| | | | | Long before John Bolton was named Donald Trump’s National Security Adviser, the president often trusted the Fox News contributor over his own national security team. On July 17, when President Trump reversed himself at the last minute on his plan to recertify the Iran deal, it was thanks to an op-ed from John Bolton. As Trump was hitting the Congress-imposed deadline, he reluctantly agreed to recertify the deal, despite his own gut feeling that the United States should get out of the deal. Steve Bannon, then one of the few opponents of recertification in the senior White House staff, gave Trump an article Bolton had published the previous day, which had the headline “Trump Must Withdraw from the Iran Nuclear Deal—Now.” The hawkish former U.N. ambassador urged Trump to ignore the advice of nearly all of his national security advisers and relevant Cabinet members. With hours before the announcement, Trump decided he would no longer recertify the deal. Communications aides who had spent hours drafting talking points explaining the president’s decision to recertify the deal, despite a campaign promise that dismantling would be his top priority, quickly wrote a new set of talking points explaining the president’s decision not to recertify the deal. Top national security advisers scrambled to convince the president to reverse his reversal, and the likes of Rex Tillerson, James Mattis, and H.R. McMaster ultimately prevailed that day. Two of those three officials are now gone. Tillerson announced last week that he’d be leaving the administration, fired unceremoniously by Trump via tweet. And on Thursday evening, Trump named Bolton to succeed McMaster as national security adviser. As he did in his Iran op-ed from last summer, Bolton has used his perches at Fox and elsewhere in an attempt to guide the president toward more hawkish stances, casting them as fulfillments of Trump’s own pledges and true beliefs. But before he was on the president’s radar for a White House job, Bolton was telling people privately that Trump was “17th out of 17” for his choices during the 2016 Republican primary. |
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| | One More Thing—McMaster, a three-star general, said in a statement that he will request retirement from the Army “effective this summer.” His departure from the White House was a long time coming. A replacement for Mike Flynn, Trump’s first NSA, who resigned after a short stint, McMaster did not have a close, personal relationship with the president. Trump would often complain that McMaster talked down to him or provided too much unnecessary detail in his briefings.
McMaster also had forces within the administration working against him. Bannon, for one, saw McMaster as an opponent who helped keep the former chief strategist off the National Security Council. Allies of Bannon waged an outside (and sometimes internal) PR campaign against the general throughout most of last summer. In addition, McMaster and the NSC often clashed with Jim Mattis and the Pentagon over policy and procedure. McMaster, for instance, was much more accomodating and supportive of Trump’s eventual decision to decertify the Iran deal, while Mattis and Tillerson opposed decertification.
The 55-year-old McMaster is considering among his next steps a move to California and possibly the Hoover Institution, the conservative think tank based at Stanford University. | |
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| | McMaster wasn’t the only high-profile White House departure Thursday: attorney John Dowd, Trump’s top lawyer handling the Russia investigation, announced he was calling it quits as well. “I love the president,” Dowd told the New York Times. “I wish him the best of luck. I think he has a really good case.”
Dowd was brought on as counsel last summer after Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed special counsel Robert Mueller to investigate potential collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. Throughout his tenure, Dowd urged Trump to play conservatively toward Mueller, which the president largely did: refraining from attacking the special counsel by name and repeatedly insisting the White House was fully cooperating with the investigation. In recent weeks, however, Trump has apparently grown restless with that strategy: saying for the first time on Twitter that the Mueller investigation should never have begun, and bringing in a new lawyer known for his bold denouncements of the investigation, Joseph diGenova. Dowd’s departure is a further indication that Trump’s new boldness regarding Mueller isn’t likely to fade soon.
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| | President Trump announced on Thursday new action against China’s “unfair trade practices.” The administration says the actions come from an extensive study of Chinese behavior that affects American companies.
“We concluded that, in fact, China does have a policy of force technology transfer, of requiring licensing at less than economic values, of state capitalism, wherein they go in and buy technology in the United States in non-economic ways,” said U.S. trade representative Robert Lighthizer Thursday. “And then, finally, of cyber theft.” Among the actions the U.S. government will take include filing a case against China in the World Trade Organization, putting restrictions on Chinese investment in technology, and instituting tariffs on Chinese-made products that value somewhere around $50 billion or $60 billion. “We are united, White House and cabinet, on this,” said on senior White House official. The goal, says the administration, is to force China to remedy its violations and conduct “fair and reciprocal trade.”
Dan Blumenthal, an expert on China and the region at the American Enterprise Institute, says the administration’s moves are “way overdue.” “The Chinese have been robbing us blind on technology and intellectual property,” he said. “The most effective part of the response are the WTO case and the enhanced investment restrictions. We should move to restrict Chinese entities and individuals who are known IP thieves and/or benefited from theft, from doing business in the U.S. market.” | |
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Mark It Down— “Minimal effects on the consumer.” —a senior White House official, asked how the new tariffs on Chinese products will affect the prices Americans pay for those goods, March 22, 2018
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| Photo of the Day
President Donald Trump holds up a Greek Independence Day proclamation after being signed next to Archbishop Demetrios of America, elder archbishop of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, on March 22, 2018. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images) |
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| | By The Way—My colleague Tony Mecia analyzes the administration’s pullback from universal steel and aluminum tariffs with the announcement that several more countries will be exempt.
“It’s the latest example of the Trump administration reaping the publicity from a big policy change, then more quietly watering it down—as it has with prior insistences on a robust border wall, withdrawing from a climate change pact, and deporting young illegal immigrants,” Mecia writes. | |
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