Other than Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, the lone remaining enforcer is Kelly. But his power as chief of staff has been diminished. Officials said the days of Kelly hovering in the Oval Office morning to night and screening the president’s calls are over. Trump is largely circumventing Kelly’s strict protocols.
The president recently reached out to some people Kelly had sought to excommunicate, calling former communications director Anthony Scaramucci to banter about politics and inviting Lewandowski and Bossie to dinner in the residence.
“He’s rotating back to the people who actually like him and is more willing to take advice from those people,” Scaramucci said. “They’re more honest with him, and he’s more comfortable with them.”
Allies said Trump is reverting to the way he led the Trump Organization from his 26th-floor office suite at Trump Tower in Manhattan. There, staffers were functionaries or lawyers, and many of his advisers were outside the company — rival business leaders, media figures and bankers. Back then, Trump controlled his orbit himself from behind his cluttered desk, relying on assistant Rhona Graff to field calls.
.. Ascendant in the West Wing are advisers who play to Trump’s gut: Kudlow on tax cuts and deregulation, Bolton on a muscular approach to foreign affairs, Peter Navarro on protectionist trade policies, Stephen Miller on crackdowns on undocumented immigrants and Kellyanne Conway on an open press strategy and tangling with reporters.
.. Like Conway, Bolton and Kudlow are seasoned cable news commentators who share Trump’s hard-charging instincts and have no illusions about his governing style. Officials said they are expected to cater to the president’s wishes and seek to avoid the internal knife fights that have befallen many a Trump aide.
.. “Gary was really good, but I don’t know if Gary ever embraced the Trump economic ideas. He was more of a traditional Democrat or moderate Republican. Kudlow is a real cheerleader for the tax cuts in a way Gary never was, although he helped get them passed.”
.. Trump has been frustrated by news stories of White House tumult and has ordered aides to contest the notion that there is chaos.
.. “The top story, number one, is Stormy Daniels,” King said he told Trump. “I told him it’s utterly ridiculous. I just came back from Hamburg, Germany, and they were just laughing at us.”
Donald Trump’s Staff Shake-Up Leaves Jim Mattis in a Key Role
New national-security partners, and conflicting viewpoints, will test the defense secretary
President Donald Trump has, to great fanfare, remade his national-security team in recent days. But the most intriguing and consequential member of that team isn’t one of the newcomers, but rather the one who has been there all along: Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.
Mr. Mattis is the most enigmatic member of the Trump team. He’s the Iran hard-liner who defends the nuclear deal with Iran. He’s the warrior who argues for using diplomacy to address North Korea’s nuclear threat. He’s the military man who argues against allowing trade disputes to disrupt ties to key allies.
And he’s the one senior official who has learned how to disagree with Mr. Trump privately without being publicly skewered by the president for doing so.
All those positions were easier for Mr. Mattis to sustain when he was joined at the hip with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. But Mr. Tillerson is gone now, and the key question is whether Mr. Mattis can continue to do his thing when paired with new Secretary of State-to-be Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton, both of whom strike quite different tones on those key issues.
“I think he’s more important than ever,” says former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel. The question, Mr. Hagel adds, is “how long Mattis can survive in that environment.…There’s an intersection of conflict coming here, and it’s been coming.”
.. the appearance of disconnects between the president and his team on key issues. Consider: Mr. Trump has said the war in Iraq that began in 2003 was one of the biggest strategic blunders in American history. Mr. Bolton has been one of its most vocal champions. Mr. Trump has repeatedly questioned whether Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential campaign. Mr. Pompeo, the current director of the Central Intelligence Agency, has embraced the intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia did so. Mr. Trump has scheduled a summit meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Mr. Bolton, the former American ambassador to the United Nations, has made the case for launching a pre-emptive military strike against North Korea.
.. Which makes Mr. Mattis all the more important as a stabilizing force. He has survived the crosscurrents of Trump administration intrigues through a combination of bureaucratic savvy and careful management of internal splits. Trump advisers say he has mastered the art of convincing the president he agrees with his goals while also sometimes differing with him on how to reach them. He has kept his public profile low enough that he isn’t seen as a rival to the president for attention or glory, while quietly cultivating good relations with members of both parties in Congress.
The Military Options for North Korea
Some sort of strike is likely unavoidable unless China agrees to regime change in Pyongyang.
.. North Korea test-launched on Friday its first ballistic missile potentially capable of hitting America’s East Coast. It thereby proved the failure of 25 years of U.S. nonproliferation policy... If Tehran’s long collusion with Pyongyang on ballistic missiles is even partly mirrored in the nuclear field, the Iranian threat is nearly as imminent as North Korea’s... Proliferators happily exploit America’s weakness and its short attention span. They exploit negotiations to gain the most precious asset: time to resolve the complex scientific and technological hurdles to making deliverable nuclear weapons... the only durable diplomatic solution is to persuade China that reunifying the two Koreas is in its national interest as well as America’s, thus ending the nuclear threat by ending the bizarre North Korean regime... Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has it right. “What’s unimaginable to me,” he said last month at the Aspen Security Forum, “is allowing a capability that would allow a nuclear weapon to land in Denver.” So what are the military options, knowing that the U.S. must plan for the worst?.. First, Washington could pre-emptively strike at Pyongyang’s known nuclear facilities, ballistic-missile factories and launch sites, and submarine bases... Second, the U.S. could wait until a missile is poised for launch toward America, and then destroy it. This would provide more time but at the cost of increased risk... Third, the U.S. could use airstrikes or special forces to decapitate North Korea’s national command authority, sowing chaos, and then sweep in on the ground from South Korea to seize Pyongyang, nuclear assets, key military sites and other territory... All these scenarios pose dangers for South Korea, especially civilians in Seoul, which is within the range of North Korean artillery near the Demilitarized Zone. Any military attack must therefore neutralize as much of the North’s retaliatory capability as possible together with the larger strike... Stopping North Korea and Iran may be the last chance to act before nuclear weapons become a global commonplace.
John Bolton Isn’t Dangerous. The World Is.
Miscalculate in favor of war, and you risk an unnecessary bloodbath — one that America would win, but at immense cost in blood and treasure. Miscalculate in favor of peace, and you risk — God forbid — American cities in flames, a genocidal nuclear exchange in the Middle East, or (perhaps most likely) future military confrontations with aggressive and hostile foreign powers that we can’t truly win because of their own nuclear shield. Remember the words of Krishnaswamy Sundarji, former chief of staff of the Indian army: “One principal lesson of the Gulf War is that, if a state intends to fight the United States, it should avoid doing so until and unless it possesses nuclear weapons.”
.. World history is littered with both kinds of mistakes, and our recent histories with both Iran and North Korea indicate that bipartisan policies of engagement, negotiation, and forbearance have not, in fact, moderated either regime. Iran continues to export jihad, work to kill Americans, and ally with our Russian rival to engineer a bloodbath in Syria — even as the Iran “deal” fails to deliver on Obama’s dream of somehow bringing Iran into the community of nations. North Korea is well on its way to developing a nuclear first-strike capability that threatens the mainland United States.
.. To be a hawk isn’t to see war as a first resort. It’s to see war as a realistic option — an option that ideally makes diplomatic overtures more urgent and effective. As the most powerful nation on the face of the earth, we should not conduct our diplomacy as if we fear war more than our potential foes do... A nuclear-armed Iran is far more dangerous than John Bolton. A North Korea capable of incinerating American cities is far more dangerous than John Bolton... It’s time to give a hawk a chance.