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White House Watch: He’s the Decider

By Andrew Egger

Michael Warren is on vacation this week, and Andrew Egger is filling in for him on White House Watch. Michael will be back in the saddle on March 12.

It’s become a commonplace among White House reporters to talk about President Trump’s lack of policy knowledge and tendency to parrot the positions of the last person he talks to—and so to focus on aides around the president as the real drivers of administration policy. (If you want to know why reporters see the administration this way, look at Trump’s rapidly shifting comments on immigration in January and on gun control this week.) But it’s also important to remember that Trump is still the president—and when the president commits to an idea, all the aides in the world can’t stop him from putting it into play.

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That’s exactly what happened Thursday, when President Trump unexpectedly announced he would impose new tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, throwing congressional Republicans into disarray and causing markets to slump at the prospect of retaliatory measures from other countries.

“We’re going to be instituting tariffs,” Trump said at a meeting with business leaders Thursday morning. “You have U.S. Steel, you have the great aluminum companies represented at this table. They’ve been decimated. Aluminum has been decimated in this country.”

Canada and the European Union immediately pledged to bring forward countermeasures, while Mexico, China, and Brazil said they were considering doing the same.

Meanwhile, GOP lawmakers scrambled to respond to the announcement, which they had not been warned was coming. Many reacted with dismay: Mike Lee said the tariffs would be a “huge job-killing tax hike on American consumers,” while Orrin Hatch said that “whoever advised him on this ought to be reprimanded.”

But it’s not clear that this was the work of an advisor. During the 2016 election, Trump frequently pledged to implement tariffs to protect American industries. And this move appears to have been a sudden decision from Trump, which took many in the White House by surprise, too: Certain details, such as whether the White House would issue exemptions to certain trading partners, were unknown for several hours on Thursday. And nearly all the president’s economic advisers have urged him to abandon the idea of protectionist tariffs, arguing they hurt the broader American economy.

Nevertheless, the president decided that America will have new tariffs next week, so have new tariffs it will.

Mueller Watch—Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort pleaded not guilty Wednesday to a battery of charges including tax fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy against the United States. I spoke to former federal prosecutors about Manafort’s strategy to make it through his trial unscathed:

The charge that Mueller overstepped his mandate by pressing charges unrelated to Russia remains a hard sell for Manafort: the order appointing the special counsel authorizes Mueller not only to investigate “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump,” but also “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation.” But the “witch hunt” strategy shows that Manafort is trying to make his trial about something bigger than his own alleged criminal behavior—and that actually pardoning Manafort isn’t the only thing President Trump can do to help his former campaign manager’s chances. President Trump has grown increasingly frustrated with the various Russia investigations that continue to entangle his presidency, lashing out frequently against them on Twitter. Every time Trump attacks the special counsel’s investigation as an illegal and unscrupulous witch hunt, it gets easier for Manafort to argue the same thing to a jury.

Trump Tweet of the Day

West Wing Wellness Alert—Former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci, he of the legendary New Yorker interview that lost him his job before he had officially started it, painted a dire picture of day-to-day White House operations Thursday, telling CNN that “people are afraid to talk to each other.”

“The morale is terrible. The reason why the morale is terrible is that the rule by fear and intimidation does not work in a civilian government,” Scaramucci told Chris Cuomo, in an apparent reference to chief of staff John Kelly.

The rate at which the Trump administration has hemorrhaged employees has also taken a toll, as the New York Times reported Thursday:

For 13 months in the Oval Office, and in an unorthodox business career before that, Donald J. Trump has thrived on chaos, using it as an organizing principle and even a management tool. Now the costs of that chaos are becoming starkly clear in the demoralized staff and policy disarray of a wayward White House. The dysfunction was on vivid display on Thursday in the president’s introduction of tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. The previous day, Mr. Trump’s chief economic adviser, Gary D. Cohn, warned the chief of staff, John F. Kelly, that he might resign if the president went ahead with the plan, according to people briefed on the discussion. Mr. Cohn, a former Goldman Sachs president, had lobbied fiercely against the measures. His threat to leave came during a tumultuous week in which Mr. Trump suffered the departure of his closest aide, Hope Hicks, and the effective demotion of his senior adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who was stripped of his top-secret security clearance. Mr. Trump was forced to deny, through an aide, that he was about to fire his national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster.

President Trump dropped unexpectedly by a White House summit on the opioid epidemic Thursday to float a modest proposal: suppose we just killed all the drug dealers?

“We need strength with respect to the pushers and the drug dealers. And if you don’t do that, you’re never going to solve the problem. If you want to be weak and you want to talk about just Blue Ribbon Communities, that’s not the answer,” Trump said. “Some countries have a very, very tough penalty—the ultimate penalty. And, by the way, they have much less of a drug problem than we do. So we’re going to have to be very strong on penalties.”

Trump made several other suggestions, like “bringing a lawsuit against some of these opioid companies,” and pledged that the White House would be releasing new policy on the subject within the next three weeks.

Your must-read of the day comes from the Daily Beast, which used a Russian online auction site to sleuth out a wealth of interesting new details about the Kremlin-backed troll farm indicted last month by special counsel Robert Mueller:

Mueller describes an extensive operation, both online and off, beginning in 2014, to “sow discord in the U.S. political system.” What the Internet Research Agency called its “Translator Project” involved over 80 employees and a monthly budget that stretched to over $1.25 million. As U.S. elections approached, its internal understanding of its goal was to engender American “distrust towards the candidates and the political system in general.” By February 2016, with the U.S. presidential election looming, it emphasized attacking Hillary Clinton, both from the right and the left simultaneously. Its means included physical reconnaissance. Two IRA employees went on a road trip to visit nine American states stretching from New York to California “to gather intelligence” in June 2014. Five months later, a colleague spent another four days in Atlanta. One of the employees who visited America was Anna Vladislavovna Bogacheva, then the head of the troll farm’s Department of Analytics. The auction of the leaked IRA data offers a glimpse into that department’s work, which appears focused on understanding America and teasing out the most contentious issues. One department folder is titled “US Migration Policy,” which would prove a cornerstone of the IRA’s most divisive trolling. Other folders cover “The ruling political oligarch,” “False promises of America,” and “Air strike costs”—likely a reference to Trump’s bombing of a Syrian military airfield, which Putin condemned and the IRA attacked as a waste of taxpayer money. One folder simply reads “Obama.”

Read the whole fascinating thing here.

Song of the Day—“Communication Breakdown,” Led Zeppelin

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