The factions behind Trump’s rule – and its chaos
A crazy week for the US president has shown the five distinct groups at work in the White House
The president of the United States uses Twitter to publicly humiliate his own attorney general. He treats a trip to the Boy Scouts’ annual Jamboree as an opportunity to threaten his health secretary with the sack if he fails to repeal Obamacare. And then – again on Twitter – a ban on transgender people serving in the armed forces is unexpectedly announced.
Even by the warped yardstick of his own making, this has been a crazy week for Donald Trump’s administration.
Liberals are defending Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, who has intensified the war on drugs and toughened the hunt for illegal immigrants. Republican leaders and US generals have been shocked by the move on transgender troops. And everyone feels sorry for the 40,000 boy scouts who had to listen to Mr Trump rail against Hillary Clinton and brag about his election victory.
The effect is disconcerting for political pundits whose analytical frameworks, built up over many years, were trashed last November.
This is not a president armed with policy prescriptions derived from a coherent philosophical view of the world.
Instead it is a chief executive who has staffed his administration with disparate factions from across different parts of his life, and these are key to understanding the apparent chaos of the Trump administration.
Who’s up and who’s down in the political world has long been a Washington parlour game. But never before has it had such an impact on policy, or the lack thereof. I’m currently documenting the factions of Trump’s White House in a new Telegraph online series, and it’s weeks like this one that show just how significant factionalism has become in the Oval Office.
To my eye there are five distinct groupings.
Best known are the blow-it-up-andstart-again Bannonite revolutionaries. In White House chief strategist Steve Bannon – the crumpled, Barbour-wearing radical who came to be seen as the warped genius behind Mr Trump’s rise – the President has the keeper of his populist flame.
In recent weeks, Mr Bannon has lobbied against sending more troops to Afghanistan, argued for tariffs on steel imports, and pushed for a crushing tax rise on Americans earning more than $5million. This is economic nationalism at work.
Against him are the sort of forces that Mr Bannon has spent his life fighting. There are the Wall Street bankers, such as Gary Cohn, who as chairman of the National Economic Council sits at the heart of every major policy debate, despite his history as a Democratic donor.
More powerful still is the other part of the New York wing. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump may not head agencies or departments, but their family ties mean their influence runs deep. There is no subject they cannot raise with the president, in the cause of their globalist, liberal agenda.
Then there are the generals (retired or serving). Jim Mattis, at the Pentagon, national security adviser HR Mcmaster and John Kelly at Homeland Security, bring the sort of alliance-building, pragmatic worldview that has been won the hard way – through US blood and treasure – but sits badly with the Bannonite America First faction.
And most fragile of all are the Republican apparatchiks, led by White House chief of staff Reince Priebus. Their job is to liaise with party leaders in Congress and to drive through the president’s legislative agenda. Which means they end up as everyone’s scapegoat much of the time.
The result is supposed to be a state of constant creative tension, of the sort we are told drove the Trump Organisation to success. Its strength is that the structure is fluid and flexible. Its weakness is the appearance of chaos.
Against this backdrop, the ban on transgender troops is a win for the conservative wing of the Republican Party as well as for Mr Bannon, a populist who has picked his side in America’s culture wars. The generals and the New York faction, both of whom might have urged caution, were blindsided by the abrupt announcement and are now pushing back.
Yet the conservatives and populists are far from in the ascendant. Their man, Jeff Sessions, clings on at the Department of Justice, battered and humiliated. Soon, plans for tax reform and a new Afghan strategy will open up fresh divides between the Wall Street faction and the populists, or the populists and the generals.
The kaleidoscope of West Wing personnel show this is a president comfortable going one way then the other. In the absence of a grand political strategy, he does it back to front, treating politics like a buffet, picking and choosing according to the relative ups and downs of the people around him. And sometimes, as the Scouts found this week, Trump just likes to be Trump.
To read Rob Crilly’s Inside the White House series visit telegraph.co.uk/opinion