Controlling Donald Trump: West Wing Gushes Leaked Details About How Aides Locking Down Information Flow, by Matthew Boyle.
The West Wing is leaking like a sieve again, this time with details pouring out of the White House into the press about how the new command and control structure is attempting to contain and manage President Donald Trump. But it does not appear they will be successful.
The main goal, per many White House leaks across the media, appears to be senior staff controlling what information and reports make it to President Trump — and tamping down who the president talks to and who has access to the president. …
Over at Politico on Thursday, Eliana Johnson and Nancy Cook got even more leaked details about the new structure Kelly is implementing. Johnson and Cook wrote:
Confronted with a West Wing that treated policymaking as a free-for-all, President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, John Kelly, is instituting a system used by previous administrations to limit internal competition — and to make himself the last word on the material that crosses the president’s deskIt’s a quiet effort to make Trump conform to White House decision-making norms he’s flouted without making him feel shackled or out of the loop. In a conference call last week, Kelly initiated a new policymaking process in which just he and one other aide — White House staff secretary Rob Porter, a little-known but highly regarded Rhodes scholar who overlapped with Jared Kushner as an undergraduate at Harvard — will review all documents that cross the Resolute desk. …
But Trump is still free when in front of a microphone:
In addition to controlling information flow to and from the president—and who communicates with him—the West Wing Democrats have aimed to force Trump to stick to pre-scripted remarks on the TelePrompTer whenever he gives speeches. They have not succeeded on that front, as Trump went on a 45-minute off-script tirade against the media, the left, the GOP establishment, and more during a campaign rally in Phoenix, Arizona, this week. …
It won’t last:
Several people close to the president tell Breitbart News that while he is for now mostly following along with what Kelly and the others want him to do, people should not expect this to last.
“Those in the Administration who think they can shackle the President are in for a rude awakening,” one White House aide told Breitbart News. “Unlike so many other political ‘plastic men,’ he’s not a pre-programmed bot, he thinks for himself and makes his own decisions.”
hat-tip Stephen Neil
