The New York Times reports: As he grappled on Thursday with his first major decision involving military action, a fed-up and frustrated President Trump turned to his two top aides and told them he had had enough of their incessant knife-fights in the media.
“Work this out,” Mr. Trump said, according to two people briefed on the exchange. The admonition was aimed at Stephen K. Bannon, the tempestuous chief strategist, and Reince Priebus, the mild-mannered chief of staff, over a series of dust-ups with Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, and the top economic adviser, Gary D. Cohn.
But they may not be able to.
The president is said to be aware that a meaningful reconciliation will take work to achieve between Mr. Bannon, who sees himself as the keeper of Mr. Trump’s campaign promises, and the competing ideologies of Mr. Kushner and Mr. Cohn, a longtime Wall Street executive and a Democrat. And he is considering a shake-up of his senior staff, according to four people with direct knowledge of the process.
Whether he acts on it remains to be seen. Mr. Trump has often pondered making changes for several weeks or even months before making them, if he does at all. He has a high tolerance for chaos, and a unique gift for creating it — and, despite his famous “You’re fired!” tagline from the show “The Apprentice,” an aversion to dismissing people.
But this past week, one that some of his aides considered the best of his presidency, was marred by fits, starts and self-inflicted wounds — and the constant churn of news accounts of a White House at war with itself finally wore the president out. And notice of a possible shake-up was a warning shot to his team to make adjustments.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, insisted that such accounts were untrue. [Continue reading…]
Raw Story reports: Alex Jones and Roger Stone blamed “President” Jared Kushner for the Syrian airstrike ordered by his father-in-law, Donald Trump.
The InfoWars founder hosted the political dirty trickster — who’s under investigation for possible ties to Russian intelligence — on his program Friday to discuss the military action.
The conversation followed a conspiratorial trail that led from Syria through the West Wing to the Upper West Side, and all the way to Silicon Valley, and fell apart when Jones blamed Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, for every bad decision made so far by the president.
“It’s them, it’s them — it’s his daughter and son-in-law who are literally enemies of the Republic!” Jones shouted.
At the start of the discussion, Stone suggested the chemical weapons attack, which Trump used to justify the military action, might have been staged as part of a conspiracy to draw the president into war in the Middle East.
“What’s interesting to me is this push by the generals, which I believe is aided by the president’s son-in-law (Kushner), to essentially shed the non-interventionist position that he stuck to very closely in the campaign and become George W. Bush,” Stone said. “The people, if they wanted a neocon, they would have elected Jeb (Bush).”
Jones blamed “President Kushner” for the torrent of media leaks from the White House, which he described as a “jihad” to go after “hardcore conservatives and patriots” like Steve Bannon for opposing the airstrike. [Continue reading…]
