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The Donald J. Trump administration will be remembered as among the most tumultuous in American history.
The day began like any other in the Trump administration: with a self-inflicted crisis.
It was prime tweeting hour, and at 9:29 a.m., he fired off a missive from the executive mansion:
One in particular decided enough was enough.
The day after the Syria tweets, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis announced his resignation.
It’s all been spun differently now, but few people on the Trump campaign—up to and including the candidate himself—truly expected to win.
It showed.
Nonetheless, the head of Trump’s transition team, New Jersey governor Chris Christie, believed he had a plan, albeit with a staff lagging behind in preparations when compared to its predecessors. Those designs ended up on the ash heap of history, as did their designer.
Fresh off his election victory, President-Elect Trump suddenly decided to sack Christie as the transition chief and make Vice-President-Elect Pence the new chair.
There was the Kushner camp, the Bannon camp, the Conway camp, and others such as Penceland or the so-called Flynn-stones, acolytes of the anointed national security advisor.
“Hope” evaporated on first contact with the president-elect.
He was so focused on his “win” that he could barely focus on the forthcoming task of governing.
Trump carried around maps outlining his electoral victory, which he would pull out at odd times in discussions meant to foc...
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He would beckon his guests, as well as aides, advisors, and incoming cabinet officers, to gaze a...
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His turbulent demeanor and off-the-wall comments—like his continued fixation with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, who were leaving government—were not part of a television persona. They were the real thing.
the president didn’t really seem aware of what he’d done. Some orders were so hastily written that they backfired spectacularly,
Then the president decided to give his
chief political strategist, Steve Bannon, a seat on the National Security Council (NSC). This really got folks up in arms.
The administration was only a few weeks in, and already the mayhem made everyone look foolish.
the president’s inattentiveness and his impulsiveness.
Briefings with Donald Trump are of
an entirely different nature. Early on, briefers were told not to send lengthy documents. Trump wouldn’t read them.
Nor should they bring summaries to the Oval Office. If they must bring paper, then PowerPoint was preferred ...
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He needed more images to keep his interest—and fewer words.
Then they were told to cut back the overall message (on complicated issues such as military readiness or the federal budget) to just three main points. Eh, that was still too much.
Just that one point. Because you cannot focus the commander in chief’s attention on more than one goddamned thing over the course of a meeting, okay?
Some officials refused to believe this
is how it worked. “Are you serious?” they asked, quizzing others who’d alread...
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That would be like speaking Aramaic to Trump through a pillow;
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even if he tried very hard to pay attention, which he didn’t, he wouldn’t be able to understand what the hell he was hearing.
“He is the most distracted person I’ve ever met,” one of the president’s security lieutenants confessed. “He has no fucking clue what we are talking about!” More changes were ordered to cater to
Trump’s peculiarities. Documents were dramatically downsized, and position papers became sound bites. As a result, complex proposals were reduced to a single page (or ideally a paragraph) and translated into Trump’s “winners and losers” tone.
He might tee up a tweet.
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Staff throw up the Bat-Signal,
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“He can’t do this. We’ll all look like idiots, and he’ll get murdered for it in the press,” another exclaims.
He wants to do what he wants to do, consequences be damned.
Some aides grew so worn down by the roller coaster of presidential whims that they started encouraging him to hold more campaign rallies, putting aside the fact that it wasn’t campaign season.
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The events had the dual benefit of giving Trump something “fun” to do and also getting him out of town, where he would hypothetically do less damage. More public events were put on his schedule, allowing frayed
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nerves back in Washington the chance to recover.
lurching from one spontaneous decision to another was more than a distraction.
Trump was all over the place.
He was like a twelve-year-old in an air traffic control tower, pushing the buttons of government indiscriminately, indifferent to the planes skidding across the runway and the fli...
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Fundamentally, the president never learned to manage the government’s day-to-day functions, or showed any real interest in doing so.
This remains a problem. He doesn’t know how the executive branch works. As a consequence, he doesn’t know how to lead it.
He tells the secretary of defense
to do things that are the responsibility of the secretary of state.
He tells the attorney general to do things that are the job of the director o...
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The White House, quite simply, is broken.
Policies are rarely coordinated or thoroughly considered. Major issues are neglected until a crisis develops.
As the old saying goes, this was no way to run a railroad. In fact, if railroads were run this way, trains would go in the wrong direction, or never show up at all, or crash into each other.
