The president rarely surfs the web on his own, but his staff have made a habit of slipping news stories on to his deskincluding the occasional internet hoax.
White House chief of staff Reince Priebus issued a stern warning at a recent senior staff meeting: Quit trying to secretly slip stuff to President Trump.
Just days earlier, K.T. McFarland, the deputy national security adviser, had given Trump a printout of two Time magazine covers. One, supposedly from the 1970s, warned of a coming ice age; the other, from 2008, about surviving global warming, according to four White House officials familiar with the matter.
Trump quickly got lathered up about the medias hypocrisy. But there was a problem. The 1970s cover was fake, part of an Internet hoax thats circulated for years. Staff chased down the truth and intervened before Trump tweeted or talked publicly about it.
The episode illustrates the impossible mission of managing a White House led by an impetuous president who has resisted structure and strictures his entire adult life.
While the information stream to past commanders-in-chief has been tightly monitored, Trump prefers an open Oval Office with a free flow of ideas and inputs from both official and unofficial channels. And he often does not differentiate between the two. Aides sometimes slip him stories to press their advantage on policy; other times they do so to gain an edge in the seemingly endless Game of Thrones inside the West Wing.
The consequences can be tremendous, according to a half-dozen White House officials and others with direct interactions with the president. A news story tucked into Trumps hands at the right moment can torpedo an appointment or redirect the presidents entire agenda. Current and former Trump officials say Trump can react volcanically to negative press clips, especially those with damaging leaks, becoming engrossed in finding out where they originated.
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When Trump bellows about this or that story, his aides often scramble in a game of cat-and-mouse to figure out who alerted the president to the piece in the first place given that he rarely browses the Internet on his own. Some in the White House describe getting angry calls from the president and then hustling over to Trumps personal secretary, Madeleine Westerhout, to ferret who exactly had just paid a visit to the Oval Office and possibly set Trump off.
Priebus and White House staff secretary Rob Porter have tried to implement a system to manage and document the paperwork Trump receives. While some see the new structure as a power play by a weakened chief of staff Hed like to get a phone log too, cracked one senior White House adviserothers are more concerned about the unfettered ability of Trumps family-member advisers, Jared Kushne and Ivanka Trump, to ply the president with whatever paperwork they want in the residence sight unseen.
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Lisa Brown, who served as White House staff secretary under President Barack Obama for two years, said it can be dangerous when people make end-runs around paperwork procedures, leaving the president with incomplete or one-sided information at key junctures.
Its even more important with someone like this, she said of Trump, a president notoriously influenced by the last person he has spoken to, but the challenge is he has to buy into it.
....
McFarland, who is expected to leave the NSC for the ambassadorship to Singapore, did not respond to requests for comment about bringing the president a fake news magazine cover. But another White House official familiar with the matter tried to defend it as an honest error that was fake but accurate.
While the specific cover is fake, it is true there was a period in the 70s when people were predicting an ice age, the official insisted. The broader point I think was accurate.
....
There is universal agreement among Trump advisers on this: The best way to focus the presidents attention on any story is to tell him about it personally, even if it is in one of the papers hes already thumbed through. But officials say its a high-risk, high-reward proposition because Trumps frustrations at bad stories can easily boomerang against those delivering him the news.
Still, Trump advisers are unwilling to give up the chance to directly bend the presidents ear and hand him supporting documents because they have seen how he can be swayed.
....
More recently, when four economists who advised Trump during the campaign Steve Forbes, Larry Kudlow, Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore wrote in a New York Times op-ed that now is the time to move it forward with urgency, someone in the White House flagged the piece for the president.
Trump summoned staff to talk about it. His message: Make this the tax plan, according to one White House official present.
The op-ed came out on a Wednesday. By Friday, Trump was telling the Associated Press, I shouldnt tell you this, but were going to be announcing, probably on Wednesday, tax reform, startling his own aides who had not yet prepared such a plan. Sure enough, the next Wednesday Trumps economic team was rolling out a tax plan that echoed the op-ed.
Moore was at the White House that day. Several of the White House folks came up to us and said, Its your op-ed that got Trump moving on this, Moore said. Ive probably written 1,000 op-eds on my life but that might have been the most impactful.
So who was his guardian angel in the White House?
We still dont know, he said.
Source: http://www.politico.com/story/2017/05/15/donald-trump-fake-news-238379
White House chief of staff Reince Priebus issued a stern warning at a recent senior staff meeting: Quit trying to secretly slip stuff to President Trump.
Just days earlier, K.T. McFarland, the deputy national security adviser, had given Trump a printout of two Time magazine covers. One, supposedly from the 1970s, warned of a coming ice age; the other, from 2008, about surviving global warming, according to four White House officials familiar with the matter.
Trump quickly got lathered up about the medias hypocrisy. But there was a problem. The 1970s cover was fake, part of an Internet hoax thats circulated for years. Staff chased down the truth and intervened before Trump tweeted or talked publicly about it.
The episode illustrates the impossible mission of managing a White House led by an impetuous president who has resisted structure and strictures his entire adult life.
While the information stream to past commanders-in-chief has been tightly monitored, Trump prefers an open Oval Office with a free flow of ideas and inputs from both official and unofficial channels. And he often does not differentiate between the two. Aides sometimes slip him stories to press their advantage on policy; other times they do so to gain an edge in the seemingly endless Game of Thrones inside the West Wing.
The consequences can be tremendous, according to a half-dozen White House officials and others with direct interactions with the president. A news story tucked into Trumps hands at the right moment can torpedo an appointment or redirect the presidents entire agenda. Current and former Trump officials say Trump can react volcanically to negative press clips, especially those with damaging leaks, becoming engrossed in finding out where they originated.
....
When Trump bellows about this or that story, his aides often scramble in a game of cat-and-mouse to figure out who alerted the president to the piece in the first place given that he rarely browses the Internet on his own. Some in the White House describe getting angry calls from the president and then hustling over to Trumps personal secretary, Madeleine Westerhout, to ferret who exactly had just paid a visit to the Oval Office and possibly set Trump off.
Priebus and White House staff secretary Rob Porter have tried to implement a system to manage and document the paperwork Trump receives. While some see the new structure as a power play by a weakened chief of staff Hed like to get a phone log too, cracked one senior White House adviserothers are more concerned about the unfettered ability of Trumps family-member advisers, Jared Kushne and Ivanka Trump, to ply the president with whatever paperwork they want in the residence sight unseen.
....
Lisa Brown, who served as White House staff secretary under President Barack Obama for two years, said it can be dangerous when people make end-runs around paperwork procedures, leaving the president with incomplete or one-sided information at key junctures.
Its even more important with someone like this, she said of Trump, a president notoriously influenced by the last person he has spoken to, but the challenge is he has to buy into it.
....
McFarland, who is expected to leave the NSC for the ambassadorship to Singapore, did not respond to requests for comment about bringing the president a fake news magazine cover. But another White House official familiar with the matter tried to defend it as an honest error that was fake but accurate.
While the specific cover is fake, it is true there was a period in the 70s when people were predicting an ice age, the official insisted. The broader point I think was accurate.
....
There is universal agreement among Trump advisers on this: The best way to focus the presidents attention on any story is to tell him about it personally, even if it is in one of the papers hes already thumbed through. But officials say its a high-risk, high-reward proposition because Trumps frustrations at bad stories can easily boomerang against those delivering him the news.
Still, Trump advisers are unwilling to give up the chance to directly bend the presidents ear and hand him supporting documents because they have seen how he can be swayed.
....
More recently, when four economists who advised Trump during the campaign Steve Forbes, Larry Kudlow, Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore wrote in a New York Times op-ed that now is the time to move it forward with urgency, someone in the White House flagged the piece for the president.
Trump summoned staff to talk about it. His message: Make this the tax plan, according to one White House official present.
The op-ed came out on a Wednesday. By Friday, Trump was telling the Associated Press, I shouldnt tell you this, but were going to be announcing, probably on Wednesday, tax reform, startling his own aides who had not yet prepared such a plan. Sure enough, the next Wednesday Trumps economic team was rolling out a tax plan that echoed the op-ed.
Moore was at the White House that day. Several of the White House folks came up to us and said, Its your op-ed that got Trump moving on this, Moore said. Ive probably written 1,000 op-eds on my life but that might have been the most impactful.
So who was his guardian angel in the White House?
We still dont know, he said.
Source: http://www.politico.com/story/2017/05/15/donald-trump-fake-news-238379
