Tight messaging and internal discipline don’t make a presidency—the Obama administration was extremely disciplined in its public pronouncements, and it was a disaster in almost every respect. But the present administration suffers from an almost total lack of coherence in its communications to the public and that debilitation has consequences beyond mere politics.
The problem can be located in the Oval Office: When President Trump makes a decision, or reverses one, he doesn’t always tell the relevant people. When he fired FBI Director James Comey, Comey found out from the media. When Trump fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, he did so by tweet; the secretary wasn’t told in advance.
This week, it was U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley’s turn.
Haley wasn’t fired but reprimanded—wrongly. On Sunday, April 15, speaking on Face the Nation, she announced the imposition of new sanctions on Russia for its nefarious abetting of Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime. She said what she had thought, almost certainly correctly, was the president’s position: “Russian sanctions will be coming down. Secretary Mnuchin will be announcing those on Monday if he hasn’t already and they will go directly to any sort of companies that were dealing with equipment related to Assad and chemical weapons use.”
People who’ve followed Haley’s career tell us she has a tendency to say too much too quickly, but in this case she appears to have stated exactly what the cabinet had agreed to do. Only later—evidently without bothering to apprise his subordinates—the president changed his mind. From Mar-a-Lago, Larry Kudlow, the president’s national economic adviser, contradicted Haley. She had, Kudlow told reporters, gotten “ahead of the curve” by announcing the new sanctions; the ambassador may have had “some momentary confusion about that.” Another White House official told the Washington Post that Haley’s remark was “an error that needs to be mopped up.”
Haley responded to Kudlow curtly. “With all due respect,” she was quoted by Fox News’s Dana Perino as saying, “I don’t get confused.”
Later, and very much to his credit, Kudlow called Haley to apologize. “She was certainly not confused,” he told the New York Times. He was “totally wrong” to speak as he did.
What almost certainly happened is that the president balked on the sanctions, his national security team sans Haley agreed to the change, and either someone forgot to tell Haley or everyone did. This is what happens when a president and his staff haven’t quite established its decision-making process and fails to keep everyone informed.
There’s more at stake here than the administration making unforced errors and making itself vulnerable to criticism and ridicule. After Haley’s remarks on CBS, Dmitry Peskov, Vladimir Putin’s press secretary, accused the United States of using Syria as an excuse to impose more sanctions: “This cannot have any relation to and cannot be motivated by, considerations of the situation in Syria or any other country . . . I would call this international economic raiding rather than anything else.”
Perhaps the administration will impose those further sanctions anyway. We hope so. But the announcement and walk-back provoked a needless round of diplomatic sniping with the nation’s chief adversary, and in the end made the United States appear indecisive and incompetent.
Trump famously values unpredictability. We wish he wouldn’t use it so often against his own staff.
