Day 83 was a flip-flopperooza. “It’s no longer obsolete”, he said.
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“I said it’s obsolete”, Trump said, referencing a favorite refrain.
“I’m sending Gen. McMaster to Afghanistan to find out how we can make progress alongside our Afghan partners and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation allies”, Trump announced after talks with the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation chief.
Or he changed because priorities changed.
The president told the Wall Street Journal that China was not artificially deflating the value of the American dollar-a big shift after pledging during his campaign to label the country a currency manipulator on day one of his administration.
Or he just knows better now.
For Trump, it’s a dramatic reversal from his repeated campaign pledges to forge a new U.S.
And the only thing Beijing might think was worse, she said, would be a unified and US-allied Korean Peninsula on the border.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, who visited the White House on Wednesday, called his meeting with Trump “good and very productive” in a Thursday morning interview with MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”.
Once you understand that Trump views everything – up to and including where he stands on a given issue on any given day – as a sort of extended negotiation, it becomes far easier to understand how he could so quickly and totally reverse himself on major issues like the United States relationship with China or whether the Export-Import Bank should exist.
Defense Secretary James Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who had his own foreign policy research and risk analysis staff as CEO of ExxonMobil, along with UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, all sounded a tougher note on Russian Federation than the President did, pointing out the ways that Moscow works to counter USA interests around the world.
But Trump’s about-face has more to do with those closest to him and the way Stoltenberg has focused on shared priorities with the new President, as well as the deterioration of another key relationship: that of the U.S. and Russian Federation. See Emily Ngo’s story for Newsday.
So all’s well that ends well in the Trump White House.
Trump downplayed the former Breitbart News chief’s importance during a New York Post interview Tuesday and indicated he was wearying of factional fighting inside the West Wing, which has pitted Bannon against Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, among others. We still have a long way to go, but at least European allies have kind of started move in the right direction.
Little of what Trump has done so far has matched what one would have thought it would be. “Many have not been doing that”, said Trump. “Otherwise, we’re just going to go it alone”, Trump said referring to the latest telephonic conversation with the Chinese President.
“I like to think of myself as a very flexible person”.
That was long before he ordered dozens of missiles be launched into Syria, in response to a gas attack by the Assad regime.
“I would say this is looking more now like a more conventional Republican administration”, said Abrams, who served as a foreign policy adviser in the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations.
“It’s a very holy week for Jewish and Christian people. This makes the United States stronger and safer”, he said.
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It may also be that Trump is merely looking for a way to improve his low approval rating, acknowledging his best tactic could be switching to a less dogmatic, more pragmatic approach.
