CLEANING UP AFTER TRUMP REQUIRES A LARGE SHOVEL AND BUCKET

… John F. Kelly, Former Marine Corp. General, current Homeland Security Secretary.

 

The unofficial duty of the Trump Cabinet is to clean-up the statements of their boss.

Trump’s Cabinet members today are kept very busy as they scramble to clean up after Trump finishes speaking.  It has become like cleaning up behind the World's Most Incontinent Elephant, (GOP pun intended). The mounds of excrement are so large that they can't get one gigantic mess cleaned up before the elephant produces another. 
 

Note to Trump's staff: “You're going to need more than a bigger shovel and bucket!” 

 

When every rational person in the United States realizes everything Trump says is total BS, the world's leaders will hopefully also learn this fact, and that he should be totally discounted.  As we today discount the press secretary, Baghdad Spicer and presidential adviser, Baghdad Conway, when the president cannot open his mouth without lying or exaggerating, eventually nothing he says matters.

 

As it turns out, many of Trump’s Cabinet members, especially the former military leaders, are continually having to explain or contradict their new boss.

 

Homeland Security Secretary, John F. Kelly, speaking in Mexico, had to clarify and contradict President Trump’s statement by saying that “Deporting undocumented immigrants is not going to be “a military operation,” and he clarified that there would be “no use of military force in the immigration operation.”

 

Nikki Haley, the UN Envoy, has also had to state that the United States “absolutely supports a two-state solution” for Israel.  That was after President Trump, while standing next to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he contradicted decades of US policy by saying he was "open to a one-state solution to the conflict in the Middle East".

 

Going back to the election campaign, Trump had then alarmed our European allies by declaring NATO as being obsolete.  That time, the now Vice President Pence had to fly to Munich and Brussels and reassure a worried continent that the American president remains “fully devoted to our transatlantic union”.

 

It is turning out to be an unofficial duty of the Trump Cabinet to clean-up the statements of their boss.  Only 5 weeks into his term and his cabinet deputies have found themselves either explaining or sometimes totally contradicting their president.  

 

The results of this awkward situation is that on a regular basis, there is an on-going problem of the White House seeming to be in chaos and turmoil.  This is while the president’s Cabinet officials are constantly in a position of trying to interpret their bosses position on any given subject.  Most of the time, these officials as well as many other nations are totally confused as to Trump’s position on many issues.

 

“It puts the Cabinet officials in an awkward position,” said Ryan Williams, a Republican strategist. “They serve the president and obviously don’t want to contradict him.  But at the same time, they have to articulate administration policy, and that’s been a difficult case in a number of instances.” 

 

When vice president Pence had traveled to Europe to offer assurances about NATO and US cooperation with the European Union (EU), the diplomats and foreign leaders emerged from 2½ days of meetings with the vice president still uncertain if he really spoke on behalf of the president.  Or if American diplomacy could yet be undone by a tweet or even a stray remark from Trump just days later.  

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Baghdad Spicer, the White House press secretary, he suggested that Trump was using “military” as an adjective referring to the “precision and efficiency with which deportations were occurring”, not the operations themselves. 

 

But there were other Cabinet members that continually having to clean up for their boss.

 

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, he, too has found himself playing interpreter and Trump explainer for the new administration, often taking stances that seem not quite in line with the message out of the White House.  On a recent trip to the Middle East, Mattis tried to clarity two of the president’s then recent comments. Trump had tweeted that he viewed the news media, or as he calls it the “fake news media”, as an “enemy of the American people”.  That was a claim he reiterated in person at last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). The defense secretary totally disagrees with that label.  “I don’t have any issue with the press myself,” he said at a stop in the United Arab Emirates. 

 

Then, during a meeting with reporters in Baghdad during his trip to Iraq as the Pentagon chief, Mattis also pushed back on comments Trump made last month at the CIA headquarters.  This time the president said “The United States should have kept the oil” from the Iraq War. It was a favorite line that Trump used repeatedly during his campaign. “We’re not in Iraq to seize anybody’s oil,” Mattis said.

 

In another trip, Mattis’s reassured South Korea and Japan over conflicting signals the president had previously sent to the region. In addition, in a trip to Brussels, Mattis also told our NATO allies that the United States remains committed to the military alliances established after World War II. 

An official in the current White House has cast these disagreements between Trump and his Cabinet officials as not being ideological conflict. “Our president chose bold leaders, not a group of yes-secretaries, and from time to time the language may differ slightly, but they are all pulling together in the same direction to make our country great again,” this was said by Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s principal deputy press secretary.  Still, the degree to which Trump and members of his own Cabinet are out of agreement is amazing, especially on so many important issues this early in his presidency.

 

And now, Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, Trump’s new National Security Adviser that replaced retired general Mike Flynn, he has broken with the president.  In his first staff meeting last week, he rejected the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism,” the New York Times reported.  The “radical Islamic terrorism” label that Trump uses frequently and usually with much gusto.  But McMaster told his team that it was not helpful and that terrorists were not accurately representing the religion of Islam.

 

In an interview with CNBC, the new Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said the administration was still determining whether to label China a “currency manipulator”. This statement is totally at odds not only with campaign promises Trump has made to do just that, his first day in office, but also with the president’s comments in an interview with Reuters.  In this case, Trump has said more than once that the Chinese were the “grand champions at manipulation of currency.” 

 

This week, the president again lashed out at the FBI in a tweet against the bureau saying: “The FBI is totally unable to stop the national security ‘leakers’ that have permeated our government for a long time,” including within the department itself. “FIND NOW,” he wrote, using all capital letters.  

 

This was just another shot at criticizing one of many US intelligence agencies.  He has even compared them to the Nazi’s in WWII Germany.  

 

Robert Dallek, a presidential historian and biographer, has said he finds the stream of Trump contradictions and Cabinet clean-ups disturbing and worrying, and totally unprecedented.  

 

“I don’t understand how this administration can be so full of errors and stumbles and retreats,” he said. “It’s as if what someone says doesn’t matter, because the next minute they change it. They don’t seem to understand that the words coming out of a presidential administration or a top adviser to the president count for something and resonate and reach people, not only in the media but across this country and around the world.” 

 

Dallek added that he sees similarities between Trump and former president Franklin D. Roosevelt, who let his Cabinet secretaries compete against one another as a means for him to maintain command. 

 

But, Dallek said, there was one crucial difference: Roosevelt’s team’s private jockeying never spilled out into public view. “This was not out in the open, so people could say: ‘Well, what are you doing? Who speaks for the president? Who’s the real authority?”  Roosevelt, he said, “Would let them compete privately and then he would decide what to do. But it was not done with this kind of public display.”

 

With this president, this is what everybody is saying all the time, and then the president himself says something 180° from something he had said less than 24 hours before..

 

Let’s face it, with an exaggerating president like Donald J. Trump, for proper clean-up, you don’t need a shovel and bucket…..you need a front-loading Bobcat and a dump truck.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2017