Jim Geraghty of National Review Online explores the impact of President Donald Trump’s top advisers.
When Donald Trump’s administration runs aground, an almost clichéd response from his disappointed supporters is that “the president is getting some very bad advice.” That bit of blame-shifting exonerates Trump from the consequences of his decisions and lays responsibility at the feet of whichever cabinet member or top staffer has Trump’s ear at any given moment. Trump cannot fail; he can only be failed.
With that said, every president needs a good team around him, and the fact that the buck stops with the president doesn’t mean that he isn’t getting bad advice and marching into box canyons because of that advice. Trump made a lot of unorthodox picks for his cabinet, and now he’s living with the consequences.
It appears that a significant factor in the difficulties at the start of Trump’s second term is a predictable consequence of the president’s getting whom he wanted in his administration.
Whatever you think of our ever-changing tariff policies, it’s clear that top trade adviser Peter Navarro, National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick have dramatically different ideas about what the aim of the tariff policies is and cannot align their arguments in justification of those policies. …
… Whatever you think of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, the best-case scenario is that his first choices for the team around him were a bunch of leakers. A worse scenario is that internal personal and petty rivalries got a bunch of people fired over false accusations.
Whatever you think of the president’s foreign policy, any credibility from the likes of Secretary of State Marco Rubio or National Security Adviser Mike Waltz is undermined by the confusing and contradictory public statements made by Steven “maybe Hamas duped me” Witkoff, who is technically the president’s special envoy to the Middle East but seems to be running the show on negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, between Israel and Hamas, and over Iran’s nuclear program.
