It’s pretty lame that the Times ran this story not having seen the memo, but only having had it read to them over the phone. But that’s the blood-in-the-water atmosphere in Washington now. Seriously, do you doubt for a minute that this Comey memo exists?
.. Comey could be lying, but we already know that Trump fired Comey in part because of the Russia investigation, because Trump said so himself in the NBC interview.
.. Trump is ignorant of the norms and practices of the presidency, and thinks he can trample them.
Hubris makes you stupid. Trump came to Washington knowing that the Deep State would have it out for him. They hardly have to lift a finger — he’s taking himself down.
Trump: ‘Normalized’ but Still Scary
What happens when the red phone rings at three in the morning? Forward the call to Defense Secretary Mattis.
And this is not to deny the insanity, incoherence, and sheer weirdness emanating daily from the White House, for which we’ve all come up with our own coping technique. Here’s mine: I simply view President Trump as the Wizard of Oz.
.. Loud and bombastic. A charlatan. Nothing behind the screen — other than the institutional chaos that defines his White House and the psychic chaos that governs his ever-changing mind. What to do? Ignore what’s behind the curtain. Deal with what comes out in front: the policy, the pronouncements, the actions.
.. At which point, out of the blue, Trump tells Reuters that Seoul will have to pay for the THAAD system. And by the way, that five-year-old U.S.–South Korea free-trade agreement is a disaster and needs to be torn up.
Now, South Korea is in the middle of a highly charged presidential campaign. The pro-American president was recently impeached and is now under indictment. The opposition party is ahead. It is wary of the U.S., accommodating to North Korea, and highly negative about installing that THAAD system on its soil.
We had agreed with Seoul that they would provide the land and the infrastructure, and we would pay the $1 billion cost. Without warning, Trump reneges on the deal, saying South Korea will have to foot the bill. This stirs anti-American feeling and gives opposition candidate Moon Jae-in the perfect campaign issue.
.. So self-defeating was the idea that within three days, national-security adviser H. R. McMaster had to walk it all back, assuring the South Koreans that we would indeed honor our agreement and send no $1 billion invoice.
.. As for the trade deal, the installation of THAAD has so angered China that it has already initiated an economic squeeze on South Korea. To which Trump would add a trade rupture with the United States. The South Korean blunder reinforces lingering fears about Trump. Especially because it was an unforced error. What happens in an externally caused crisis? Then, there is no hiding, no guardrails, no cushioning. It’s the wisdom and understanding of one man versus whatever the world has thrown up against us. However normalized this presidency may be day to day, in such a moment all bets are off. What happens when the red phone rings at three in the morning? I’d say: Let it ring. Let the wizard sleep. Forward the call to Defense Secretary Mattis.
Can a Free Mind Survive in Trump’s White House
Colonel McMaster had spent the first two years of the war at Central Command under General John Abizaid, trying to get their boss, Donald Rumsfeld, the Defense Secretary, to acknowledge that America was fighting an insurgency in Iraq. Rumsfeld refused to admit it, because it went against his high-tech approach to the global war on terror. He would fax McMaster pages from Che Guevara’s memoirs to prove that Iraq didn’t fit the classical definition.
.. McMaster believed that a counterinsurgency strategy—putting the focus on securing the population and bringing economic development, not just killing the enemy—could turn things around.
.. He sent his troops into the city and kept them there, establishing connections with local leaders and Iraqi Army units, gathering intelligence on the jihadis, providing security in the streets, and showing that the Americans—appearances throughout the country notwithstanding—were not abandoning Iraq to its warring factions.
.. it failed strategically because it could not resolve the basic struggle for political power between sectarian groups. As McMaster told me again and again, counterinsurgency is eighty per cent political.
.. He could also be tough on his men, who did not universally love him.
.. McMaster was too intellectually rambunctious for his own good.
.. Lieutenant General McMaster has a lot of faith in American power, especially military power.
.. I imagine that he would shake his head over the conspiracy theories about Muslims that held Flynn spellbound.
.. I wasn’t surprised to learn from a mutual friend that McMaster considered his new boss’s ban on refugees and immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries to be heinous and self-defeating.
The national-security adviser has to master three fundamental things.
- He has to stay on top of fast-moving events around the world while helping to develop long-term American strategy across regions and issues.
- He has to allow the views of the key national-security officials in Washington to reach the President in an honest and independent way.
- And he has to win the trust of the President himself
.. Will he have the bureaucratic skill to outmaneuver the long knives of Steve Bannon and his shadow National Security Council?