Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Team Trump turnover
These top Trump team members were fired or quit in 2017:
■ Mike Flynn, national security adviser
■ Michael Dubke, communications director
■ Reince Priebus, chief of staff
■ Sean Spicer, press secretary and communications director
■ Anthony Scaramucci, replacement communications director
■ Steve Bannon, chief strategist
■ Tom Price, Health and Human Services secretary
■ Omarosa Manigault-Newman, Office of Public Liaison communications director
his own staff on Twitter. After Secretary of State Rex Tillerson reached out to Pyongyang for talks, Trump tweeted, “I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man.”
Trump repeatedly complains that Attorney General Jeff Sessions was wrong to recuse himself in the Russia probe.
It has become customary for reporters to ask the White House press secretary if Trump retains confidence in a given target.
Consequential firing
Trump’s most consequential firing occurred in May, when he canned FBI Director James Comey. It was a decision that would haunt Trump for the rest of the year, in part because Trump gave conflicting explanations for the move. At first, Trump said he fired Comey at the urging of top Justice officials concerned over the FBI chief ’s handling of a probe into Hillary Clinton’s private server.
Later, Trump told NBC’s Lester Holt he had fired Comey because “Russia is a made-up story.” The New York Times reported that Trump gave a similar explanation to Russian officials.
Comey had his revenge when he arranged for the leak of memos he had written about Trump asking for his loyalty and suggesting that Comey drop his investigation of Flynn. In June, Comey testified that he thought the leaks “might prompt the appointment of a special counsel.”
Mission accomplished. After the Comey leaks, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel with the ability to consider whether Comey’s termination constituted obstruction of justice.
In October, the special counsel indicted former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his longtime associate Rick Gates on charges that included money laundering, income tax evasion and lying to federal investigators. None of the counts involved the 2016 election. Former campaign volunteer George Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to federal agents investigating links between the Trump campaign and Russian officials.
On Dec. 1, Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his talks with Kislyak. The White House continues to maintain that while Flynn has admitted to lying, investigators have shown no proof that Trump campaign officials colluded with Russia.
Unforced error
Trump’s other major unforced error occurred in August after a white supremacist who was protesting the removal of a Confederate statue in Charlottesville, Virginia, mowed his car into a crowd and killed counterprotester Heather Heyer.
Rather than denounce the homicidal driver, Trump delivered a statement that condemned “this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violent on many sides.” It was a moral equivalency argument that angered the left and right.
Two days later, Trump refined his message by targeting white supremacists for disapproval. But the next day, Trump stepped in it again when he reverted to his initial reaction that “there’s blame on both sides.”
The unnecessary controversy led American CEOs to resign from Trump advisory panels en masse. In short order, so many corporate suits had fled that Trump dissolved the panels.
Where other politicians might have caved in, Trump did not allow the many reversals to prompt him to back down.
By year’s end and with passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, Trump would find corporate America backing him up. AT&T and Comcast announced they would reward workers with bonuses, while Wells Fargo raised its hourly minimum wage to $15.
For Heller, all’s well that ends well. “Oh, it was fine,” Heller said recently about the lunch where Trump presented him as a political hostage. “And I said this then, that it was just Trump being Trump.”
Heller has seen Trump appeal to the GOP conference with both carrot and stick.
“And frankly, you can tell after yesterday, he’s pretty successful,” Heller told the Las Vegas Review-Journal after the Senate passed the tax cut bill.
Washington has come to understand that you don’t get Trump policies without Trump theatrics.