Trump remarks on policies force aides to fill in details
President’s impromptu comments can give appearance of chaos
WASHINGTON – Sometimes it looks like policy at President Donald Trump’s White House is like a night at the Improv.
From transgender troops in the military to immigration and tax cuts, Trump has a habit of winging it: Announcing (or tweeting) a policy pronouncement, and leaving it to aides to fill in the details (or somehow walk it back). In the past week alone, Trump did that with immigration, the Mexican border and U.S. troops in Syria.
One result of the president’s improvisational style, said government officials as well as analysts, is a near-constant churning that leaves some people confused and creates the image of chaos.
“It’s been this way since the beginning,” said Stan Collender, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University. “It looks like they’re operating on pure adrenaline, emotion ... let’s say sugar-rush, also.”
To his aides, it shows an active president who makes decisions and wants to share them with constituents.
“It’s his agenda,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said. “He’s the one who won election. He gets to decide the policy and when he’s going to say it.”
White House aides have been surprised by any number of seemingly spontaneous Trump decisions.
In administrations past, generally, presidents and aides would meet and exchange views on various policy options; the president would make a decision; the staff would then decide when and how to formally announce the plan.
In this White House, the process is sometimes the opposite.
Aides and allies, such as former campaign senior adviser Michael Caputo, said Trump sometimes tweets out announcements in order to force action from his own aides, citing the drawnout development of a tax cut plan as an example.
They also said Trump uses his platform to cut off aides who are fighting against certain policies. Trump told reporters he would seek to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum imports in the face of opposition from Gary Cohn, the since-departed director of the National Economic Council.
Caputo said the people caught by surprise tend to be those opposed to what Trump wants to do, or out of the loop entirely: “I believe the president is moving quickly on policy issues because some of his advisers have worked against him in the past.”
Observers have another word for it: Chaos.
Chris Whipple, author of “The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency,” said it looks like Trump is “out of control” and “we’ve never seen anything like it.”