Trump’s pick for top aide turns down offer
After the latest blow, president says he is considering four people for the White House post
Vice Admiral Robert Harward has turned down an offer to be President Donald Trump’s new national security adviser, the latest blow to a new administration struggling to find its footing.
Harward told The Associated Press that the Trump administration was “very accommodating to my needs, both professionally and personally.”
“It’s purely a personal issue,” Harward said. “I’m in a unique position finally after being in the military for 40 years to enjoy some personal time.”
Asked whether he had requested to bring in his own staff at the National Security Council, Harward said: “I think that’s for the president to address.” The 60-year-old former Navy SEAL is currently based in Abu Dhabi as an executive for US defence contractor Lockheed Martin.
Trump said yesterday he is considering four people to serve as his top aide on security, including acting national security adviser Keith Kellogg.
Kellogg, a retired general who was chief of staff of the White House National Security Council, stepped into the role after Michael Flynn resigned on Monday amid controversy over his contacts with Russia. Trump said on Twitter he was still weighing other potential candidates for the White House job.
The leaks are real. But the news about them is fake. The White House is a fine-tuned machine. Russia is a ruse. For its stunning moments and memorable one-liners, Donald Trump’s first solo news conference as president has no rivals in recent memory. For all the trappings of the White House and traditions of the forum, his performance was one of a swaggering, blustery campaigner, armed with grievances and primed to unload on his favourite targets.
In nearly an hour and a half at the podium, Trump bullied reporters, dismissed facts and then cracked a few caustic jokes — a combination that once made the candidate irresistible cable TV fodder.
Now in office, he went even further, blaming the media for all but sinking his not-yetlaunched attempt to “make a deal” with Moscow.
That matters, Trump said in one of his many improvisational asides, because he’d been briefed and “I can tell you ... nuclear holocaust would be like no other.”
This was his and his aides’ attempt to get the boss his groove back. Trump used the event to try to claw his young administration back from the brink after a defeat in court and the forced resignation of his top national security adviser.
He taunted reporters and waved away their attempts to fact-check him in real time.
He [incorrectly] touted his Electoral College total and repeatedly blasted his November opponent — somehow mentioning Hillary Clinton more than anyone else in his defence of his administration’s early days.
He bragged that his White House is “a fine-tuned machine” and claimed “there has never been a presidency that has done so much in such a short period of time.”
If only the news media would give him credit.
Over and over, he accused the political press of being dishonest and suggested that any negative coverage of his administration was “fake news.”
He unloaded a torrent of grievances while positioning himself as the stand-in for the everyman, who, he declared, hates and distrusts reporters as much as he does.
‘People don’t believe you’
“The press — the public doesn’t believe you people anymore. Now, maybe I had something to do with that. I don’t know. But they don’t b elieve you,” Trump charged. “But you’ve got to be at least a little bit fair, and that’s why the public sees it. They see it. They see it’s not fair. You take a look at some of your shows and you see the bias and the hatred.”
“The press is out of control,” he said. “The level of dishonesty is out of control,” After weeks of disclosures in newspapers over turmoil in his administration, he told one reporter to “sit down” for a rambling question.
“Tomorrow, they will say: ‘Donald Trump rants and raves at the press,’” Trump said. “I’m not ranting and raving. I’m just telling you. You know, you’re dishonest people. But I’m not ranting and raving. I love this. I’m having a good time doing it.”
The hastily called news conference was not on the White House’s original schedule for Thursday, and some of Trump’s own aides were surprised when the president let slip at a morning meeting that he would hold the event in the East Room just hours later.
The performance was vintage Trump, a throwback to the messy, zinger-filled news conferences he held during the early stages of his campaign. And, when combined with a rally slated for today in Florida, it appeared to be the start of a onetwo punch meant to re-energise a president whose White House in recent days has been buffeted by crisis and paralysed by dysfunction. Trump, ignoring the nation’s healthy economy and relative peace when he took office, said “to be honest, I inherited a mess, a mess, at home and abroad, a mess.” He mostly blamed the media for his woes, rebuffing suggestions that he was undermining confidence in the press or threatening the First Amendment by trying to convince the nation that “the press honestly is out of control.”
“The press has become so dishonest that if we don’t talk
77minutes Duration of conference in which Trump mostly attacked the press.
about it, we are doing a tremendous disservice to the American people,” he said. “Tremendous disservice.” Never before has a president stood in the White House and so publicly maligned the press or attacked reporters by name.
For all of Trump’s complaints, he appeared to delight in sparring with reporters in what was only his second news conference since last July. Not that he answered them all. He dodged inquiries about his campaign’s links to Russia.