‘The Presidency Has Done Little to Tame a Shoot-From-the-Hip-Into-His-Own-Foot Style’
Senior aides to President Donald Trump are afraid to leave him alone with foreign leaders, scared he will “talk out of turn,” according to a new report from The New York Times. The paper paints the White House as “besieged,” and President Trump as “sour and dark,” a man calling his aides out in anger as “incompetent.â€
“There is a fear among some of Mr. Trump’s senior advisers about leaving him alone in meetings with foreign leaders out of concern he might speak out of turn,” the Times reports, noting that his National Security Adviser, General H.R. McMaster, “in particular, has tried to insert caveats or gentle corrections into conversations when he believes the president is straying off topic or onto boggy diplomatic ground.”
In return, “Trump, who still openly laments having to dismiss his first national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, has groused that General McMaster talks too much in meetings, and the president has referred to him as ‘a pain.'”
Trump at the end of this week begins an eight-day overseas trip to Saudi Arabia, Rome (the Vatican), and Israel.
Noting “Trump’s appetite for chaos, coupled with his disregard for the self-protective conventions of the presidency, have left his staff confused and squabbling,” the Times adds that there “is a growing sense that Mr. Trump seems unwilling or unable to do the things necessary to keep himself out of trouble, and that the presidency has done little to tame a shoot-from-the-hip-into-his-own-foot style that characterized his campaign.”
“There is a growing sense that Mr. Trump seems unwilling or unable to do the things necessary to keep himself out of trouble, and that the presidency has done little to tame a shoot-from-the-hip-into-his-own-foot style that characterized his campaign.”
The Times concludes that, according to “three administration officials,” Trump’s best defense on sharing highly classified “code word” information with Russia may just be that he is “a hasty and indifferent reader of printed briefing materials” who “simply did not possess the interest or knowledge of the granular details of intelligence gathering to leak specific sources and methods of intelligence gathering that would do harm to United States allies.”
There is, some might say, a six-letter word for that.
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