Vice President Mike Pence is returning from his Latin American trip to Washington on Thursday, a day earlier than planned. Could a decision on the war in Afghanistan be in the offing?
“We prepare to end our trip a little bit early tomorrow in Panama,” Pence told reporters Wednesday in Santiago, Chile. Pence’s press secretary, Marc Lotter, tells me the vice president “will be joining the president on Friday at Camp David for a national security meeting on South Asia.” The White House first announced the Camp David meeting Wednesday morning. Lotter did not respond to my question as to whether President Donald Trump requested that Pence return early.
Asked what prompted Friday’s meeting, Michael Anton, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said “It’s a meeting to discuss South Asia strategy and other topics.” What’s included in the NSC’s definition of “South Asia”? I’m told India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.
The president has for months had before him a decision to make on America’s continued military involvement in Afghanistan. Trump is divided on what to do largely because his White House advisers are split, as my colleague Peter Boyer reports in the current issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
“Key members of the Trump administration’s war council met with the president on August 10 at the summer White House in Bedminster, N.J., and presented him with a trio of options for the 16-year-old conflict, according to senior government officials,” Boyer reported. “These range from an open-ended mission for a beefed-up American military force to a near-complete withdrawal of American forces.”
The White House won’t say if Friday’s meeting is meant to resolve the Afghanistan question.
Bannon Watch—Steve Bannon, the former Breitbart chairman and top aide to President Trump, seems to have been on the brink of exiting the White House for a few days. Now, there’s more evidence that Bannon may not be long for the West Wing: an “exit interview” of sorts with an unlikely interlocutor.
Liberal journalist Robert Kuttner of the American Prospect says he received a call from Bannon Tuesday in which the White House adviser “unloaded” about everything from China to the internal politics of the administration. Read Kuttner’s whole account, but the part about North Korea is the most shocking—Bannon effectively undercuts the president’s own words on the subject.
“Contrary to Trump’s threat of fire and fury, Bannon said: ‘There’s no military solution [to North Korea’s nuclear threats], forget it. Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that ten million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about, there’s no military solution here, they got us.’”
That alone is enough justification for chief of staff John Kelly to fire Bannon. Jonathan Swan of Axios reports that Bannon himself did not believe he was giving an Kuttner an interview to be published, but at times it reads like the intentional venting of a frustrated aide on his way out the door.
Earlier this week Mike Pence traveled to Colombia and Argentina before arriving in Chile. He had been scheduled to leave his final stop on the trip, Panama, on Friday.
Speaking to the press at the Chilean presidential palace, Pence said he was “greatly encouraged” by what he has seen in his travels across the region.
“I leave here greatly encouraged that across South America and Central America and with the United States and Canada that this is a new era here in the New World,” he said. “Chile is a shining example of a nation that first chose economic freedom decades ago and now is experiencing vibrant democracy. I return from this trip more encouraged than ever that not only will our commerce grow, strengthening jobs and opportunities in America, strengthening prosperity across Latin America.”
Pence also took note of the unrest and crisis in Venezuela, where the Trump administration has recently sanctioned several government officials, including President Nicolas Maduro. “I truly do believe that the unity that I have experienced in our determination to ensure that we will not permit a failed state in Venezuela in this hemisphere,” Pence said.
Mark It Down—“[Trump] is not interested in a mere tweaking of a few provisions of a couple of provisions and a couple of updated chapters. We feel that NAFTA has fundamentally failed many, many Americans and needs major improvement.” – Robert Lighthizer, U.S. Trade Representative, August 16, 2017.
Trump Tweet of the Day
Rather than putting pressure on the businesspeople of the Manufacturing Council & Strategy & Policy Forum, I am ending both. Thank you all!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 16, 2017
What is the Trump administration’s ideal level of legal immigration? I asked an administration official that Wednesday, but couldn’t get a straightforward answer.
“What the president said during the campaign is bring immigration down to historical norms,” said the official, who noted that the average foreign-born population of the United States during the twentieth century was less than 10 percent, but is now above 14 percent.
The official also mentioned the proposed RAISE Act, co-sponsored by GOP senators David Perdue and Tom Cotton and supported by the White House, which plans to cut legal immigration by about half (or a little more than 500,000 new permanent residents) in a decade.
Hope Springs—Hope Hicks has been named the interim White House communications director, a job that’s never quite been defined in the Trump administration. Initially held by Sean Spicer (playing the dual role of press secretary), the job fell to GOP veteran Mike Dubke, who tried to implement some kind of order to the communications operation. That failed, and the job remained unfilled until Anthony Scaramucci’s 10-day tour last month.
Hicks is a natural fit for the job, even if it is (supposedly) temporary. Fiercely loyal to the Trump family, she has the absolute trust of the three most important people in the White House: Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, and the president himself. After serving as the campaign’s press secretary, Hicks entered the White House as the director of strategic communications. But as one of her West Wing colleagues put it to me, her communications portfolio has been to work on behalf of—and protect—the Trump family.
This is quite the tale of a small-town newspaper’s epic screw-up that seems to have haunted those involved in the two decades since. Jeff Pearlman does a superb job telling the story of a journalism goof gone wrong.
Song of the Day—“Suspicious Minds” by Elvis Presley.
