WASHINGTON – For the last 18 months, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and other top national-security officials have mostly kept their heads down in public as they tried to quietly counsel President Trump. But this low-key consultation process seems to be weakening, as a headstrong president becomes increasingly insistent about his judgment.
The Helsinki summit showed that Trump thinks he’s his own best foreign-policy adviser. The formal interagency process that traditionally surrounds such big events all but disappeared for the U.S.-Russia encounter, with no full National Security Council meetings to prepare for Helsinki and none last week to discuss its results.
Trump chose to go it alone with Russian President Vladimir Putin, literally and figuratively. Officials who wanted to know what happened had to read the president’s tweets or White House press briefings.
“I don’t think there is an interagency process now,” cautioned one prominent Republican foreign-policy expert. “Trump glories in not listening to advisers. He trusts his instincts, as uninformed as they sometimes are.”
Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and one of Trump’s closest informal advisers, outlined the challenge in an interview Tuesday: “A major problem for Trump is that he’s a golfer; he doesn’t play a team sport. The rest of the team has to know what play you’re calling. In golf, it’s just between you and the ball. I think that’s a major weakness. The world is far too complicated for one person to control everything.”