Trump’s Immigration Ban, Shiny Objects and Misdirection
While the world focused on Trump’s immigration ban, the White House issued another executive order that might prove far more important. Trump ordered a rearrangement of the National Security Council, the president’s most important group of advisors on national security, that elevated Steve Bannon to the Council while demoting the Director of National Intelligence and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to members on an as-needed basis.
For this change to be concerning, you’d have to believe that it represented more than a bureaucratic reshuffling. I think it does, for two reasons in particular.
First, it breaks the traditional firewall between the political and national security arms of the president’s counsel. Steve Bannon is Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor to the President, a position similar to the ones held by David Axelrod for President Obama and Karl Rove for President Bush. These are political positions held by the men most responsible for the campaigns and political futures of their presidents. They have a distinctly political responsibility: to advise the President on policy decisions and their political implications.
Historically, political advisors have been barred from attending N.S.C. meetings, except for specific, exceptional occasions. N.S.C. meetings are focused on critical national security matters, and presidents of both parties have made organizational decisions to separate political interests from these issues.
Moreover, in Bannon’s case it represents a broad expansion of power and influence for the man most responsible for Trump’s election, the author of his inaugural address, and the driving force behind the immigration ban. In what could prove indicative of how the administration operates and Bannon’s power within it, that ban was signed without meaningful communication with cabinet officials. John Kelly, the new chief of the Department of Homeland Security — the agency most responsible for enforcing the order — didn’t receive final language of the order until hours before it was signed.
Second, it revokes the permanent status of the Director of National Intelligence and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the Principals Committee of the N.S.C. The Principals Committee is the senior-most assembly of the N.S.C. and by all accounts the most important national security group of the administration. The D.N.I. and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs will still attend “where issues pertaining to their responsibilities and expertise are to be discussed,” so it remains to be seen what practical implication this demotion has. But at a minimum, there’s a clear symbolic importance here.
Consider an example from corporate America. Imagine you’re the new CEO of a company that has a monthly executive meeting. In your first week on the job, you inform the Chief Technology Officer and Chief Marketing Officer that they’re no longer regular invitees for that meeting, they’ll just be pulled in when technology or marketing issues are discussed. That sends a clear signal to the entire organization that technology and marketing are no longer strategically important for the company. In this case, though, the executives no longer included are the Director of National Intelligence and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
Trump clearly wants to shake things up, and to some extent, it’s his prerogative as a newly-elected president to do so. But those changes need to be watched closely, and they need to be questioned. Why did Trump make these changes? Just to elevate Bannon’s influence? Why demote the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs? So far, the administration has offered little reasoning beyond what was written in the executive order, that the administration’s decision-making structures and processes must remain “adaptive and transformative.”
The immigration ban was the shiny object last week. It dominated the news cycle and allowed Trump to issue a number of executive orders that received little attention. If Trump’s playing a game of misdirection, it’s working.
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