Instead, Mr. Trump now faces a different sort of crisis, trying to govern with a team that he has reason to suspect is not entirely on his team. An already toxic environment inside his White House turned even more corrosive as fingers pointed in different directions and the president railed about virtually everyone who worked for him.
“It’s unproductive and disruptive to governance,” said Sara Fagen, who was political director under President George W. Bush and has at times been critical of Mr. Trump on policy. “Like it or not, Trump was fairly elected and he deserves a staff who supports him and his agenda, even if that agenda lacks definition.” The anonymous author, she added, “should identify themselves and resign.”
White House officials called around to various departments asking if cabinet secretaries were responsible and collected multiple denials. That helped incite an extraordinary parade of the nation’s top officials marching to news media microphones or issuing written statements through their aides disavowing the piece, with the most important audience sitting in the Oval Office.
Among those disavowing the piece were Mr. Pence; Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; Defense Secretary Jim Mattis; Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin; Attorney General Jeff Sessions; Kirstjen M. Nielsen, the secretary of homeland security; John R. Bolton, the national security adviser; and Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence. Others included the secretaries of agriculture, commerce, education, energy, health and human services, housing and urban development, interior, labor, transportation and veterans affairs as well as the C.I.A. and F.B.I. directors, the president’s trade representative, acting chief of the Environmental Protection Agency and his ambassadors to the United Nations and Russia.
“It is not mine,” said Mr. Pompeo.
“Patently false,” Mr. Coats said.
“It is laughable,” said a spokesman for Mr. Mnuchin.
Some of them denounced the piece without explicitly denying authorship, but even the unequivocal denials may not be all that useful beyond assuaging Mr. Trump and hoping to avoid his wrath. W. Mark Felt, the deputy F.B.I. director under President Richard M. Nixon, likewise publicly denied being the “Deep Throat” source for Mr. Woodward and Carl Bernstein during Watergate, only to reveal himself three decades later.
But Washington was deeply engaged in the same sort of speculation that absorbed the capital about “Deep Throat” and, in later eras, the anonymous author of “Primary Colors,” a roman à clef about Bill Clinton’s scandal-tarred 1992 presidential campaign or the White House official under Barack Obama who posted anonymous Twitter messages mocking his colleagues.
from Trends A to Z https://ift.tt/2wPrbF9
via IFTTT
0 Comments