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National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster unloaded about President Donald Trump at a private dinner in July, according to a report in BuzzFeed, referring to his boss as an “idiot,” a “dope,” and a man with the intelligence of a “kindergartener.”
The White House denied the report, as did the tech CEO with whom McMaster was dining. Such denials would be credible if McMaster’s comments sounded out of character for senior members of Trump’s national security team. They don’t. Instead, they sound exactly like what those officials have tended to say about their boss.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson famously referred to Trump as a “moron” — a “fucking moron,” according to some accounts — after a July 20 meeting in the Pentagon about America’s nuclear arsenal. After reports of this comment first broke in early October, Tillerson gave a bizarre press conference in which he refused to point-blank deny insulting the president’s intelligence.
Tillerson, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin are reportedly so worried about Trump that they’ve formed a “suicide pact” wherein they all quit if one of them is fired. Chief of Staff John Kelly has taken it on himself to fill up Trump’s schedule for fear of him spending his free time learning “unfiltered and sometimes inaccurate information that can rile him up,” per the Los Angeles Times.
There’s more. CIA Director Mike Pompeo has cut huge amounts of text from intelligence briefings, resorting to “killer graphics” because that’s “the way that [Trump] can best understand the information we’re trying to communicate.” The aides who write the remaining text have resorted to stratagems like tweet-length summaries of major foreign policy issues and putting Trump’s name in briefings whenever possible to get him interested in reading.
“I call the president the two-minute man,” a source close to Trump told the Washington Post. “The president has patience for a half-page.”
Trump’s short attention span isn’t a laughing matter
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American lawmakers and foreign dignitaries who work with the president on national security issues can be even blunter than Trump’s aides.
Sen. Bob Corker, the Republican chair of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, called the White House an “adult daycare center.” After NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg met the president in April, he reportedly told another official that “the president of the United States has a 12-second attention span.”
One foreign diplomat told the Washington Post that world powers had given up on the president improving his grasp of policy: “The idea that he would inform himself, and things would change, that is no longer operative.”
This kind of thing isn’t normal. Top foreign policy aides tend to sing the praises of their boss, typically seeing them as someone whose judgment they trust and ideas they share.
The comments from these aides and others who work with the president suggest his erratic public comments and tweets like aren’t part of some grand strategy, as some have hypothesized. When the president calls Kim Jong Un “Little Rocket Man,” gratuitously insulting the leader of a nuclear-armed power, it isn’t part of a sophisticated plan to increase the pressure on North Korea.
What we see, it appears, is what we’re actually getting. The people who work with the president regularly on international affairs seem to genuinely believe that he lacks the capacity to understand the deadly serious policy issues he’s making decisions about.
