Upheaval is now standard operating procedure inside the White House

Zippyjuan

Zippyjuan

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...l?tid=test_hp_curation&utm_term=.3749a9223d67

With President Trump in his fourth full week in office, the upheaval inside the administration that West Wing officials had optimistically dismissed as growing pains is now embedding itself as standard operating procedure.

Trump — distracted by political brushfires, often of his own making — has failed to fill such key posts as White House communications director, while sub-Cabinet positions across agencies and scores of ambassadorships around the globe still sit empty.

Upset about damaging leaks of his calls with world leaders and other national security information, Trump has ordered an internal investigation to find the leakers. Staffers, meanwhile, are so fearful of being accused of talking to the media that some have resorted to a secret chat app — Confide — that erases messages as soon as they’re read.

The chaos and competing factions that were a Trump trademark in business and campaigning now are starting to define his presidency, according to interviews with a dozen White House officials as well as other Republicans. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly discuss internal White House dynamics and deliberations.

Some senior officials are worried about their own standing with the president, who through his casual conversations with friends and associates sometimes seems to hint that a shake-up could come at a moment’s notice. Aides said they strive to avoid appearing “weak” or “low* energy” — two of Trump’s least favorite attributes.

On Monday afternoon, as speculation of a staff shake-up was rife on cable news channels, Trump made clear to a small group of reporters what he thought of his chief of staff: “Reince is doing a great job. Not a good job. A great job,” the president said.

“None of this is normal,” said Steve Schmidt, a Republican strategist and top official in President George W. Bush’s White House, who has been highly critical of Trump and ticked through controversies that included false White House statements and the administration’s halted travel ban targeting seven majority-Muslim countries. “The incompetence, the sloppiness and the leaking is unprecedented.”

The ongoing saga of Michael Flynn — which left the White House paralyzed for much of the weekend and into Monday — encapsulates the problems.

As scrutiny of the national security adviser has intensified over the past few days amid reports that he had misled colleagues about his talks of sanctions with a Russian envoy, administration officials found themselves in an uncomfortable holding pattern, unsure about whether to defend him and privately grumbling about the indecisiveness on high.

The problem: Trump had yet to weigh in, and aides and advisers were loath to take sides without knowing for certain whether their often mercurial and erratic boss wanted to keep Flynn or cut him loose.

On Monday, after Trump made it through a joint news conference with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau without being asked about Flynn, a group of reporters gathered outside Spicer’s office for more than 80 minutes. Spicer twice declined to answer questions about Flynn. When White House chief of staff Reince Priebus walked by, he was asked whether the president still had confidence in Flynn. Priebus gave no answer.

Not long after, Kellyanne Conway, the counselor to the president, said Trump had “full confidence” in Flynn. Yet a few minutes later, Spicer issued an official — and conflicting — statement, saying Trump was “evaluating the situation.”

Late Monday night, the White House announced that Flynn had resigned.
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More at link.
 
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Opinion: A White House where no one is in charge

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...rid_collaborative_3_na&utm_term=.3722b4204d97

In early January, House Speaker Paul Ryan met on the issue of tax reform with a delegation from the president-elect. Attending were future chief strategist and senior counselor Stephen K. Bannon, future chief of staff Reince Priebus, future senior adviser Jared Kushner, future counselor Kellyanne Conway and future senior policy adviser Stephen Miller. As the meeting began, Ryan pointedly asked, “Who’s in charge?”

Silence.

It is still the right question. Former officials with deep knowledge of the presidency describe Donald Trump’s White House staff as top-heavy, with five or six power centers and little vertical structure. “The desire to be a big shot is overrunning any sense of team,” says one experienced Republican. “This will cause terrible dysfunction, distraction, disloyalty and leaks.”

Trump has run a family business but never a large organization. Nor has he seen such an organization as an employee. “Trump,” says another former official, “is ill-suited to appreciate the importance of a coherent chain of command and decision-making process. On the contrary, his instincts run instead toward multiple mini power centers, which rewards competing aggressively for Trump’s favor.”

This seems to be the dynamic unfolding on the weekend political talk shows. These have traditionally been venues for an administration to communicate with media and political elites (whose religion dedicates Sunday morning to the gods of policy, scandal and pith). But Trump surrogates are clearly appealing to a different audience: an audience of one, who may well tweet them a nice pat on the back. The goal — as Miller demonstrated over the weekend — is not to persuade or even explain. It is to confidently repeat Trump’s most absurd or unsubstantiated claims from the previous week. This time it was electorally decisive voter fraud in New Hampshire (for which there is no evidence). Next weekend it could be the harm done by vaccination, or the possible murder of Antonin Scalia (both of which Trump has raised in the past). It is the main function of Trump surrogates to restate Trump’s “alternative facts” in a steady voice.

It is hard for me (and everyone else outside the White House) to know exactly what is going on in the West Wing. Leaks may provide a distorted picture. But, in this case, there have been an awful lot of them, clearly from the highest levels. And they uniformly reveal a management structure and culture in which the highest goal is not to display competence or to display creativity but to display loyalty, defined as sucking up. The philosophy of competing power centers has, indeed, produced terrible dysfunction, distraction, disloyalty and leaks. Trump’s failed and frightening executive order on immigration is exhibit A. But now the National Security Council seems to be in a full-scale crisis of purpose, thoroughly demoralized and trying to discern American policy from presidential tweets. With the real NSC badly weakened by the travails of the national security adviser, it seems that Bannon is developing a shadow NSC to serve his well-developed nationalist agenda.

The president may thrive in chaos, but the presidency does not. A president needs aides who will give him honest information and analysis, not compete for his favor. This may even involve checking a president’s mistaken instincts. There will always be competing power centers in the West Wing. But the White House runs best when there is, according to a former White House official, “a strong chief of staff, empowered by the president to exercise absolute control over all logistics, decision-making processes and execution. He can have as many advisers as he wants, but until one person has full control over the process, chaos will persist.”

What does it mean to have a president who seems so hungry for affirmation and so influenced by slights? I recall (from working in George W. Bush’s White House) the briefing material that senior staff received before international visits. It always included detailed personality profiles of foreign leaders. Surely other intelligence services prepare the same way. Might Trump’s impulsive (and perhaps compulsive) reactions be manipulated by enemies and allies, either to allay or to enrage?

For whatever reason, Trump sees benefits in surrounding himself with a swarm of disorder and disruption. So far, that has helped produce relatively small, self-made crises. But what about the big ones caused by the relentless flow of events? The president will face challenges of amazing complexity that must be addressed in real time, without do-overs. Will the president be able to act swiftly, on the best information and the best advice?

Silence.
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Yeah! They should let more of those Obammy hires get involved in the decision making process.

Oh, Wapo again. Fake news...
 
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No worries, the shadow government is in control as always. At very least break the link to that septic line neo con war pushing rag Compost.
 
seapilot said:
No worries, the shadow government is in control as always. At very least break the link to that septic line neo con war pushing rag Compost.
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The same shadow government which has being ordering more US/NATO troops to go near the Russian borders to.
 
Origanalist said:
Yes Zippy, we all know the media is on a mission to get Trump create the Legend of Trump. If I want to read this $#@! I would subscribe to a $#@!ing newspaper.
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FIFY. Everybody is playing their part and the audience is being fooled into thinking that the media who created and supported him at the expsense of other candidates is against him. Dont buy into the charade.
 
Interesting how whenever a story breaks about Russian interference, the same group of members always seems to show up here calling bullshit.
 
CPUd said:
Interesting how whenever a story breaks about Russian interference, the same group of members always seems to show up here calling bull$#@!.
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Because it is bullshit. I know war drum beating when I hear it, and I heard it many years ago, and I will not tolerate it, nor any of its other bloody tones.
There is no need for Russia to be an enemy. We'd be way better off as friends anyways. So called liberty lovers, yet always pushing that war propaganda narrative, doing the bidding of the World War III trumpeters.

I see your ugly faces, demons of war. Lackeys of deception. CIA zombies.
 
Eroberer said:
It's always the same tag team posting these articles.

But some personalities simply need the attention to feel something, right?
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I wish it was that. These two clearly are oblivious, and not interested in dialogue. they continue to push the agenda of the warmongers. They can talk freedom this and liberty that all they want, but it is clear they are not interested in peace, and clearly do not think the CIA is a wretched little propaganda outfit now, with "predictive technologies to see which messages resonate the best on social media and which strategies have the greatest effects (that is what Shareblue has, they have a giant computer hooked up with CIA asset facebook, and are trying to use bayesian filtering to spam the boards, and see which go viral the best. This would be best countered with a bot net army that reposts the worst ones to dead twitter and facebook accounts, giving the illusion of success. If there is a lack of people able to intelligently discern the worst from best, just pick them at random, the statistical noise will kill all their analytics.)*

They are like all the politicians in DC. When it comes to war, and the fed... ..lockstep, they parrot like good little troopers. Everything else is debatable. But war and the fed is the lifeblood of the beast.



*even funnier is how the media is now buying clicks from China, to make it appear they have a wider audience than they do. The emperor has no clothes. Once advertisers figure out they have been defrauded by the NYT et al, there will be lawsuits... ..and the failing new york times will be the failed new york times.
 
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