Monday, March 20, 2017
Inside Trump’s
White House, New York moderates spark infighting and suspicion
Outspoken, worldly and polished, this coterie of ascendant Manhattan business figures-turned-presidential advisers is scrambling the still-evolving power centers swirling around President Trump.
Led by Gary Cohn and Dina Powell — two former Goldman Sachs executives often aligned with Trump’s eldest daughter and his son-in-law — the group and its broad network of allies are the targets of suspicion, loathing and jealousy from their more ideological West Wing colleagues.
On the other side are the Republican populists driving much of Trump’s nationalist agenda and confrontations, led by chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, who has grown closer to Chief of Staff Reince Priebus in part to counter the New Yorkers. As Trump’s administration enters its third month, the constant jockeying and backbiting among senior staff is further inflaming tensions at a time when the White House is struggling on numerous fronts — from the endangered health-care bill to the controversial budget to the hundreds of top jobs still vacant throughout the government.
The emerging turf war has led to fights over White House protocol and access to the president, backstabbing and leaks to reporters, and a heated Oval Office showdown over trade refereed by the president himself.
This account of the internal workings of Trump’s team is based on interviews with 18 top White House officials, confidants of the president and other senior Republicans with knowledge of the relationships, many of whom requested anonymity to speak candidly.
For the most part so far, the ideologues are winning. One revealing episode came as Trump weighed where he would travel this past Wednesday following an auto industry event in Michigan.
Would he jet to New York at the invitation of Canada’s progressive hero, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, to attend a Broadway performance of “Come From Away,” a musical that showcases the generosity of foreigners?
Or would he fly to Nashville to dip his head in reverence at the gravesite of Andrew Jackson and yoke himself to the nationalist legacy of America’s seventh president?
Some of his New York-linked aides urged him to go to the play with Trudeau and Ivanka Trump, according to four senior Trump advisers. But Trump opted instead to follow his gut and heed Bannon’s counsel.
“Absolutely not,” the president said later of going to the play, according to one of the advisers.
Instead, Trump journeyed to Tennessee, where he laid a wreath at Jackson’s tomb to celebrate what would have been the former president’s 250th birthday and delivered a fiery speech.
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