These are chaotic and anxious days inside the National Security Council, the traditional center of management for a president’s dealings with an uncertain world.
Three weeks into the Trump administration, council staff members get up in the morning, read President Trump’s Twitter posts and struggle to make policy to fit them. Most are kept in the dark about what Mr. Trump tells foreign leaders in his phone calls. Some staff members have turned to encrypted communications to talk with their colleagues, after hearing that Mr. Trump’s top advisers are considering an “insider threat” program that could result in monitoring cellphones and emails for leaks.
The national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, has hunkered down since investigators began looking into what, exactly, he told the Russian ambassador to the United States about the lifting of sanctions imposed in the last days of the Obama administration, and whether he misled Vice President Mike Pence about those conversations. His survival in the job may hang in the balance.
Although Mr. Trump suggested to reporters aboard Air Force One on Friday that he was unaware of the latest questions swirling around Mr. Flynn’s dealings with Russia, aides said over the weekend in Florida — where Mr. Flynn accompanied the president and Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe — that Mr. Trump was closely monitoring the reaction to Mr. Flynn’s conversations. There are transcripts of a conversation in at least one phone call, recorded by American intelligence agencies that wiretap foreign diplomats, which may determine Mr. Flynn’s future.
That is just the beginning of an article that goes into much detail about the White House staff's damaged morale and bunker mentality.
However the administration is not so much worried about outside attacks as they are from internal ones, emanating from the president himself who has become so deeply suspicious of all those around him that it inspired some of the staffers to meet at night to discuss purging their social accounts of anything that could be perceived as "anti-Trump."
This report also follows other reports of turmoil within the administration, and the more recent report that the intelligence agencies now consider Trump possibly be a spy for Vladimir Putin.
There are times when I try to imagine how it must feel to have been a Trump voter and to see all of this happening, while desperately trying to pretend that it is not a big deal, or something manufactured by the "liberal" press, or perhaps that it is all just a terrible nightmare.
But I simply can't.
All of this, ALL of it, was easily predicted many months before the actual election, and yet Trump supporters simply refused to see it.
One has to wonder, can they see it now?
Source http://ift.tt/2kpV99F
