U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a national security strategy speech at the Ronald Reagan Building. Photo / AP
Trump has decided to remove H.R. McMaster as his national security adviser and is actively discussing Fox News contributor John Bolton as a potential successor.
A leading contender to replace Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin is Pete Hegseth, the co-host of "Fox and Friends Weekend."
The president named CNBC analyst and former host Larry Kudlow to replace former Goldman Sachs president Gary Cohn as his chief economic adviser on Wednesday.
Heather Nauert, a former co-host of "Fox and Friends," got promoted on Monday from being a spokeswoman for the State Department to acting undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, reports Washington Post.
She replaced Steve Goldstein, who was fired because he publicly contradicted the White House's claim that Rex Tillerson knew he was being fired before Trump announced it on Twitter. (Is it any coincidence that Mike Pompeo got elevated from Langley to Foggy Bottom the morning after he aggressively went to bat for Trump on the Sunday shows?)
• Trump's plot to poach from green rooms is an additional proof point that validates two important themes I've written about: Trump has debased the value of expertise and supercharged the celebrification of American politics.
• The president expressed interest in bringing Bolton, Hegseth and Kudlow on board during the transition, but he was dissuaded by traditionalists who said they weren't qualified for such powerful posts. The VA secretary, for instance, manages the government's second-largest bureaucracy, which employs 360,000. But Hegseth is just 37.
The Iraq War veteran previously served as the executive director of Concerned Veterans for America, which is in the constellation of groups bankrolled by the billionaire Koch brothers.
He ran for Senate in Minnesota against Amy Klobuchar in 2012, but his campaign was such a disaster that he unexpectedly lost the GOP nomination to a random Ron Paul supporter — who went on to lose in the general election by 35 points.
Hegseth's views on reforming VA "are considered extreme even by some Republicans in Congress," but Trump frequently calls him to discuss veterans' policy, Lisa Rein reports: "Hegseth has dined at the White House and, during an Oval Office meeting between Trump and Shulkin last week, the president called Hegseth to seek his counsel on pending legislation that would expand private care.
He also is disliked by traditional veterans' advocacy groups, which fear a downsized VA and a privatized system, and which would probably mount a strong campaign against his nomination."
• Bolton, an outspoken hawk who had a tumultuous and short-lived tenure as George W. Bush's ambassador to the United Nations, is also seen as too extreme by many Republicans on Capitol Hill, but he wouldn't need to get confirmed to become national security adviser. "Trump is now comfortable with ousting McMaster, with whom he never personally gelled, but is willing to take time executing the move because he wants to ensure both that the three-star Army general is not humiliated and that there is a strong successor lined up," Ashley Parker, Josh Dawsey, Philip Rucker and Carol D. Leonnig reported last night. "Bolton has met with Trump several times and often agrees with the president's instincts. Trump also thinks Bolton … is good on television."
Another finalist for the job is Keith Kellogg, the chief of staff of the National Security Council. "Kellogg travels with Trump on many domestic trips, in part because the president likes his company and thinks he is fun," my colleagues report.
• One reason Kudlow was attractive to Trump is that he can go on business news channels to promote his agenda. Ostensibly, Bolton and Hegseth could do the same. "The president likes me as a media communicator, so I will be more than happy to oblige," Kudlow said Wednesday night on CNBC.
He added that the president had phoned him a few hours earlier when the news broke of his selection to be director of the National Economic Council.
"The president called and he said, 'It's out,'" Kudlow recalled. "And he said, 'You're on the air … I'm looking at a picture of you … Very handsome!' So Trumpian."
• But installing cable pundits in decision-making jobs has not worked out very well for Trump thus far. Foreign policy pros were aghast when Trump named K.T. McFarland as his deputy national security adviser during the transition.
She had appeared frequently on Fox as an analyst and anchored her own program called "DEFCON3." But the last time she'd worked in government was more than three decades earlier, as a junior Pentagon spokeswoman and speechwriter.
McFarland got marginalized after Michael Flynn went down. Then Trump nominated her to be ambassador to Singapore, but her nomination needed to be withdrawn when damning emails implicated her in the Russia scandal and imperiled her Senate confirmation.
Trump initially named another Fox talking head, Monica Crowley, as the senior director of strategic communications for the NSC.
He stood by her for more than a week as news stories revealed egregious examples of plagiarism over several years, from a 2012 book to her PhD dissertation and op-eds. Just before the inauguration, under pressure, the president-elect dumped her.
Former Navy SEAL Carl Higbie, 34, was forced to resign two months ago as the chief of external affairs for the Corporation for National and Community Service after CNN uncovered bigoted statements he had made about African Americans, immigrants and gays as the host of an Internet radio show.
He got the patronage because he had been a go-to Trump defender on Fox, CNN and MSNBC during the 2016 campaign.
America First Priorities, a Trump-sanctioned outside group, hired the 34-year-old on Thursday as its new advocacy director, with the expectation that he'll again appear on TV to promote the president.
"The fact that I'm coming back into the fray does not mean that the president endorses those comments by any stretch," Higbie told the Hartford Courant yesterday. "We've all said something we've regretted. I just happened to say it on the radio. … But I'm committed to this administration and its policies."
• The president reportedly has fewer events on his schedule than he did during the opening year of his presidency so that he can have extra "executive time" in the residence, which appears to be a euphemism for watching television. That's only intensified the cable news feedback loop. Trump's tweets routinely echo messages, sometimes word for word, that he heard on Fox minutes earlier. Remember Trump's tweet about North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un's "button"?
The president just threatened a nuclear strike while live-tweeting a Fox News segment.
— Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) January 3, 2018
Left, Fox, 7:37 pm
Right, Trump, 7:49 pm pic.twitter.com/vJciYH6LIA
The president's cable habit almost led him to torpedo a compromise his own administration had negotiated to reauthorize Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act in January.
"Trump issued an early morning tweet in response to Judge Andrew Napolitano's criticism on a 'Fox and Friends' segment," Tufts University professor Daniel Drezner notes. "Only direct intervention from the chief of staff, national security adviser, director of national intelligence, CIA director, and House Speaker Paul Ryan convinced Trump to post a follow-up tweet clarifying his position."
Last Friday, Trump pardoned a former Navy sailor whose conviction for unauthorized retention of national defense information had made him a cause celebre on Fox. Commentators have often argued that the year he served in prison for taking pictures aboard a submarine showed Hillary Clinton was treated too leniently for how she mishandled classified material.
Kristian Saucier, 31, who is now a garbage collector in Vermont, had appeared on "Fox and Friends" earlier in the week to press his case. "Obviously, there's two different sets of laws in this country, for the political elite and for, you know, those lower-level, individuals, Americans, like myself," he said. "I think my case draws a very clear example of that."
Former Navy Sailor Kristian Saucier: I mishandled classified info, pled guilty to that mistake and continue to be punished, meanwhile Hillary Clinton gets to run for president pic.twitter.com/YKx8dgeKQ3
— FOX & friends (@foxandfriends) March 4, 2018
"A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment on its involvement, if any, in the process," Matt Zapotosky reports.
The only other pardon Trump has issued since taking office was for Joe Arpaio, who also frequently appears on Fox shows. The former Arizona sheriff was convicted of criminal contempt of court for ignoring a federal judge's order to stop racially profiling Latinos.
• Trump plainly enjoys the company of people he sees on TV. Trump invited Sebastian Gorka, a lightning rod who got fired from the White House last year but now spends a lot of time defending the president on Fox, over for dinner last week. Jesse Watters, a co-host of Fox's "The Five," joined them.
"According to a White House official and two other sources familiar with the meeting, Trump invited Gorka and Watters because 'he couldn't get enough of them on TV,' as one source put it, and wanted to confab with them about what he'd seen on Fox News, politics, gossip, and his administration," The Daily Beast reported.
Watters tweeted a picture of the menu afterward:
— Jesse Watters (@JesseBWatters) March 9, 2018
• The embattled president also appears to be putting a greater premium on loyalty as he makes personnel decisions. He clearly feels burned by some of his early hiring decisions. For example, Trump interviewed Jeanine Pirro, the host of Fox's "Justice with Judge Jeanine," to be deputy attorney general. Instead, he went along with Rod Rosenstein, a respected DOJ insider who he had no prior relationship with. That's a decision he's repeatedly said that he regrets.
• Trump's embrace of talking heads has become a punchline in popular culture. "To help find [Gary Cohn's] replacement, the president turned to his most trusted confidante: the TV in his bedroom," Comedy Central host Trevor Noah said on "The Daily Show" last night. "Basically, if Trump sees you on TV, there's a really good chance that he'll hire you. By the time his term is done, his attorney general is going to be 'Judge Judy' and his housing secretary will be 'Bob the Builder.'"
with Breanne Deppisch and Joanie Greve
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