a fed-up and frustrated President Trump turned to his two top aides and told them he had had enough of their incessant knife-fights in the media.
“Work this out,” Mr. Trump said, according to two people briefed on the exchange. The admonition was aimed at Stephen K. Bannon, the tempestuous chief strategist, and Reince Priebus
.. He has a high tolerance for chaos, and a unique gift for creating it — and, despite his famous “You’re fired!” tagline from the show “The Apprentice,” an aversion to dismissing people.
.. now finds himself in the undesirable position of being caught between the president and his family. That is a position that others have not survived, most notably Corey Lewandowski, the first of the president’s three campaign managers.
Ned Ryun: Trump WH Breaking into Two Factions — National Populists vs. Liberal NYC Democrats
“Since inauguration, it was really about four camps,” Ryun replied. “It was the Kushner camp, it was the Bannon camp, it was the Reince camp, and it was the Pence camp. But I’m starting to think, based off what I was hearing from yesterday and then reading reports this morning, that this is becoming actually more of two camps – that it really is the national populists, really led by Bannon, versus, quite frankly – there’s no other way to describe them – the liberal New York City set that have come in.”
.. “God bless them, they’re part of the Trump family, but let’s not kid ourselves: they are part of the Manhattan liberal set,” he said of the latter duo.
.. “The people that voted for Donald Trump voted for very specific things,” he noted. “They do want to see a wall. They want to see immigration dealt with. They want to see healthcare reform. They want to see tax reform. They want to see all of these things.”
.. “I have real concerns, not only about the New York liberal set that has come into the White House. … I am more and more concerned about the Goldman Sachs people that have come into the administration,” Ryun professed.
He said they have a “different worldview than the American people that voted Trump in.”
.. my hope is that Trump will say, ‘I know what got me in. I know what brought me to the White House. Steve Bannon is really the lead cheerleader on that front. Keep Steve close. Listen to Steve.
.. I really do think we’re going to get something done with health care. There’s going to be a massive step in the right direction. I do think we’ve got a real shot at tax reform.”
.. “If the other guys win, I guarantee you Bannon’s out, Reince is out, Spicer’s out, the corporate New York set is in.”
NYT: Jared Kushner Omitted Meeting with Foreign Officials on Security Clearance Forms
Jo Becker and Matthew Rosenberg report in the New York Times that President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner omitted mention of his meetings foreign government officials when he filed his security clearance paperwork.
.. When Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, sought the top-secret security clearance that would give him access to some of the nation’s most closely guarded secrets, he was required to disclose all encounters with foreign government officials over the last seven years.
But Mr. Kushner did not mention dozens of contacts with foreign leaders or officials in recent months. They include a December meeting with the Russian ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak, and one with the head of a Russian state-owned bank, Vnesheconombank, arranged at Mr. Kislyak’s behest.
Bannon’s Out. But Did H.R. McMaster Win?
in mid-March, General McMaster tried to fire Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the senior director for intelligence programs at the National Security Council. Mr. Cohen-Watnick, a holdover from Michael Flynn’s aborted stint as national security adviser, complained to Mr. Bannon and Jared Kushner, who prevailed on Mr. Trump to have him reinstated.
The idea that the 30-year-old Mr. Cohen-Watnick should be senior director for intelligence programs — a position held by senior career C.I.A. officers in the Obama administration and others — is dubious. Furthermore, General McMaster’s decision to get rid of Mr. Cohen-Watnick was well within his pay grade.
.. A few days after his reinstatement, Mr. Cohen-Watnick was one of three White House staffers who facilitated a briefing to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes on the “incidental surveillance” of Trump campaign staff members, which Mr. Nunes used to distract news media and public attention from the committee’s investigation of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government to influence the outcome of the presidential election.
A little unpacking revealed how artlessly pretextual this distraction was: Mr. Nunes professed the need to learn new information about surveillance to warn the president, yet that very information was in the possession of the White House and accessible to Mr. Trump without Mr. Nunes’s intervention.
.. One defensible inference is that Mr. Trump wanted to keep a pliable ally as the White House’s principal liaison with the intelligence community.
To arrange Mr. Trump’s reversal of General McMaster’s dismissal of Mr. Cohen-Watnick, Mr. Bannon required no formal position on the National Security Council. Indeed, Mr. Cohen-Watnick’s other inside patron — Mr. Kushner — had no such position.
.. Rex W. Tillerson blithely channeled buzz phrases like “win-win solutions” and “mutual respect” in describing United States-China relations. The phraseology seemed to signal United States capitulation to China’s sphere-of-influence geopolitical stance
.. Matt Pottinger, the senior director for Asia at the National Security Council, had warned in a memo against using such language. The fact that no one seems to have paid him any heed suggests how little the council matters in the Trump White House.
.. Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, implied it would be “silly” to advocate regime change due to the absence of practical alternatives. The next day, Nikki Haley, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, in an emergency session of the United Nations Security Council, struck a very different chord by condemning the regime and saying that the United States could take unilateral action should the Security Council fail to respond effectively. (Mr. Trump then dialed up his own language, saying his attitude toward Syria had “changed very much.”)
In each case, the stated position of one national security player did not mesh with that of another.
Among the National Security Council’s key tasks is to help the president arrive at a consensus on a given foreign policy issue by soliciting the views of different agencies and orchestrating compromises in formulating a clear and integrated approach.
.. And perhaps a lack of policy coordination is just the way it is in the Trump administration. But if that is the case, the situation calls into question the National Security Council’s very utility.
..
But for the institution to have real value, regardless of who the players are, Mr. Trump himself needs to respect it more than he apparently does.