Last week’s successful strike on a Syrian airfield has been followed up by important questions for the Trump administration: What happens to Bashar al-Assad now? Will U.S. policy toward the Assad regime change? Will Trump call for regime change through force? What will the United States do if Assad uses more chemical weapons or even large-scale conventional weapons in his war against opponents of his rule? How does this change our relationship with Russia, a key ally of Assad’s Syria?
Right now, the Trump administration doesn’t quite have all of those answers figured out. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s restatement on Sunday of current U.S. policy toward the regime—that the Syrian people, through the “political process”, be allowed to determine their own leadership—is closer, I’m told, to where President Trump himself is than what Trump’s United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley said the same day.
“Regime change is something that we think is going to happen because all of the parties are going to see that Assad is not the leader that needs to be taking place for Syria,” Haley said on CNN’s State of the Union Sunday. “There’s not any sort of option where a political solution is going to happen with Assad at the head of the regime.”
That contradicts Tillerson, going way farther than the rest of the administration is willing to go. But if last week’s decision by Trump to take swift and decisive military action against Assad tells us anything, it’s that the president is willing to reconsider his current position if the situation changes or the argument strikes him right. Haley’s attempt to nudge the president to embrace regime change probably won’t work, but as one White House official often tells me: With this president, you never know.
Bannon On the Bubble
Is Steve Bannon on his way out? There are signs the former Breitbart chairman and chief strategist for President Trump has lost some influence within the White House. Last week, Bannon was formally removed from the National Security Council after having been controversially given a seat at the table early in the administration. And the New York Times reports the president may be looking to shake up the West Wing after a “series of dust-ups” between Trump’s son in law, Jared Kushner, and other senior aides—including and perhaps primarily Bannon.
Bannon has been and remains more aligned with Trump instinctually and ideologically. But the White House appears to be moving in a different direction on policy from Bannon’s economic nationalist worldview. The Syrian strike and the Gary Cohn-driven tax reform ideas are both more reflective of the priorities of Kushner and other senior White House aides.
If that’s the trajectory of the Trump White House, Bannon has two options: he can remain in the West Wing and try to advise the president as best he can by going around the growing Kushner power center, or he can find another perch—an outside influence group or back to Breitbart?—from which to make his voice heard. But even with the tension with Kushner, Bannon is nowhere more influential than at the White House, where he has direct access to the president.
From NSC to Singapore?
Deputy national security adviser K.T. McFarland is likely leaving her post in the White House to become the U.S. ambassador to Singapore, an administration source confirms. McFarland’s potential departure, first reported by the New York Times, will depend upon Senate confirmation and an agrément from Singapore, but otherwise it’s a done deal.
McFarland came into the White House under President Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn. But her future at the NSC was always in question once Flynn’s successor, H.R. McMaster, was appointed to the post in February.
It’s not immediately obvious who McMaster will be replacing McFarland with. Dina Powell, the deputy national security adviser for strategy, is a White House and State Department veteran with close ties to Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. But in addition to national security, Powell has domestic policy issues in her portfolio that she will likely not want to relinquish. The NSC will need to find someone to “make the trains run on time,” as one administration source puts it, the way McFarland has during her tenure there.
Meet Justice Gorsuch
President Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch, will be sworn in at the White House Monday by Justice Anthony Kennedy. Gorsuch’s successful nomination to the Court deserves to go down as a major accomplishment for Trump. (And the way things are currently going for his agenda on Capitol Hill, it may be one of the few achievements he can get through Congress.)
But as Fred Barnes reported, Gorsuch almost didn’t get confirmed. Trump can thank Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell for outfoxing his Democratic counterpart, Chuck Schumer, in the Senate parliamentary gaming that allowed Republicans to break through a Democratic filibuster of Gorsuch’s confirmation. And that’s not the only assist McConnell gave Trump when it came to Gorsuch:
Song of the Day
“Lovely Day,” Bill Withers.
