resident Trump started this week as he has so many in his tenure, distracting from one controversy by plunging headlong into another. A well-timed firing, in fact, has become a signature move for the President. Many of his nine hundred and sixty-three days in office have featured surprise oustings by tweet, angry public confrontations, and unexpected personnel developments. Even before this Tuesday, Trump had fired two national-security advisers, two White House chiefs of staff, one Attorney General, and one F.B.I. director, and had one Secretary of Defense quit in apparent protest. Trump has pushed out a Secretary of State, a Secretary of Homeland Security, a Secretary of Labor, a Secretary of Health and Human Services, a Secretary of the Interior, and a Secretary of Veterans Affairs. He is on his seventh communications director. His director of White House operations was forced out just last week, for gossiping about Trump’s children, and she was the third person to hold that job.
The exit of John Bolton, Trump’s third national-security adviser, was not exactly unexpected, either. It had been predicted so many times during Bolton’s sixteen contentious months in the Administration that few in Washington ought to have been surprised when the moment came. Bolton has been widely and accurately reported to disagree with key aspects of Trump’s policies toward Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Russia, Ukraine, and Venezuela. He was feuding with Trump’s other advisers. He had all but dismantled the traditional national-security process, and he was on such hostile terms with the Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, that the two largely communicated, I was told last month, through intermediaries. But when the Presidential tweet announcing the end of Bolton’s tenure appeared, it was at once sudden and yet completely predictable, a paradox that will keep its place in the annals of Trumpian White House dysfunction, even in an Administration where firing the nation’s most powerful officials by tweet has become so common that it no longer shocks.
Logistically speaking, Trump and Bolton’s acrimonious parting couldn’t have been revealed in a manner more likely to embarrass everyone involved, even as it underscored the falsehoods that riddled the President’s explanation. At 10:55 a.m. on Tuesday, the White House announced that Bolton would join a rare briefing in the press room, with his two bureaucratic rivals, Pompeo and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, to discuss a counterterrorism initiative. Barely an hour later, at 11:58 a.m., came Trump’s tweet, which did not even pretend that Bolton’s exit had been planned. The President noted instead, coldly, that Bolton’s “services were no longer needed.” What’s more, Trump said, “I disagreed strongly with many of his suggestions, as did others in the Administration,” which is why, Trump said, he had demanded and accepted Bolton’s resignation.
If that was, in fact, the case, Trump had failed to inform his staff about it. Sure enough, the dubious story was attacked minutes later, by Bolton himself, in a duelling tweet, in which he claimed to have offered his resignation on Monday, only for Trump to say, “Let’s talk about it tomorrow.” The direct quote from the President in Bolton’s tweet was a particularly deft touch. Up until now, most of those who have been fired and publicly humiliated on their way out by Trump have chosen to go silently. Not Bolton. He might as well have tweeted, “You didn’t fire me. I quit!” By Wednesday morning, “a person familiar with the situation” was putting out Bolton’s side of the story through Axios, which reported that he had met with Trump and offered to resign twenty-two hours before the President’s tweet claimed to have fired him. Soon after, more Bolton-sympathetic stories appeared, suggesting that the national-security adviser had tried to stop Trump from easing sanctions on Iran in a final blowup.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario