Kelly cracks down on West Wing back channels to Trump
August 3, 2017 by admin
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When new White House chief of staff John Kelly huddled with senior staff on his first day at work, he outlined a key problem in President Donald Trump’s White House that he planned to fix: Bad information getting into the president’s hands.
Kelly told the staff that information needed to flow through him — whether on paper or in briefings — because the president would make better decisions if given good information.
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Kelly, a retired Marine general, faces an uphill path when it comes to his stated goal of instilling order in the White House, from aides who have directly reported to the president and don’t want to see their power curbed to Trump’s own itchy Twitter finger. In talks with congressional leaders, friends and longtime associates, he has bluntly described how serious the problems he faces in the West Wing are, according to more than a half-dozen people familiar with the conversations.
“John Kelly knows the challenges he is facing,” said Leon Panetta, a former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton who spoke to Kelly after he took the job. “He’s not going to just stand to the side and watch the White House fall apart piece by piece.”
But several people who have spoken with him say Kelly believes that making sure Trump is getting good information is among the biggest challenges he faces as he takes over from Reince Priebus, the former Republican National Committee chairman who was dismissed by the president last week.
Since starting this week, Kelly has told aides that anyone briefing the president needs to show him the information first. The Trump West Wing tradition of aides dropping off articles on the president’s desk — then waiting for him to react, with a screaming phone call or a hastily scheduled staff meeting, must stop. He will not accept aides walking into the Oval Office and telling the president information without permission — or without the information being vetted.
“He basically said, ‘The president has to get good briefings, he has to get good intelligence,’” one senior White House official said. “We have to be putting him in a position to make good decisions.”
In the West Wing, many of the president’s most controversial decisions have been attributed to bad information, partially because the president is easily swayed by the last person he has talked to — or the last thing he has read.
For example, he accused President Barack Obama of tapping his phone line in Trump Tower after seeing comments from a conservative talk show host and a Breitbart News article. He has often posted some of his most controversial tweets while watching Fox News and stewing. He has sometimes seemed to view television accounts of the news as fact more than information from people armed with classified information. He has made decisions about legal matters or major policy decisions while consulting with some aides — only to reverse them after talking to family members or friends, who he dials late at night.
He has been given information of dubious quality, from stories by GotNews.com, a blog written by a right-wing provocateur named Chuck Johnson to segments of debunked documentaries. He has, at times, listened to real estate friends about legislative strategy while ignoring Speaker Paul Ryan or Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
By limiting information, and making it go through proper channels, Kelly is “ensuring Trump doesn’t make his decisions based on some bullshit he watched at midnight or on Breitbart,” said Chris Whipple, who recently wrote a book on the chief-of-staff role.
A White House spokeswoman didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Kelly and senior West Wing officials don’t believe Trump will fully change. He is not going to stop tweeting, for example, and they expect him to keep dialing old friends in New York after hours — and that he will likely huddle with aides when Kelly is not around. Senior officials are likely to still give him articles to read without Kelly knowing. “He’s not under the impression he can tell Donald Trump, ‘Oh, you’re going to do it my way,” one Kelly associate said. “He’s not delusional about it.”
But so far, Kelly has received some buy-in to creating more discipline. Aides were startled earlier this week to see Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter, at a senior staff meeting, two White House officials said. Both Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, have agreed to the new order, people close to them say. Steve Bannon, the president’s strategist, has told others he thinks having a military-like chain-of-command will help the West Wing.
Aides have begun raising more issues with Kelly, several West Wing aides said, whereas they previously would avoid Priebus and go straight to the president. And Trump’s friends say he has expressed an optimistic tone on the phone, thinking the mood was improving.
“What we’ve seen in the past six months is a new president who has never governed and trying to adjust, and he is finding the right people for the right jobs,” said Chris Ruddy, a longtime friend. “Reince was not a manager. I think he had the president’s interests at heart, and he wanted him to succeed, but you can’t learn to be a manager of a complex organization, how to hire and fire people and develop strategy, in a matter of months.”
Panetta, who served as director of the CIA and secretary of defense under President Barack Obama, said he faced many similar issues when he became Clinton’s chief of staff in 1994. Warring aides and advisers were giving the president different messages. He would stay up late and talk with friends on the phone from Arkansas. “Too many people who didn’t have a portfolio were walking in and out of the Oval,” he said.
Panetta said he created a process by which the president would tell him about his conversations, and he would ask every person briefing the president to outline the options — and that he installed a more chain-of-command system where people knew who they were reporting to and what their responsibilities were. But there were still hiccups.
“While you’re trying to develop a policy process, and you’re trying to work with people who are knowledgeable, and the president is talking to whoever he likes and decides he’s going to tweet out something, that is a recipe for chaos,” Panetta said. “The success or failure of this administration is going to depend on whether the president actually gives John Kelly the power to do what he needs to do.”
Those close to Trump say time will tell whether Kelly can succeed. Trump sometimes sours on aides after several months, and the 71-year-old billionaire has enjoyed the freewheeling style that has proven problematic in the West Wing. “In private business, Donald Trump would often defer to his managers if they are capable and competent,” Ruddy said. “He had a team who was with him for decades. There wasn’t a lot of turnover.”
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‘Time to Move On’: Senate GOP Flouts Trump After Health Care Defeat
August 2, 2017 by admin
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“I don’t think he’s got much experience in the Senate, as I recall,” Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, said of Mr. Mulvaney, tweaking a former House member. “And he’s got a big job. He ought to do that job and let us do our job.”
The Senate has planned non-health care votes all week on the president’s own nominees.
After subsisting around the edges of criticism throughout Mr. Trump’s tenure so far — saying they were “concerned” by his campaign’s Russia ties, “troubled” over the firing of the F.B.I. director James B. Comey, unsure if a war with MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” was helping the conservative agenda — Republican senators have emerged from the health care defeat with fewer apparent qualms about flouting the White House.
Unlike many state-level Republicans who have long defied the president, like Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, Mr. Trump’s allies in the Capitol have generally held firm all year, almost always voting to support his agenda and deflecting questions about his erratic behavior and chaotic West Wing.
To date, lawmakers’ loyalty has been rewarded with presidential finger-pointing, attempted intervention into the Senate voting calendar and threats against lawmakers’ own health care coverage, Mr. Trump’s latest gambit over the weekend.
The senators are not tired of all the winning, as promised. They are grappling with how to navigate a moment that might include little of it, despite total Republican control in Washington, led by a distractible and often disengaged standard-bearer who has never much tried to sell the public on the merits of their policy aims anyway.
“If this was our Faustian bargain,” Senator Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, wrote in a new book, “Conscience of a Conservative,” reckoning with the Trump age, “then it was not worth it.”
Mr. Trump’s reign atop American politics has been specked with misguided predictions of Republicans’ mass exodus from his thrall.
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Surely the “Access Hollywood” video, in which he boasted of sexually assaulting women, would be too much.
Or his baseless claims of voter fraud in an election he won.
Or his firing of Mr. Comey.
In all these instances, and likely more to come, expectations have been upended by a simple reality: Republicans are politically tethered to Mr. Trump, who remains broadly popular with Republican primary campaign voters, and any hope of legislative accomplishment runs through his desk.
Lately, though, frustrations have seeped into open view with notable frequency.
Senators have stewed most recently — perhaps more than at any other point in Mr. Trump’s term — over his public disparaging of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a former senator from Alabama.
Several of Mr. Sessions’s former colleagues rallied behind him and strongly cautioned Mr. Trump that “there will be holy hell to pay,” in the words of Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, if Mr. Sessions is fired.
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The president’s latest rampaging Twitter posts, including renewing his call to do away with the legislative filibuster in the Senate, have not helped, either. Among other issues, like widespread support in the chamber for maintaining the 60-vote standard on most major legislation, Mr. Trump has overlooked the fact that his health care bill failed to meet even the 51-vote threshold required in this case.
“If we change those rules, it’d be the end of the Republican Party,” said Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, the body’s longest-serving Republican. “And it’d be the end of the Senate.”
Asked if Mr. Trump’s antics were hindering progress, Mr. Hatch said, “It doesn’t help.”
“He just doesn’t understand,” Mr. Hatch added of Mr. Trump’s grasp of Senate protocol. “He’d like to get more cooperation up here. And he’s not getting very much, to be honest with you.”
Yet while Republicans have said they will not give up on a health care overhaul in the long term, last week’s failure has made clear the limits of their legislative ambitions.
At least as troubling to some Republicans is what the president’s conduct — and the party’s tolerance of it — has reflected about the state of modern conservatism.
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“We have principles for a reason,” Mr. Flake said in an interview, alluding to concerns “in matters of demeanor and character.” “If we’re willing to abandon those principles at the drop of a hat, then we aren’t very committed.”
Mr. Flake, one of the few national Republican officeholders who declined to endorse Mr. Trump last year, was asked if Mr. Trump is fit to be president.
“That was decided by the voters,” he said. “They decided.”
Asked if he preferred President Barack Obama, with whom he had a warm relationship despite disagreements on policy, Mr. Flake said he was “not going to grade presidents here.”
Public introspection has not been universal. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the chamber’s laconic majority leader, told reporters he had not yet read Mr. Flake’s book — with its blistering words about the party’s direction — but said he planned to “get around to it at some point.”
Still, Mr. McConnell and his conference have at times demonstrated their independence from the president. Last week, the Senate and the House both passed sanctions on Russia nearly unanimously, against the administration’s wishes.
And Mr. McConnell has made two things clear to the president: He plans to move on from health care repeal for now, declining to mention it from the Senate floor so far this week, and he has no plans to scuttle the legislative filibuster.
“It’s pretty obvious that our problem on health care was not the Democrats,” he told reporters on Tuesday, challenging Mr. Trump’s logic on the prospective rule change. “We didn’t have 50 Republicans.”
Some lawmakers have seemed to relish Congress’s assertions of autonomy, after years of mushrooming executive power.
Senator Richard Shelby, Republican of Alabama, was asked if Congress had succeeded in demonstrating its muscle anew during this chapter of the Trump administration.
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“I think we should,” he said. “We have three branches of government.”
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