the Republican councilors tabled more than twenty state contracts. Their complaint was that Ayotte’s departments were not putting adequate documentation in the contract packets, at the same time her office was trying to end the printed packet system and move the Council to digital. Her office pegged the printing cost at roughly $200,000 a year against as much as 1.3 million printed pages. The councilors held the contracts hostage until they got their paperwork. Asked whether he would trade digitization for a documentation guarantee, Wheeler said a good negotiator never gives his final answer.

A truce followed within a couple of weeks. Councilors who wanted paper would keep getting paper, delivered by a state employee instead of a state trooper. Ayotte said she would keep pushing on digitization.

Worth sitting with what that fight was about. Elected officials with a constitutional right to review a contract said they could not get the documents behind it. If that is the experience of a sitting councilor, a resident filing a records request on the same contract is not starting from a stronger position. The Council fight was a transparency fight that happened to be conducted by people with subpoena-adjacent power and a microphone.

The bill came due on the roads

The real cost of Law 2 landed on pavement.

New Hampshire tolls had not risen since 2007 and the gas tax had not moved since 2014, while the Legislature stripped tolls off three Everett Turnpike exits between 2014 and 2021. Ayotte and the Republican-led Council announced they would back no toll increase. So the Council did the arithmetic the other way: it cut 34 Highway Fund projects worth $106 million, delayed another $199 million, and paused the municipal grants towns use for smaller bridge work.

Liot Hill, the lone Democrat, filed a minority report arguing the projects should be paid for with higher tolls.

Then the Legislature took the question away from both of them. Toll rates had traditionally been the Council’s business. Republican Sen. Mark McConkey of Freedom and Democratic Sen. David Watters of Dover wrote a plan doubling tolls for drivers without a New Hampshire E-ZPass transponder, projected at $53 million a year, and attached it to the ten-year transportation plan.

Ayotte vetoed it on July 10, 2026, saying she did not support raising the tolls. It was the first veto of a ten-year plan since Craig Benson in 2004. Deputy House Speaker Steven Smith, a Charlestown Republican, said the plan is normally the kind of thing that passes pro forma.

On August 19 the House overrode her 292 to 25. The Senate, where her party holds a veto-proof majority, overrode her 24 to 0. Not one Republican senator stood with the Republican governor. Out-of-state tolls double on January 1, the first such increase in nineteen years. Higher tolls, the remedy the Council’s lone Democrat had put in a minority report months earlier, are now law.

Ayotte issued 31 vetoes this session, a modern record for a New Hampshire governor whose own party runs the State House.

Why Greene misreads it

Greene explains betrayal psychologically. Friends resent what you have. They envy the favor, and the resentment curdles.

Nothing in the record supports that here. Wheeler voted against Will over a brief Will wrote as solicitor general defending Chris Sununu’s 2020 emergency orders, and said the constitution cannot be suspended. That is a position, held publicly and consistently, and Wheeler announced it before the hearing. Kenney, Stephen and Stevens confirmed Will anyway. Liot Hill voted for a nominee she had every partisan reason to oppose and said his temperament persuaded her.

None of that is envy. It is five people with five sets of voters, each facing an election every twenty-four months, doing math about their own districts.

That is the correction the record forces on the law. Greene’s advice assumes betrayal is a character flaw you can screen for. The Council is proof it can be a structural certainty you cannot screen for at all. Ayotte did not pick badly. She cannot pick.

What it costs the Lakes Region

District 1 runs from the Seacoast through the Lakes Region and into the mountains, taking in Gilford, Meredith, Alton, Belmont, Wolfeboro, Conway, Farmington, Wakefield and Durham. Joseph Kenney, a Wakefield Republican, has held it since 2022 and served an earlier term from 2014 to 2018.

Kenney held the line against the toll increase. His district carries the smaller Spaulding Turnpike tolls rather than the heavy Everett or Blue Star collections, so the vote cost his drivers comparatively little. What it did cost, as part of the Council’s response to the revenue gap, was the municipal bridge grant program the towns in his district use, and a share of the $106 million in eliminated projects and $199 million in delayed ones.

Whether that trade was the right one is a question for the people who live there. They get to ask it on September 8, when every seat on the Council is on the ballot, and again on November 3.

The use of it

Read Law 2 as instruction and it fails a governor completely. There is no version of this where Ayotte hires her enemies and fires her friends. The Council is not staff.

Read it as a diagnostic and it earns its place. It tells you to stop counting party labels and start counting calendars. When a New Hampshire official has to decide something hard, the question worth asking is not which party they belong to. It is when they next face voters, who those voters are, and what the decision costs in that district specifically. Liot Hill and Wheeler were the two most predictable councilors of the past eighteen months, and neither was predictable by party.

Part Three takes Law 3, on concealing intentions, into the space where New Hampshire government does its least visible work: the nonpublic session, and what RSA 91-A:3 permits a board to discuss behind a closed door.

The Power Playbook runs through all forty-eight laws. Each entry is scored on the same four axes and added to the running index.

Fact check

Editor’s note: This is commentary and analysis. It quotes no part of Robert Greene’s book beyond the title of Law 2, and every example and conclusion here is original work by Granite State Report. The GSR Power Index is an editorial rating, not data. Vote counts and dates come from the reporting cited above. Characterizations of councilors’ reasoning reflect their own public statements at Council meetings and hearings.