The departure of Hope Hicks, the single most trusted aide to President Trump, from the White House Thursday has left two voids in the West Wing. The first is as just about the only person around him who can give an unvarnished opinion to the president—and be heard and taken seriously. This position made Hicks valuable not just to Trump but to other advisers and staff looking to communicate with the man in the Oval Office. Her absence creates a gap nobody else, inside the White House or out, can bridge.
The second is more ordinary: Hicks’s job as communications director. Whether this void gets filled in the short term depends on the president—who may decide he can live without someone in charge of communications. Until then, White House aides Mercedes Schlapp and Tony Sayegh have been not-so-subtly vying for the job (and dunking on each other) through the press, with Kellyanne Conway also making it clear she’s interested. The Washington Examiner reported Thursday that Michael Anton, a spokesman for the National Security Council, is also being discussed as a potential new communications director.
Anton joined the NSC staff at the beginning of the administration and has survived the tenures of both Michael Flynn and now H.R. McMaster. As one of the only West Wing staff members who brought previous White House experience—he served as a speechwriter and communications aide in the George W. Bush administration—Anton is popular among others on staff for his institutional knowledge. His future in an NSC run by John Bolton is uncertain, but he’s not actively, or even passively, lobbying for the comms director job.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t others in the West Wing, looking for a resolution to PR battle among Schlapp, Sayegh, and Conway, who are hoping for Anton as a consensus candidate for the job.
This is how one senior administration official described President Trump’s forthcoming infrastructure speech to reporters Thursday, as Air Force One made its way to Cleveland: “Obviously, today’s focus is going to be on workers and what this plan will do for the American workers.” But as my colleague Andrew Egger reported, the president strayed from the the script to address, well, a lot of other things:
A couple of the other digressions that may or may not indicate real diversions from the administration’s current policy:
- On the recently brokered trade deal with South Korea: “I may hold it up until after a deal is made with North Korea. You know why? Because it’s a very strong card and I want to make sure everyone is treated fairly and we’re moving along very nicely with North Korea.”
- On American troop presence in Syria: “We’ll be coming out of Syria, like, very soon. Let the other people take care of it now. Very soon. Very soon, we’re coming out. We’re going to have a hundred percent of the caliphate, as they call it. Sometimes referred to as land, taking it all back. Quickly, quickly.”
Reality Check— But would it have mattered if Trump had stuck to the script and given a perfect pitch for his big spending proposal? Republicans I talk with on Capitol Hill are not just skeptical they’ll pass an infrastructure proposal anything like what the president is proposing—they insist it’s almost certainly not going to happen. That’s because there’s little interest from GOP leadership in either house of Congress, particularly in an election year.
In the House, Paul Ryan’s focus is on welfare reform—what he’s been calling workforce development—while Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell is taking more of a bunker mentality ahead of the midterms, trying to move forward on ambassadorship and judicial nominations and not much else.
Trump Tweet of the Day
I have stated my concerns with Amazon long before the Election. Unlike others, they pay little or no taxes to state & local governments, use our Postal System as their Delivery Boy (causing tremendous loss to the U.S.), and are putting many thousands of retailers out of business!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 29, 2018
Mark It Down—“The president has expressed his concerns with Amazon. We have no actions at this time.” —White House deputy press secretary Lindsay Walters, March 29, 2018
Must-Read of the Day—On the website my colleague David Byler took a deeper look at a recent, wide-reaching, online scientific poll of Trump’s approval. He comes away with a few interesting points about the president’s popularity, including that there’s hardly any soft disapproval of Trump—if you don’t like him, you really don’t like him.
There’s not the same sort of universal intensity, however, among those who approve of the president. Here’s more:
Hollywood Watch—Another disturbing story from the entertainment industry of sexual abuse and misconduct, this time involving underage girls, comes via BuzzFeed: “Robyn Byrd and Katie Rice were teenage Ren & Stimpy fans who wanted to make cartoons. They say they were preyed upon by the creator of the show, John Kricfalusi, who admitted to having had a 16-year-old girlfriend . . .”
Song of the Day— “Wanted It To Be” by Sister Hazel
