Tight messaging and internal discipline don’t make a presidency—the Obama administration was extremely disciplined in its public pronouncements and a disaster in almost every other respect. But the present administration suffers from an almost total lack of coherence in its statements to the public, and that debility 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. FBI director James Comey found out he’d been fired 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—and wrongly. On April 15, appearing on Face the Nation, she announced the imposition of new sanctions on Russia for its abetting of Bashar al-Assad’s nefarious regime. She said what she understood was the president’s position: “Russian sanctions will be coming down. [Treasury] 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 soon, but in this case she appears to have stated exactly what the cabinet had agreed upon. Only, the president had changed his mind—evidently without bothering to apprise his subordinates. 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 said, “I don’t get confused.” Later, and very much to his credit, Kudlow called Haley to apologize. “She was certainly not confused,” he further told the New York Times. He admitted that he was “totally wrong” to speak as he did.
What almost certainly happened is that the president balked at 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 established a viable decision-making process.
There’s more at stake here than the administration’s opening itself to criticism and ridicule. After Haley’s announcement, Dmitry Peskov, Vladimir Putin’s press secretary, accused the United States of using Syria as a pretext: “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. We hope so. But the announcement and walk-back provoked a needless round of diplomatic sniping with the nation’s chief adversary and 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.
