Date: 2024-09-27 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00020051
The Trump Saga
Remains a very present danger
Trump Officials Rush to Keep Him From Sparking Another Conflict—at Home or Abroad
Peter Burgess
High-ranking national security officials have spent the last 24 hours scrambling to figure out how to keep their commander-in-chief, Donald Trump, from inciting further violence at home to spilling national secrets to sparking last-minute confrontations with international foes.
The concerns in the upper echelons of the administration’s national security community range from fears inside the Pentagon that the president will do or say something that effectively throws the U.S. into a military confrontation with another country to anxieties in the intelligence apparatus that Trump will divulge classified intelligence on his way out, according to four officials who spoke with The Daily Beast about the matter. All requested to remain anonymous in order to speak more openly about the discussions.
“This isn’t a hypothetical anymore,” said one senior administration official. “This is real. What happened yesterday changed the calculus. People are concerned about [the president’s] state of mind.”
After a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol building Wednesday, several high-ranking national security and White House officials were on the edge of resigning, according to two sources familiar with the matter. Officials called and texted one another, probing whether they would call it quits. Several did step down, including deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger. But after a series of calls from prominent GOP lawmakers, including Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), leading national security officials decided to stay in office, at least for the time being, in order to preserve cohesiveness but also to provide safeguards in the coming weeks. One of those individuals asked to stay on is national security adviser Robert O’Brien. Officials inside the State Department close to the secretary say they are unaware of any plans by Mike Pompeo to step down.
“This isn’t a hypothetical anymore. This is real. What happened yesterday changed the calculus. People are concerned about [the president’s] state of mind.” — senior administration officialFor those who have decided to stay on, their main focus is preventing President Trump from pushing the country further into chaos. The fears, some of which were laid out by Axios Thursday, have grown so intense over the last day that officials have contacted leading lawmakers on Capitol Hill to informally brief them about the situation, according to two congressional aides familiar with the matter.
“The president was trying to stage a coup. There was little chance of it happening, but there was enough chance that the former defense secretaries had to put out that letter, which was the final nail through that effort. They prevented the military from being involved in any coup attempt. But instead, Trump tried to incite it himself,” said Fiona Hill, Trump’s former top Russia adviser. “This could have turned into a full-blown coup had he had any of those key institutions following him. Just because it failed or didn’t succeed doesn’t mean it wasn’t real.”
Defense and intelligence officials have discussed attempting to prevent the president and his loyalists at the Pentagon—especially Kash Patel, the chief of staff to Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller—from tampering with classified information or carrying out their own political agendas that could threaten the security of the United States, three currently-serving senior officials told The Daily Beast.
“I am worried about DOD [Department of Defense]. I do not trust the political appointees,” one former senior national security official said.
“I’m worried about the relationships with nations that we consider foreign adversaries,” the former official added. “I wouldn’t put it past him to share intelligence. There are a number of ways he could cause grave damage in the name of a burn-it-all-down mentality.”
Part of the problem, officials said, is that Trump’s inner circle has been even further cut off from the rest of the administration. And those who are left and are still communicating with him are “not going to rock the boat,” one senior official said.
“There is no one to tell the truth to him at all anymore,” another former senior national security official said. “That’s the problem. Even if they did, he wouldn’t listen.”
“The president was trying to stage a coup... Just because it failed or didn’t succeed doesn’t mean it wasn’t real.” — Fiona Hill, Trump’s former top Russia adviserWhite House Counsel Pat Cipollone has already cautioned the president that he could be in potential legal jeopardy for egging on the rioters, a person familiar with the warning said. (This was previously reported by The New York Times.) The White House lawyer’s warning was viewed by some close to Trump as one of the ways that could maybe, perhaps, sort of deter making matters worse. This president is famously litigious, after all, the logic goes. “It’s a language he speaks,” the source said, but added that it was abundantly unclear how effective Cipollone’s warning would be.
Officials have also discussed other strategies for how to limit Trump’s capacity to do harm—from limiting the flow of some information to the president's desk to slow-walking certain geopolitically sensitive decisions.
On Capitol Hill, both Democratic and Republican lawmakers have voiced concerns about the president’s state of mind and whether he is still fit for office. Several members of the House Judiciary Committee have circulated draft articles of impeachment. Others, including Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), called for the president’s removal via the 25th amendment. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) told reporters Thursday that if the executive branch did not remove the president via the 25th amendment, the House would move toward impeachment.
In the past 24 hours, several senior administration officials have quietly sought to tamp down internal chatter of invoking the 25th Amendment to force Trump’s removal from office, according to three people with knowledge of the conversations. These sources say that the efforts are motivated in part by the fear that his removal, though unlikely to begin with, could cause further violent uprisings by Trump supporters in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere in the United States, and also by concerns that more talk, even if fleeting, of the 25th amendment could further enrage Trump and cause him to tweet or announce to his extremist fans that they should fight against that as well.
“Yesterday was the worst day for the Republican Party since Lincoln’s assassination.” — Joe Grogan, Trump’s former top domestic policy adviser“It could easily lead to the president inspiring people to act out even more, with the message being that [MAGA’s enemies] are stealing more from you,” said another senior Trump administration official, who added it could, in Trump and his diehard followers’ eyes, vindicate the “‘Deep State’ rhetoric.”
Amid a growing slate of high-profile Trump administration resignations since Wednesday, several former top Trump lieutenants and key allies have come out publicly to trash the president’s actions this week, and to state that this week will likely live on as a defining moment of Trump’s legacy.
On Thursday afternoon, Joe Grogan, who was the top White House domestic policy adviser to Trump until May of last year, went as far as to tell The Daily Beast that “yesterday was the worst day for the Republican Party since Lincoln’s assassination.”
The former senior aide continued, “It was a disgrace and a tragedy…[Trump] had plenty of opportunities to off-ramp before this—and should have conceded before it came to this.” Grogan also didn’t exude confidence about certain former colleagues who are still advising the president during this crisis, bluntly describing some current aides surrounding Trump as “psycho[s].”
Erin Banco National Security Reporter Erin.Banco@thedailybeast.com
Asawin Suebsaeng White House Reporter @swin24 asawin.suebsaeng@thedailybeast.com
Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast here. They Arrested Woman in Wheelchair 15 Times—but Not MAGA Mob? EQUAL JUSTICE? Michael Daly Trump Justifies Mob Chaos: These ‘Things’ Happen When I Lose ‘I KNOW HOW YOU FEEL’ READ THIS LIST See George Clooney and Laura Dern’s Long-Lost Horror Movie SUZANNE C. NAGY Cop Killers: MAGA Mob Slays Capitol Police Officer PILAR MELENDEZ, ANA LUCIA MURILLO Impeach? You Bet. Then Investigate and Humiliate Trump. MICHAEL TOMASKY MAGA Latino Stronghold in Florida Is a Vaccine Dead End FRANCISCO ALVARADO Michael Cohen: I’m Certain That Trump Is Psychotic Right Now THE DAILY BEAST AD BLADE Urban Air Mobility - Fly The Future Today BY BLADE TRUMPLAND Trump Whined to Advisers: Why Can’t I Tweet?! SNOWFLAKE Once again, the president focused on what really mattered—Twitter and Facebook locking him out of his accounts. Asawin Suebsaeng White House Reporter Noah Shachtman Editor-In-Chief Updated Jan. 07, 2021 7:24PM ET / Published Jan. 07, 2021 1:01PM ET Four people were dead. The Capitol was in shambles. Several members of his team had resigned. His allies were quickly abandoning him. Naturally, President Donald Trump was livid. About being locked out of his Twitter feed, that is. Twitter and Facebook temporarily locked Trump’s accounts on Wednesday after he had used his social channels to incite a riot of his supporters at the U.S. Capitol. Not long after, the outgoing, increasingly authoritarian Republican president grew increasingly upset about the social media giants robbing him of his online voice, according to two people familiar with the matter. One of the sources said that since Wednesday, Trump has specifically complained that he was trying to send a tweet during his Twitter lockout, and that he was furious that he couldn’t. The other person familiar with the situation said the president privately claimed this was another instance of Big Tech silencing conservatives and trying to help cover up the “crime” of the century that occurred during the 2020 presidential election. Pelosi Gives Pence Ultimatum as House Moves on Impeachment IMMEDIATE REMOVAL Erin Banco, Rachel Olding The imagined “crime” here is that he decisively lost the election to Democratic President-elect Joe Biden, a victory that for two months Trump, his legal team, and swaths of the GOP have attempted, based on pure lies, to overturn. Trump’s Twitter account was unlocked on Thursday night. But his fixation on this underscores, yet again, a president hellbent on obsessing over his own petty grievances and personal desires for power and influence, even as his words and actions helped spur a widely-condemned storming of the Capitol, contributed to the Republican Party’s loss of Senate control and led to multiple resignations from his administration. This is all happening against a backdrop of a tanked U.S. economy and a still-raging coronavirus pandemic that Trump has continued to show no interest in helping to mitigate. Multiple sources with knowledge of the matter and who have been in contact with Trump since Wednesday say he continues to insist he did absolutely nothing wrong, that senior officials and party leaders backing away from him are cowards, and that he also wants people to look into baseless rumors that antifa radicals infiltrated the MAGA protest and riot this week. White House spokespeople did not provide comment for this story. Critics inside and outside of the platforms have been pleading with the social media firms for years to restrict or take down Trump’s accounts, arguing that Trump’s peddling of dangerous disinformation and incitements to violence outweighed any free-speech concerns. (“When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” he tweeted in May during the Black Lives Matter protests.) The ‘Oh F*ck’ Moment Is Finally Here for Trump’s Enablers AMERICA’S SADDAM Rick Wilson The platforms began labeling some posts as potentially erroneous. But for the most part, they left his feeds alone, even as those of his supporters came under increasing scrutiny. For instance, the social media platforms took down pages for the violent, pro-Trump QAnon cult in the fall. More recently, Twitter banned Lin Wood, a pro-Trump attorney who has waged his own effort to nullify Biden’s win. On rightist social network Parler, where he isn’t banned, Wood wrote, “Get the firing squad ready,” and that Vice President Mike Pence, now labeled a turncoat by Trump and his followers for his refusal to try to overturn Biden’s victory, “goes FIRST.” “I am not at all surprised by Twitter suspending my account,” Wood told The Daily Beast on Thursday, adding, cryptically, “I know who did it and why.” He supplied no evidence for this claim. Since the election, Trump has used his social media channels to spread absurd conspiracy theories about the election results—and to push his most hardcore supporters into the streets. He tweeted on December 19, “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!” “Get smart Republicans. FIGHT!” he tweeted on that morning. Even as his supporters were running wild through the Capitol, he pushed out a video on his social feeds falsely claiming that “we had an election that was stolen from us.” In a separate tweet, he wrote, “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots.” That was one of the messages that Twitter took down—and drove the decision to temporarily lock his account. Facebook quickly followed suit, and on Thursday, extended the suspension for at least two weeks. “Lots of people could’ve and did predict that this would happen,” a source at Facebook told The Daily Beast, referring to the riot at the Capitol. “The possibility of it happening again was high, because this guy [Trump] is fucking nuts.” Colbert Delivers Furious Takedown of Trump, GOP and Fox News ‘HAVE YOU HAD ENOUGH?’ Matt Wilstein Asawin Suebsaeng White House Reporter @swin24 asawin.suebsaeng@thedailybeast.com Noah Shachtman Editor-In-Chief @noahshachtman noah.shachtman@thedailybeast.com Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast here. READ THIS LIST Trump Aides Rush to Keep Him From Sparking Another Conflict ERIN BANCO, ASAWIN SUEBSAENG See George Clooney and Laura Dern’s Long-Lost Horror Movie SUZANNE C. NAGY Cop Killers: MAGA Mob Slays Capitol Police Officer PILAR MELENDEZ, ANA LUCIA MURILLO Impeach? You Bet. Then Investigate and Humiliate Trump. 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