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The NSC: A Microcosm of Trump Chaos [1]
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Date: 2025-04-24
The National Security Council (NSC) is a White House group that works for the National Security Adviser, who advises the president on the possible implications and consequences (and also the legality) of proposed domestic and international actions.
The National Security Council is the President’s principal forum for national security and foreign policy decision making with his or her senior national security advisors and cabinet officials, and the President’s principal arm for coordinating these policies across federal agencies.
That quote is from the Biden White House archived description of the NSC. You wouldn’t recognize Trump’s NSC from that version. Instead, we have this description, from the Atlantic’s Isaac Stanley-Becker today: Inside the Fiasco at the National Security Council.
The NSC was the first part of the federal workforce to be purged of expertise when Donald Trump returned to power in January. . . .
The article appeared shortly after Trump announced he will meet with Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of the Altantic. One has to wonder if that meeting is still on, because Stanley-Becker goes on to say:
The firings and failure to follow protocol offered an early preview of the chaos and instability at Trump’s NSC, described to me by more than a dozen current and former U.S. officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive details or to avoid reprisal.
One thing about the article, which Taggan Goddard’s Political Wire spotted and which then caught my eye, was this:
The disorder at the NSC, officials told me, stems from Trump’s impatience with process, disregard for the law, and insistence on loyalty in place of expertise.
Those three qualities almost completely sum up Trump’s approach to governing. About the only things missing are his narcissism and his total incompetence. (Side note: while we’ve had a lot of discussion here about Trump’s insistence on loyalty and contempt for the law, we haven’t talked as much about his impatience, and we should be doing more of that.)
Another point of interest — and of grave concern:
On the priorities that matter most to the president, Waltz has less influence than Stephen Miller, the homeland-security adviser and deputy White House chief of staff for policy, whose team is part of the NSC. Miller treats the advisory body not as a forum to weigh policy options, current and former officials told me, but as a platform to advance his own hard-line immigration agenda. . . . Meanwhile, Waltz’s authority to hire and fire his own staff has been swept out from under him.
Given that Waltz was the guy responsible for connecting Goldberg to the “highly classified” Signal chat group where Hegseth spelled out details of the planned attack on the Houthis, I don’t have much confidence in his hiring skills. But Miller’s invasion of the NSC means its focus is not on national security and the impact policies may have on it, but on immigration:
On the priorities that matter most to the president, Waltz has less influence than Stephen Miller, the homeland-security adviser and deputy White House chief of staff for policy, whose team is part of the NSC. Miller treats the advisory body not as a forum to weigh policy options, current and former officials told me, but as a platform to advance his own hard-line immigration agenda.
Meanwhile. . .
The purpose of the NSC directorates is to develop policy proposals for consideration by senior leadership and the president—and to implement presidential decisions across agencies. The . . . bulk of the work is carried out by career officials detailed from other parts of the government—including the intelligence community and the Department of Defense—for one- or two-year stints that tend to span administrations of different parties. The career staff help ensure a thorough evaluation of the benefits and possible risks of those orders. That evaluation is traditionally reflected in a decision memo that accompanies major foreign-policy actions. In certain instances over the past three months, Trump has not received such memos, officials told me.
And then there was conspiracy nut Laura Loomer, who snuck into the Oval Office when NSA Waltz wasn’t there and persuaded Trump to fire some of his most competent staffers for . . . reasons (like not firing a holdover transgender employee): Trump Firing Mike Waltz Staffers After Laura Loomer's White House Visit. According to the Atlantic story, when
Waltz protested that he had, in fact, carefully vetted his staff. Vice President J. D. Vance appeared amused by the interaction. He joked during the meeting that Loomer’s investigative skills made her well suited for work at the CIA.
Except I don’t think Vance was joking.
This is only one agency. It happens to be an agency over which Trump legally has total control; the NSC works for the Office of the President and Congress does not get consulted about its membership. This is Trump chaos unfiltered, unrestrained, and on steroids (or adderall).
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