Report: Trump Wasn’t Briefed On Order He Signed Giving Bannon National Security Role
The New York Times is reporting, in a piece rife with White House leaks, that Donald Trump wasn’t adequately briefed and didn’t fully understand the power he gave to Steve Bannon when he signed the executive order giving him a permanent seat on the National Security Council.
Of course, putting a political strategist with no national security experience on the National Security Council is unprecedented. Trump reportedly grew angry when he learned the order’s full significance after the fact.
The Times also reports that other White House staff are concerned about the largely unchecked powers that Bannon has in the White House, including Trump’s Chief of Staff Reince Priebus. Priebus has reportedly drafted a 10-part checklist of steps and approvals an executive order must receive before it is signed into action, the Times notes.
The New York Times also notes, “At the center of the story, according to these sources, is a president determined to go big but increasingly frustrated by the efforts of his small team to contain the backlash.”
Trump has reportedly demanded of Priebus to put in place a more conventional White House organization in the West Wing and “From now on, Mr. Trump would be looped in on the drafting of executive orders much earlier in the process.”
The stumbles by the Trump administration are in part due to the fact that they scrapped their transition plan late in the game when they tossed out Chris Christie who, for all his faults, has more government experience than nearly everyone on the Trump team combined. The Times notes that Christie’s transition plan “was discarded — a senior Trump aide made a show of tossing it into a garbage can — for a strategy that prioritized the daily release of dramatic executive orders to put opponents on the defensive.”
Another somewhat alarming anecdote from the Times piece is that “to pass the time between meetings, Mr. Trump gives quick tours to visitors, highlighting little tweaks he has made after initially expecting he would have to pay for them himself.”
And the Times piece concludes, “For a man who sometimes has trouble concentrating on policy memos, Mr. Trump was delighted to page through a book that offered him 17 window covering options.”
