President Trump kept White House aides on edge this week with a series of surprise moves that openly contradicted things his staff had said days or even just hours earlier.
The result was an escalation of the sense of chaos that has increasingly enveloped the West Wing amid staff departures, haphazard policy rollouts and highly sensitive leaks to the press.
A week that began with Trump’s direct attacks on special counsel Robert Mueller and ended with his staff’s scramble to organize a “news conference” he had announced via Twitter moments prior left White House allies and Republicans on Capitol Hill struggling to understand where the president was headed on any given issue.
“If you look at all of this, it’s frustration with the way things are playing out and the pace at which things are moving,” Ford O’Connell, a Republican strategist, said of what has driven Trump’s unpredictable streak.
One of the president’s latest surprise moves came Thursday evening, when he announced he had replaced national security adviser H.R. McMaster with John Bolton, a former Bush administration official and Fox News pundit. Trump unveiled his decision to part ways with McMaster just days after dispatching press secretary Sarah Sanders to deny reports that he had considered replacing his national security adviser.
A GOP operative said the timing of McMaster’s ouster was likely tied to a damaging leak about Trump’s phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday, just before the president decided to bring in Bolton.
Soon after Trump called Putin this week to congratulate him on his victory in Russia’s recent election — which many observers have described as a sham — unnamed administration officials told the Washington Post that Trump had ignored warnings in his briefing materials to avoid congratulating the Russian president. The leak infuriated senior White House staff and revived suspicions of the national security team, which has been a suspected source of leaks in the past.
The GOP operative suggested Trump likely would not have moved so quickly to bring in a new national security adviser had the leak not occurred this week.
Trump then stunned Washington on Friday morning when he began the day with a threat to veto the omnibus spending bill his own staff had touted as a legislative victory just hours earlier.
White House legislative director Marc Short and budget director Mick Mulvaney had appeared together in the White House briefing room on Thursday to assure reporters that the bill’s $1.6 billion in border wall funding was satisfactory to Trump, even though the president had requested $25 billion. However, Trump took to Twitter the following morning to complain about how little the omnibus provided for his wall, raising questions about why senior aides would have bothered defending the legislation if the president opposed it so strongly.
Amid confusion over whether Trump would ultimately sign the spending bill, Trump announced — again via Twitter — that he planned to conduct a press conference Friday afternoon. His staff had already scheduled a briefing for press secretary Sarah Sanders at the exact time as Trump’s impromptu appearance, so aides scrapped the press briefing and scrambled to pull together the event in time for Trump to express his distaste for a bill he had actually already signed.
Press aides seemed not to know key details, such as the location and format of the event, just minutes before the president was set to take the podium, as a crowd of reporters waited outside the White House press office to understand whether Trump would truly hold a news conference.
Brad Blakeman, a Republican strategist and former senior aide to President George W. Bush, said Trump’s unexpected moves this week “are more deliberate than some appreciate.
“I believe with regard to personnel announcements the [president] was guarding against leaks. He wanted to break the news, not be scooped,” Blakeman said.
“The [president], by threatening a ‘veto,’ was a shot over the bow of Congress that come September, they better not try it again with regard to not funding his priorities,” Blakeman added. “Keeping friend and foe guessing at times is a sound way of governing.”
Heavy staff turnover has begun to take its toll on an already strained West Wing, which had just this year weathered controversies ranging from the publication of a salacious book to the departure of a senior aide accused of beating his two ex-wives.
In the past month alone, press aide Josh Raffel, communications director Hope Hicks, and National Economic Chair Gary Cohn all resigned from the White House, while Trump decided to replace Secretary of State Rex Tillerson with CIA Director Mike Pompeo, and most recently to replace McMaster with Bolton. In addition, one of Trump’s top personal lawyers left his legal team amid reports that Trump had weighed hiring Joe diGenova, a controversial former prosecutor who sees the president a victim of a Justice Department conspiracy.
Without a communications director, the White House’s inconsistent messaging strategy could deteriorate even further. Although staffers believe Trump is now seriously considering two candidates — Mercedes Schlapp, director of strategic messaging, and Tony Sayegh, Treasury Department spokesman — to replace Hicks, both senior aides have enemies within the West Wing who could leave or rebel if either were to take the job.
