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This week's revelations of a so-called "resistance" force of senior government officials acting as a guard against President Trump – manipulating him, infantilizing him and ignoring his directives – have raised the specter of a ghost administration.
"Who's in charge at the White House?", Launched a reporter on Thursday at Trump while he was leaving for a rally in Montana.
The president did not answer.
An anonymous New York Times editorial, someone identified as a senior official, and a new Bob Woodward book, "Fear," detail efforts at the highest levels of government to contain Trump's impulses and, in the most extreme case, to challenge and even undermine his orders.
Successive revelations have crystallized what has always been evident throughout the Trump presidency – a group of government officials alarmed by the wishes and fears of a ruthless CEO they feel he wants to curb his instinct in various fields, including national security. trade and immigration
On Thursday, just after dawn, more than two dozen senior officials and cabinet members ran to make energetic statements denying that they were anonymousor the Times op-ed. They read as public statements of loyalty to an audience – the media-obsessed president, who was happy to see statements as aides, was keeping him informed.
Trump particularly appreciated the statement of state secretary Mike Pompeo, according to a senior administration official, who, like many other current and former officials interviewed for the purposes of this report, requested anonymity to share candid testimonies. While traveling in India, Pompeo criticized the "liberal newspaper" and described the anonymous editorial as "a nasty, misleading, bad actor".
The administration's fierce pressure was to insist on the anonymity of the official and the Times' decision to publish the column without the author's name, but Trump's staff questioned the contents of the column.
Senior officials have long acted to slow or hinder some of the president's ideas and directions. According to his colleagues, Reince Priebus, then chief of staff of the White House, had a preferred strategy – telling the president that he would execute an order or dismissal – but not before "next week". forget it.
[‘The sleeper cells have awoken’: Trump and aides shaken by ‘resistance’ op-ed]
Before some legislators, such as Sens. Lindsey O. Graham (RS.C.) or Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), Do golf with Trump, the White House legislative assistants prepared them for useful messages that they were trying to share or " the disasters they were trying to hijack, "according to a former senior administration official.A current senior administrative official has defended the practice saying that" office staff work in any house white. "
In his new book, Woodward tells of multiple episodes in which assistants displayed a subterfuge against their boss. In one of these cases, Trump wrote a letter to remove the United States from its trade deal with South Korea. Gary Cohn, then Trump's chief economic adviser, took him from the Resolute president's office so he could not sign it.
Trump also wanted to completely cut off military aid in Pakistan because he felt he was not doing enough to fight terrorism and extremism, and in August 2017, the administration said it would postpone more $ 250 million in assistance
For months, US diplomats and military officials managed to delay action, while striving to reassure Pakistan, armed with nuclear weapons, which for years had been the main recipient of foreign aid. But the strategy only exacerbated the inevitable, admitted a former official.
Trump blinded his staff on New Year's Day when he angrily accused Pakistan of "lies" in a tweet and called for an end to US aid. The message provoked a frantic race, while Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson continued to warn that the removal of aid could be destabilizing former officials and assistants of the Congress.
The State Department announced three days later that it was suspending at least $ 900 million or so of remaining military aid, but managed to preserve hundreds of millions of dollars in economic assistance and funding. military.
In the summer of 2017, Trump suggested to National Security Adviser R. McMaster that the United States invade Venezuela to fire its autocratic president, Nicolás Maduro. McMaster did his best to dissuade Trump – and thought he had succeeded – until Trump publicly raised this possibility at a press conference and at a meeting with Latin American leaders at American General Assembly.
"My people tell me it's not a good idea, but. . Trump said at the private meeting before raising the possibility of an invasion or a regime change in Venezuela, officials said.
A senior White House official explained why Mr. Trump had continued to raise this issue: "Even though the staff says no, I think he hopes to find someone who thinks it's a good idea .
The invasion imagined by Trump never took place.
Aids has also regularly slowed down its business ideas. The president would require executive orders from Cohn or former staff secretary, Rob Porter, imposing tariffs or otherwise punishing China. But officials said the duo often ignored it in an effort to avoid what they thought was a bad policy, in the hope that if they would stop, the President would move on to another topic.
"He would say," Do this, do this, strike a tariff on that country or country, let everything explode, go to war, "said a former White House official." Then we'll come back next week and Trump would say, "What happened with X?" And he would be angry that no one did it. And it was an endless cycle.
In the end, the administration implemented some of the tariffs – a factor precipitating Cohn's departure earlier this year.
Trump has been persistent in other areas as well. He lashed out Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen in May at a Cabinet meeting on a wave of illegal border crossings – a crisis that lasted half an hour – and demanded that she "Close" the border. .
Nielsen County implemented a crackdown at the border that separated parents from their children. But in the midst of the outcry, Trump turned the corner, frustrating the Department of Homeland Security officials who had defended a policy that many of their friends and family members considered monstrous.
[The hostile border between Trump and the head of DHS]
Trump's advisors are impatient with the bureaucracy and want to see immediate actions or results, which sometimes puts him in conflict with his staff or the processes they manage.
Graham said that these staff efforts to manage Trump are a common practice in politics.
"In my office, there are people who bring me back every day," Graham said. He added, "Trump can be a handful, right? But basically, the people around him make him a successful president. . . . Trump sausage manufacturing is hard to observe, but in my opinion, it produces beneficial results for the country. "
Rep. Mark Meadows (NC), another Trump confidant, agreed, "Listen, this happens every day on Capitol Hill. Even some of my staff think that one of my ideas is great and that another one is not great.
The Trump atmosphere this week has ranged from volcanic anger to disappointment, and it has been "hellish", in the characterization of a senior official, to root out the unnamed author of The Times and the hold responsible for the treason of the president. .
White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, National Security Advisor John Bolton, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Councilor Jared Kushner tried to convince the President that he could trust them his inner circle. They argued that the author was probably a lower-level employee, according to the senior official.
The twin bombings also highlighted a frustrating reality for Trump – that some of his employees treat him as a teenager needing to be chaperoned to the White House, which Corker called "adult day care."
But the plot and sometimes paranoid Trump felt a slice of revenge by reading the Times column, considering it as justifying his belief that "the deep state" and the other enemies inside were trying to undermine it, according to two former leaders from the White House. private conversations of the president.
"The functional effect of all this is that it is increasingly isolated, considering the presidency more and more like a group of one man," said one of those responsible. This person described the president's point of view as saying, "These people are here. Sometimes I need them to do things. But the presidency is not an institution. The presidency is me.
Some of Trump's allies at Capitol Hill have argued that the tactic of sounding an alarm anonymously would turn against politics.
"Here, anonymity is widespread among the host of cosmopolitan and cultured insults that live in condos with high ceilings and important art on the walls," said Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.) . "The attitude of the average American is:" If you make such an allegation, have the oranges to put in the account. "
The Times column describes a "two-way presidency" in which Trump makes public statements, while his administration, in an open-minded way, works against the tide. "This can be a comfort in this chaotic era, but Americans should know that there are adults in the room," writes the author. "We fully recognize what is happening. And we are trying to do what is right, even when Donald Trump will not do it.
The Department of Justice has always had some independence from the White House and, although Attorney General Jeff Sessions has conscientiously implemented some of the most controversial parts of Trump's agenda,
Trump ruthlessly tweeted about the transmission of documents to Congress on the investigation in Russia and the investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private mail server. As the department returned hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, officials apparently did not produce anything Trump's conservative allies sought, prompting the president to continue spreading on Twitter.
Trump recently tweeted his dissatisfaction with Sessions for allowing the department to lay charges against two of its Republican allies ahead of the midterm elections. Up to now, at least, this frustration has not changed the way Justice Attorneys handled the cases.
Thursday offered new evidence of divergent courses established by the President and the Department of Justice. In the morning, Trump tweeted the North Korean leader's praise: "Kim Jong Un of North Korea proclaims" an unshakeable faith in President Trump ". Thank you to President Kim. We will do it together! "
A few hours later, the Justice Ministry announced criminal charges against Park Jin Hyok for being part of the North Korean government's hacking team that paralyzed Sony's computer systems, stole $ 81 million from a bank
Devlin Barrett, Mike DeBonis, Anne Gearan, Shane Harris, John Hudson, Nick Miroff, Gabriel Pogrund and Matt Zapotosky contributed to this report.
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