President Donald Trump and his team continue to upend American government. While the salacious headlines keep on rolling out thanks to issues like his tweets, the Trump administration keeps on reshaping American national security and foreign policy in deeply unsettling ways. POLITICO shares that National Security Council staffers became so concerned as the Trump team took control that they took extraordinary steps to get information out, including other agencies on email chains, for instance, so that the information would have a greater chance of making it out to the public either via Freedom of Information Act requests or straightforward leaking to journalists. “Many” explain that in those efforts, they also wanted to establish a record of themselves dissenting when the newly politically charged body undertook work that might have been illegal.
That’s the desperation that the Trump team has enacted across the American government’s security apparatus. Some of the acts the experienced career staffers on the team worried about include the infamous Muslim ban, which relevant individuals were asked to review within just a few days of its eventual signing, completely upending decades of established precedent of someone other than the president and his closest political allies helping more fully to enact decisions like that.
Counsel opposite to the president’s agenda has consistently not even been considered. One former NSC staffer told POLITICO that when they came back around the agency for a party, someone who at the time still worked there exclaimed to them:
‘These people are incompetent. They literally don’t know what they’re doing, and they don’t care to know what they’re doing. I don’t know why I’m doing this. Nobody listens to professional advice.’
How reassuring!
That’s not an isolated incident by any stretch of the imagination, the publication explains. Trump’s second national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, temporarily reinstated some of the safeguarding procedure that went out the window under Michael Flynn, but the process was again largely discarded when the fiercely political John Bolton came on board.
In the face of this preponderance of complete disregard for standards of national and global security — one angry president shouldn’t be making decisions all or almost all by himself — some who’ve worked on the committee explain that they engaged in their information sharing “just so the relevant officials would know what was happening.” Trump has certainly repeatedly blindsided the national security apparatus such as through his recent abrupt announcement that the United States would be withdrawing from Syria, although the reality is more nuanced than that. He also made the more recent announcement that the Islamic State terror group had been completely pushed out of all of its territory and its “caliphate is over” — which The Washington Post called “news to troops on the ground.”
This disconnect of the White House from the national security apparatus of the United States government has consequences. Current and former U.S. officials told POLITICO that they “worry Trump’s presidency has poisoned the relationship between career government staffers and political appointees, threatening the ability of a future president to make decisions based on nonpartisan expertise.”
How are we supposed to trust a guy who has no relevant government experience but wants to go it almost alone in matters that affect literally billions of people?
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