Spicer was determinedly dour and looked miserable. He was puffy, pinched and pale. And little wonder: Trump has sucked the lifeblood out of him.
.. Washington is abuzz with speculation about when Spicer will be shown the door, but it doesn’t really matter. His credibility, and his dignity, have already been defenestrated.
.. Trump has a long history of walking out of disasters unscathed. It’s those around him — the Spicers of the world — who are destroyed.
- Trump entities filed for bankruptcy protection six times. Investors, lenders and workers took hits — and Trump moved on.
- Trump was caught on tape boasting to Billy Bush about sexually assaulting women — and Billy Bush lost his job.
- Corey Lewandowski and
- Paul Manafort poured themselves into Trump’s campaign and were unceremoniously dumped.
- Michael Flynn is out and potentially in legal trouble.
- The FBI’s Comey arguably handed Trump the election — and learned of his dismissal from TV.
- Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein tarnished his sterling reputation in just two weeks.
- Vice President Pence has been “unflagging in his loyalty,” only to be made “the public face of official narratives that turn out to be misleading or false.”
- Trump humiliated Steve Bannon by publicly downplaying their association.
- Trump repaid House Speaker Paul Ryan’s loyalty by winking at calls for Ryan’s ouster.
- Attempts to defend Trump by aides Reince Priebus and Kellyanne Conway and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have left them sounding clownish.
.. avoided answering questions by saying no fewer than 22 times how very “clear” he or Trump had been about this or that.
.. And, as many a Trump loyalist has discovered, you are useful to Trump until you are not — and then you are cast aside.
Video: Why a Staff ‘Shake-up’ Poses Challenges for President Trump
There are Three Pillars of Political Thought in the white house:
- Economic nationalists: Steve Bannon, Stephenen Miller, Peter Navarro
- Moderate Globalists: Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Gary Cohn, Dina Powell
- Establishment Republicans: Reince Priebus, Sean Spicer
Just What Is Trump Trying to Do in Syria?
One week after the missile strike, we still don’t know what it was meant to accomplish.
Effective signaling in foreign policy and warfare is both vital and no simple matter, as every president discovers.
.. In the annals of pinprick strikes, Trump’s Tomahawk attack now stands as the pinprickiest.
.. That strike was undertaken in response to the discovery of an Iraqi plot to assassinate former President George H. W. Bush during a visit to Kuwait.
.. Iraq never again attempted to kill a U.S. president, and, indeed, never supported another terrorist attack against Americans
.. the Russians notified the Syrians, who reportedly moved their most important aircraft elsewhere before the strike. The very next day, Syrian airplanes were once again flying from the base to hit rebel targets.
.. from the perspective of international politics, the fact that the airstrip was in the use the next day was not negligible.
.. This attack possibly even eroded the chemical weapons taboo by convincing any would-be transgressors that the worst they could expect would be the loss of a small number of inessential aircraft after an advance warning—in other words, a slap on the wrist.
The clearest signal of all would have required a serious punitive attack on the regime itself, a step whose legality would be open to question and that would risk a dangerous escalation with Russia.
.. The fact that Trump chose the least aggressive option available suggests that the principal audience for the strikes was not in Damascus or Moscow, but in the United States.
.. So was the strike political kabuki
.. Sean Spicer suggested in a news briefing Monday that there was now open-ended U.S. commitment to intervene to stop the killing of civilians.
.. Rex Tillerson added to the confusion by issuing his own series of conflicting signals.
.. the era of Assad family rule was coming to an end—an assessment at odds with most military analysts’ views
.. H.R. McMaster .. suggested that the administration had embraced the goal of regime change in Syria
.. Nikki Haley won the sweepstakes by enunciating war aims more far-reaching than McMaster’s: It is a U.S. priority, she said, “to get the Iranian influence out” of Syria
.. historic conduit to the Shiite community in Lebanon.
.. Trump’s own rhetoric has both echoed and contradicted Haley, as he said on April 11 that “we’re not going into Syria” after asserting just days before that “we have a vital strategic interest in Syria.”
.. boasts of his unpredictability while showing no ability to think one step ahead.
59 Missiles Don’t Equal a Foreign Policy
the public performance of President Trump and his team throughout this tragic episode hardly inspires confidence. On the contrary, the administration demonstrated a dangerous degree of incoherence and inconsistency.
.. Despite a brutal six-year civil war in which Mr. Assad’s forces have been responsible for the deaths of about 200,000 civilians, and despite near universal opposition to his rule by leaders of the civilized world
.. Ms. Haley thought it was the right time to send a signal to Mr. Assad and his allies, Russia and Iran, that the new American president’s priority “is no longer to sit there and focus on getting Assad out.”
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson confirmed this new view, which Sean Spicer, the White House spokesman, described as a simple recognition of “political reality.”
.. For months they have suggested that “America First” meant that the country should not become mired in the region’s civil wars and violent upheavals.
.. public reversal
- .. Mr. Trump raised doubts about the longstanding “one China” policy, only to endorse it weeks later.
- .. contradictory statements about NATO
- .. There had been talk of scrapping the Iran nuclear accord
.. Where the administration stands on any number of major issues can depend on the day of the week.
.. inability or refusal to articulate — or even formulate — an overarching foreign policy beyond Mr. Trump’s nationalistic slogan “America First”
.. disconnect between Nikki Haley .. and the White House
.. give heart to dictators who view inconsistency as weakness.
.. Mr. Trump has allowed, or perhaps encouraged, the creation of confusing lines of authority and alternative centers of power within the White House
.. Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, has emerged as the president’s foreign policy troubleshooter, playing a prominent role in the administration’s talks with China, visiting Iraq
.. These are jobs traditionally given to seasoned diplomats, something Mr. Kushner is not.
.. Fixing this problem is a straightforward matter of political power, will and discipline.
.. he has put down America’s moral leadership in the world while talking up dictators and strongmen