Some of those leaks are too big to just be on Obama staffers. These are leaks that news organizations have reported as "from the Trump Administration." And some of this is too detailed to come from lower level civil servants. The administration has admitted that it has factions within it on purpose so its no surprise this is happening. The whole Preibus v. Bannon dynamic alone creates this potential. I wouldn't be shocked if Preibus staffers are leaking things left and right to prevent some of these EOs from happening. Same with the transcripts from the Mexican and Australian calls. Not to mention that the different departments like defense and state that have very different perspectives on everything. This is going to be a regular thing and it is so much harder to prosecute if this stuff is happening so easily.
I'm curious how this White House is going to fracture. You seem to have Bannon, Flynn, and Miller in one group. Then you have Tillerson, Mattis, and Priebus in another. I'm not sure where exactly the Goldman Sachs and Wall Street people fall in, but I'm guessing they would have to be on the Tillerson side. I don't know where Kushner is either, but he is supposed to be reasonable. The establishment Republicans like Pence, Ryan, etc can't be happy with this Bannon influence either. Call me crazy, but I think Bannon gets forced out. I honestly don't understand the appeal of Bannon and he just looks creepy too. He doesn't look like a Trump type of person.
That would be awesome news if Bannon get forced out. I'm concern that bigtexxx is right though - that circle is going to shrink and shrink and shrink until it's just Bannon.
I was skeptical of him at first, but after listening to him and reading more about him he is by far the most reasonable person appointed by Trump, thank god he's there as a buffer between Trump and the military.
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/arti...business&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter Just saw that article from Bloomberg. Nothing too ground breaking but a decent breakdown. WHITE HOUSE 'Trump Adviser' Is a Contradiction in Terms 111 FEB 2, 2017 5:00 AM EST Timothy L. O'Brien Rex Tillerson, who ran Exxon Mobil for a decade before signing on as Donald Trump's secretary of state, is reportedly "baffled" that the White House didn't consult with him on its controversial executive order restricting travel and immigration from seven mostly Muslim countries. James Mattis, who retired as a four-star Marine Corps general and supervisor of the U.S. Central Command before becoming Trump's secretary of defense, is said by the Associated Press to be "particularly incensed" about exactly the same thing. Both men -- seasoned, thoughtful managers with bucketloads of experience and insight -- probably thought that Trump recruited them to his cabinet to be trusted advisers. They may be in for more surprises, however, because there's a good chance that Trump merely sees them as hood ornaments atop the little engine of state he's building at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. For most of Trump's career he has only trusted a small group of longtime loyalists at the Trump Organization, and even then he has often tightened the circle further to family members. Advisers will come and go in the White House in coming years, but it's likely that the only permanent confidantes and counselors to the most powerful man in the world will be his 36-year-old son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his daughter, Ivanka Trump, 35. It will probably be Javanka to whom Trump turns for final gut checks on major decisions, and the Tillersons and Mattises of the world may have to shuffle along. That's not to say that outside advisers won't ascend from time to time. Remember Chris Christie and Rudy Giuliani? Both men hovered in Trump's inner sanctum during the 2016 campaign before he passed them over for White House and cabinet posts they coveted. For a time they appeared to be close counselors before being put out to pasture once Trump deemed them to be liabilities. Trump hasn't enjoyed sharing credit or center stage for long stretches with anyone other than family. Advisers like Christie and Giuliani (and Cory Lewandowski) who are considered overly ubiquitous or assertive -- or both -- can find themselves out on the street. That's a reality that may eventually land hard on Trump's current leading media ambassador, Kellyanne Conway, who seems to have enjoyed more airtime lately than her boss. Chief strategist Steve Bannon, on the other hand, has shrewdly managed to stay off TV and has avoided interviews (a posture Kushner also favors). But Bannon, 63, had a coming-out of sorts over the last few days after it was revealed that he worked in secrecy with a White House youngster, 32-year-old Stephen Miller, to draft Trump's immigration order. Widespread outcry about the order and Bannon's apparent power to dictate policy -- along with his promotion to an influential position on Trump's National Security Council -- inspired a spate of recent headlines describing where gravity now resides in the Oval Office: with "President Bannon." This creates some peril for Bannon. Trump has always enjoyed having street-smart brawlers like Bannon at his side (think of Roy Cohn and Roger Stone) but he's unlikely to countenance a pretender to the throne. (Even if Bannon is going out of his way not to pretend, the media has crowned him. Trump absorbs media coverage and it often sways him.)
con't Bannon and Conway may survive in the White House for as long as Trump does. But there are already rifts within Trump's senior team, as different cliques jockey for position. And Trump's inability to knit together advisers and managers, and his family-centric ways, will continue to be stumbling blocks for his administration. Trump's management experience has been confined to the boutique licensing and development business he and his children run from the 26th floor of Trump Tower. The only sizable enterprise he ever oversaw was his casino company, where success depended on sharing power with qualified managers, being emotionally and intellectually disciplined and thinking strategically. Trump did none of those things and ran that venture into the ground. The practical implications of this for Trump's presidency have surfaced just 12 days into his tenure, with the word "chaos" a common term in many accounts of his immigration ban, his confrontation with the Justice Department, his random tweeting about replacing Obamacare, his fights with U.S. intelligence services and federal agencies that are investigating him and his allegations of voter fraud in the general election. "We've seen some problems," Republican Senator Rob Portman told CNN, diplomatically. Trump, who famously quipped during the presidential campaign that he "knows more about ISIS than the generals do," on Sunday launched his first covert military strike against terrorists in Yemen -- an operation that apparently reflected the president's desire to accelerate the use of such actions. A Navy SEAL and an 8-year-old girl were killed and a U.S. aircraft crashed and had to be destroyed. Trump approved the military strike at a recent White House dinner, according to the New York Times, and his guests included Bannon, Kushner, Mattis, Vice President Mike Pence, Trump's national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford. Some critics suggested the Yemen attack was too hastily arranged and proceeded, as Reuters put it, "without sufficient intelligence, ground support, or adequate backup preparations." Sean Spicer, Trump's press secretary, described the mission as a success, citing the number of terrorist casualties (about 14) and the valuable intelligence that U.S. forces secured. Trump campaigned in part on the notion that he would bring managerial prowess to the White House. But his entire business career, his presidential campaign, and now his presidency, have been routinely marked by chaos and seat-of-the-pants decision-making. Some observers attribute this -- as well as Trump's haphazard tweeting and his fondness for confrontational or unsettling statements -- to various forms of the Trumpian dark arts and wily, strategic thinking. It's none of that. It's just Trump being Trump, and the country he's presiding over should brace itself accordingly.
Trump seems to be using Bannon as counterweight against establishment Conservatives. He didn't pivot center because the ugly **** You Machismo that energized his base is his security blanket for his deep and terrifying anxiety for not knowing a god damn thing. He needs Bannon to wear the big boy pants because he can't trust the Priebuses or the McConnels, nor can he trust the Dems or the media or whatever sources an average non-politico can leverage to make a decision. That demand for extreme loyalty comes from his deep seeded paranoia. If people villainize Bannon more than Trump, his baby brother mentality will let that fact help him sleep better at night.
Seriously, WTF is going on in the White House? Sad! Aides confer in the dark because they cannot figure out how to operate the light switches in the cabinet room. Visitors conclude their meetings and then wander around, testing doorknobs until finding one that leads to an exit. In a darkened, mostly empty West Wing, Mr. Trump’s provocative chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, finishes another 16-hour day planning new lines of attack. Usually around 6:30 p.m., or sometimes later, Mr. Trump retires upstairs to the residence to recharge, vent and intermittently use Twitter.... This account of the early days of the Trump White House is based on interviews with dozens of government officials, congressional aides, former staff members and other observers of the new administration, many of whom requested anonymity. At the center of the story, according to these sources, is a president determined to go big but increasingly frustrated by the efforts of his small team to contain the backlash.... By then, the president, for whom chains of command and policy minutiae rarely meant much, was demanding that Mr. Priebus begin to put in effect a much more conventional White House protocol that had been taken for granted in previous administrations: From now on, Mr. Trump would be looped in on the drafting of executive orders much earlier in the process. Another change will be a new set of checks on the previously unfettered power enjoyed by Mr. Bannon and the White House policy director, Stephen Miller, who oversees the implementation of the orders and who received the brunt of the internal and public criticism for the rollout of the travel ban. Mr. Priebus has told Mr. Trump and Mr. Bannon that the administration needs to rethink its policy and communications operation in the wake of embarrassing revelations that key details of the orders were withheld from agencies, White House staff and Republican congressional leaders like Speaker Paul D. Ryan. Mr. Priebus has also created a 10-point checklist for the release of any new initiatives that includes signoff from the communications department and the White House staff secretary, Robert Porter, according to several aides familiar with the process.... But for the moment, Mr. Bannon remains the president’s dominant adviser, despite Mr. Trump’s anger that he was not fully briefed on details of the executive order he signed giving his chief strategist a seat on the National Security Council, a greater source of frustration to the president than the fallout from the travel ban. Read the whole thing. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/05/us/politics/trump-white-house-aides-strategy.html
Do Presidents read EO they sign? It's only a few pages, so I would think so. I guess briefing is fine too, if it's accurate. Reading this, one thing that caught my attention is it sounds like Trump does not read EO he signed and he's not happy that he wasn't fully briefed on the details for at least one of them. But then I laugh... details and Trump don't mix.
He's trying to run the country like a company, where you trust your experts and watch them go to work. It's not working as he expected but the good news is that he is realizing this and making adjustments. I think he's been let down by some selfish individuals.
The most selfish individual in the White House is Donald Trump. Who has been let down? The country, and you are busy supporting this guy. I thought you were a Bernie fan? That was obviously a lie, with all due respect. Incredible.
I think it's perfectly appropriate that low information voters installed a low information President.
It could be that he read it but didn't realize all the implications the EO would have, and nobody volunteered them.
I guess this count as a leak. Trump has been critical of the START (which he incorrectly called Start-Up) treaty during the campaign, even though he does not know what it is. You know, if it's Obama, it's anti-it. Who is comfortable that Trump understand the treaty and will make good decision? with that said, if he can negotiate another huge reduction, all credit to him Full article at link http://www.reuters.com/article/us-u...2A5?il=0&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=Social In his first call as president with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump denounced a treaty that caps U.S. and Russian deployment of nuclear warheads as a bad deal for the United States, according to two U.S. officials and one former U.S. official with knowledge of the call. When Putin raised the possibility of extending the 2010 treaty, known as New START, Trump paused to ask his aides in an aside what the treaty was, these sources said.
Awwww. The Rogue twitter account appears to have been locked. I liked seeing the WH dysfunction from the inside.
