Interpreting Trump a heavy Cabinet duty
WASHINGTON— After President Donald Trump said that deporting undocumented immigrants was “a military operation,” Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, speaking in Mexico, clarified that there would be “no use of military force in immigration operations.”
After Trump, standing next to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, upended decades of U.S. policy by saying he was open to a one-state solution to the conflict in the Middle East, U.N. envoy Nikki Haley asserted that the United States “absolutely” supports a two-state solution.
And after Trump alarmed European allies by declaring NATO obsolete, Vice President Mike Pence flew to Munich and Brussels, where he reassured a worried continent that the president remains “fully devoted to our trans-Atlantic union.”
This public gulf between Trump and his agency heads has added to the sense of chaos and turmoil emanating from the White House, sending his secretaries scrambling to interpret their boss’ exact positions and leaving other nations confused as to who, exactly, speaks on behalf of the administration.
“It puts the Cabinet officials in an awkward position,” said Ryan Williams, a Republican strategist. “They serve the president and obviously don’t want to contradict him, but at the same time they have to articulate administration policy, which sounds like an oxymoron— contradicting the president by articulating administration policy — but that’s been the case in some instances so far.”
When Pence traveled to Europe a week ago to offer assurances of support for NATO and cooperation with the European Union, he managed to temporarily soothe nervous allies. But diplomats and foreign leaders nonetheless emerged from 2½ days of meetings with the vice president uncertain if he really spoke on behalf of the president or if his diplomacy could yet be undone by a tweet or stray remark from Trump just days later.
Andona diplomatic mission in Mexico City, Kelly chided the press for misreporting and misrepresenting the facts. “Let me be very clear. There will be no — repeat, no— mass deportations,” he said. “There will be no — repeat, no — use of military force in immigration operations. None.”
But the news reports to which Kelly referred were simply quoting Trump himself, who earlier in the day had touted “a military operation” in the United States to help round up and deport undocumented immigrants, whom the president called “really bad dudes.”
Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, ultimately suggested that Trump was using “military” as an adjective referring to the precision and efficiency with which deportations were occurring — not the operations themselves.
On a recent trip to the Middle East, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis seemed to break from — or at least add clarity to — two of the president’s recent comments. Trump recently tweeted that he views the news media as an “enemy of the American people” — a claim he reiterated in person at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland on Friday. The defense secretary disagreed with the label.
“I don’t have any issue with the press myself,” he said at a stop in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
During a meeting with reporters in Baghdad during his first trip to Iraq as Pentagon chief, Mattis also pushed back on comments Trump made last month at CIA headquarters, in which the president said the United States should have “kept the oil” during the drawdown from the Iraq War. It was a favorite line that Trump used repeatedly during his campaign.
“We’re not in Iraq to seize anybody’s oil,” Mattis said.
Of course, the Trump White House is hardly the first in which Cabinet officials have disagreed with the president.
Still, the degree to which Trump and members of his own Cabinet seem out of alignment is striking.
Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, Trump’s new national security adviser, broke with the president when, in his first staff meeting last week, he rejected the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism,” The New York Times reported. The“radical Islamic terrorism” label is one Trump used frequently, but McMaster told his team that it was not helpful and that terrorists were not accurately representing the religion of Islam.
Robert Dallek, a presidential historian and biographer, said he found the stream of contradictions and cleanups worrying — and unprecedented.
“I don’t understand how this administration can be so full of errors and stumbles and retreats,” he said. “It’s as if what someone says doesn’t matter, because the next minute they change it.”