Trump calling own shots more
PALM BEACH, FLA. >> President Donald Trump began the past workweek cutting into steaks at the White House residence on Monday night with his political soldiers, including former advisers Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie, strategist Brad Parscale, and son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner.
He ended it dining on the gilded patio of his Mara-Lago estate with eccentric boxing promoter Don King, who said he vented to the president about the Stormy Daniels saga. “It’s just utterly ridiculous,” King said he told a nodding Trump on Thursday evening as the president began his holiday weekend in Palm Beach, Florida.
Nowhere to be seen was John Kelly, the beleaguered White House chief of staff and overall disciplinarian — nor were the handful of advisers regarded as moderating forces eager to restrain the president from acting impulsively, who
have resigned or been fired.
The gatherings neatly illustrated an inflection point for the Trump presidency. Fourteen months into the job, Trump is increasingly defiant and singularly directing his administration with the same rapid and brutal style he honed leading his real estate and branding empire.
Trump is making hasty decisions that jolt markets and shock leaders and experts
— including those on his own staff. Some confidants expressed concern about the situation, while others, unworried, characterized him as unleashed.
The president is replacing aides who have tended toward caution and consensus with figures far more likely to encourage his more rash instincts and act upon them, and he is frequently soliciting advice from loyalists outside the government. As he shakes up his administration, Trump is prioritizing personal chemistry above all else, as evidenced by his controversial selection of Navy Rear Adm. Ronny Jackson, the White House physician, to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs.
“The president is in an action mood and doesn’t want to slow-roll things, from trade to the border to staffing changes,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said. “He wants to make things that he’s been discussing for a while happen. He’s tired of the wait game.”
This dynamic — detailed in interviews with 23 senior White House officials and outside advisers, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer candid assessments — is evident in multiple realms.
Trump is domineering his strategy regarding the expanding investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, in effect acting as his own lawyer. He is clamoring to reject the counsel of his attorneys and sit for an interview with special counsel Robert Mueller III and malign him by name.
Rudolph Giuliani, a former New York mayor and longtime Trump friend, said the president is entering a new phase: “It took time for the president to discover how far he could move things and find the pieces that fit. Now he sees he has an open field.”
To many in the outside world, the Trump White House appears dangerously dysfunctional. Theodore Olson, a Republican former solicitor general, declined to join Trump’s legal team in the Russia matter.
“I think everybody would agree this is turmoil, it’s chaos, it’s confusion, it’s not good for anything,” Olson recently told anchor Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC.
But people close to the president offer a different spin.
“I don’t see anything under siege; I see it as the Big Red Machine,” incoming National Economic Council director Larry Kudlow said, referring to the championship Cincinnati Reds baseball teams from the 1970s.