In Oval Office, McMaster in tight corner
Aide often stands alone as others try to rein in Trump
WASHINGTON — As President Donald Trump appears to lurch from crisis to crisis on the world stage, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson have quietly maneuvered to constrain an impulsive commander in chief, the latest sign of a national security team that is increasingly challenging the president.
Officials say the Cabinet officers have slow-rolled requests for options on a wide range of policy goals, including exiting the Iran nuclear disarmament deal, reacting to missile strikes into Saudi Arabia by Iranbacked rebels in Yemen, pressuring longtime ally Pakistan by cutting U.S. military aid, and possible limited airstrikes on North Korea’s nuclear infrastructure.
Trump is said to blame Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, bristling when his national security adviser has not presented the options he sought, or as quickly as he demanded them. That has given rise to multiple reports that McMaster could resign or be forced out in coming weeks, and added to the portrait of a White House in perpetual turmoil.
But when he walks into the Oval Office, McMaster is often caught in a carefully orchestrated manipulation by Mattis and Tillerson to slow the delivery of options they don’t want the president to take, according to two current White House officials and one former official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions.
“They are going to hide the ball from the president to keep him from doing stupid (stuff), there’s no doubt about it,” said another former official, a national security expert who served in the Trump administration transition and asked not to be identified discussing internal deliberations. Other members of Trump’s national security team also have pushed back, suggesting that some of the president’s top advisers have decided to speak out rather than acquiesce to what they see as false claims or dangerous policies.
In a Senate intelligence committee hearing Feb. 13, six of the president’s handpicked security chiefs — including Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, CIA Director Mike Pompeo and FBI Director Christopher Wray — challenged or contradicted Trump’s stated views on Russia’s role in the 2016 election, the danger of Russian meddling in elections this fall and whether a GOP memo on surveillance was accurate.
Last week, Adm. Michael Rogers, head of the National Security Agency and the Pentagon’s Cyber Command, told Congress he was concerned the White House had not ordered any retaliation against the Russian meddling, or given him new authority to block it in the future.
Russian President Vladimir “Putin has clearly come to the conclusion that there’s little price to pay and that therefore ‘I can continue this activity,’ ” Rogers told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Feb. 27. “Clearly what we have done hasn’t been enough.”
Even McMaster has pushed back — but then got bloodied for it.
During a security conference last month in Germany, McMaster said the federal indictment of 13 Russians in the special counsel investigation provided “incontrovertible” evidence of Moscow’s meddling the 2016 election.
Trump furiously tweeted back that McMaster “forgot to say that the results of the 2016 election were not impacted or changed” by the Russian campaign.
The practice of Cabinet officials sandbagging presidential requests has several precedents in modern American history.
The Pentagon misled President Lyndon B. Johnson about the effects of escalating the Vietnam War, a pattern of devastating bureaucratic misdirection that McMaster studied for his doctoral thesis and was the subject of his 1997 book, “Dereliction of Duty,” which became a bestseller last year after he joined the White House.
President Reagan’s first secretary of State, George Schultz, was careful about what information he shared with Reagan about the Soviet Union because he was afraid Reagan might act on his bellicose impulses toward Moscow, historians say.
But with Trump, it is “a different kind of strategic withholding,” said Julian Zelizer, a presidential historian at Princeton University.
Trump’s advisers fear he will say something rash or take an unplanned action, and are likely calculating that by slow-walking a potentially explosive action, his attention will turn to something else, Zelizer said.
One concern among advisers close to Mattis and Tillerson is that McMaster is willing to present Trump with options the president has requested for a socalled bloody-nose military strike at North Korea in an effort to disable its nuclear weapons or ballistic missiles before Pyongyang achieves the ability to launch a nuclear-tipped missile at the United States.
McMaster has told staff that he would present the options, even though he agrees with most experts that a limited series of U.S. airstrikes would spark war on the Korean Peninsula.
The Pentagon, which has warned of hundreds of thousands of casualties if war breaks out, has been slow to deliver the bloodynose options to the White House.
Trump was frustrated in April after Iran-backed Houthi insurgents based in Yemen attempted to ram a boat packed with explosives into a Saudi Aramco fuel terminal. Trump demanded more U.S. military options to counter the possibility of similar attacks, but was not satisfied with the list he got.
Trump also asked for ways to deter Iran from sending short-range ballistic missiles into Yemen; Houthi rebels have fired the missiles into Saudi Arabia in recent months. Again, military options were slow in coming.
Trump publicly called for cutting aid to Pakistan in August, and privately railed against the country for not doing more against terrorist groups. He got nowhere until Jan. 1, when he tweeted about what he called Pakistan’s “lies & deceit.” Many saw the tweet as a way to short-circuit the bureaucracy.
Three days later, the State Department announced it was freezing as much as $1.3 billion in annual aid to Pakistan.
“Mattis and Tillerson are holding the line because they don’t want to rush to war any faster than we otherwise would,” said Ned Price, a former CIA analyst and National Security Council spokesman under President Barack Obama. “It’s not that unrealistic to be concerned that if the president is in a petulant mood, he will start an actual war.”