Inside the Chaotic Early Days of Trump's Foreign Policy

[brooklynite]

Politico

The day after Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, White House national security adviser Susan Rice gathered her staff for a pep talk.

About a third of the room was crying. Everyone was in shock. Trump had defeated Hillary Clinton, an upset of historic proportions that promised, at a minimum, a period of uncertainty in U.S. foreign policy. Most who joined Rice that day worked for the National Security Council, the White House’s elite group of foreign policy experts. Some were political appointees of President Barack Obama, and there was little question they’d be out of jobs by Inauguration Day. But most were career government staffers, typically detailed to the NSC from other agencies and sworn to serve under any presidential administration in a nonpartisan way. They didn’t know what to expect, but many were uneasy about Trump’s heated rhetoric on the campaign trail — his praise for Russian President Vladimir Putin, his skepticism of U.S. allies, his calls to dismantle the post-Cold War consensus on global trade.

Rice said the NSC staffers should give Trump a chance, that he and his team deserved the benefit of the doubt. Their duty was to the country, she reminded them, and they should do whatever it took to help America — and Trump — succeed.

What Rice didn’t — couldn’t — tell these government employees was that the dawn of the Trump administration would be a time of extraordinary personal and professional torment for them; that they’d be asked to make ethically, and legally, dubious decisions while ignoring facts and evidence on basic issues to fit the president’s whims; that they would be vilified as “Obama holdovers” and treated like an enemy within, to the point where some of their lives were threatened; that they’d grow so paranoid they would seek “safe spaces” to speak to each other, use encrypted apps to talk to their mothers, and go on documentation sprees to protect themselves and inform history; that at least one career staffer would cry on the way home from work every night; and that another would call Trump a “dumpster fire” in a farewell message.

[enough]

1. This is almost unbearable to read, even though we already knew it was bad.

Then replicate some version of this in every other agency of the government.

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. Their title really plays down the article

Charles Pierce calls it 'frankly terrifying', in a post titled "How in the Name of Our Bearded Lord Are We All Still Alive?":

The story illustrates that the administration* came into office determined to "disrupt" the workings of the National Security Council, but with no earthly idea how to do it—or, for that matter, what the NSC was supposed to do in the first place. Security clearances were handed out like chocolate eggs at Easter. (Hi, Jared!) Michael Flynn was the primary agent of chaos, but there was a whole brigade of bungling elves behind him.
...
Five pages is too long and complicated for our outcome-focused president*. Plus there were too many words. What was next? Colorforms?
...
But by far, the most vivid look into how the administration did business is the long section regarding the executive orders signed by the president* in the early days of his administration, most notable of which was what became known as "the Muslim ban." The president* indeed did sign them, but all indications are that they were drafted by lemurs.
...
And, as an added bit of flavor, there was addle-brained, talk-radio paranoia from the administration*'s political appointees. One poor bastard got singled out by the apparatchiks, and the journalistic hacks that they fed, because he'd attended the Clinton School of Public Service at the University of Arkansas.

One more quote from the Politico article, which sums up the Trump regime:

One Trump appointee, conservative commentator Sebastian Gorka, would show up at random meetings, even though it was never clear whether he had the proper security clearance, and he would often raise unrelated points. One former White House official recalled Gorka saying such things as, “‘If you look at what Napoleon did ...’ and we’d all be like, ‘I don’t even know how to respond to that.’” (Asked for comment, Gorka told a POLITICO reporter, “Take a long run off a short pier, you utter hack.”)