Last Call For Trump Cards, Con't

So it turns out that everyone really was expecting Donald Trump to reaffirm America's military commitment to Article 5 of the NATO treaty, the mutual military defense part of the agreement that has only been invoked once, after 9/11. Only Trump changed the speech himself at the last minute and left that part out on purpose.

When President Donald Trump addressed NATO leaders during his debut overseas trip little more than a week ago, he surprised and disappointed European allies who hoped—and expected—he would use his speech to explicitly reaffirm America’s commitment to mutual defense of the alliance’s members, a one-for-all, all-for-one provision that looks increasingly urgent as Eastern European members worry about the threat from a resurgent Russia on their borders.

That part of the Trump visit is known. 

What’s not is that the president also disappointed—and surprised—his own top national security officials by failing to include the language reaffirming the so-called Article 5 provision in his speech. National security adviser H.R. McMaster, Defense Secretary James Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson all supported Trump doing so and had worked in the weeks leading up to the trip to make sure it was included in the speech, according to five sources familiar with the episode. They thought it was, and a White House aide even told The New York Times the day before the line was definitely included.

Whoopsie!

The president appears to have deleted it himself, according to one version making the rounds inside the government, reflecting his personal skepticism about NATO and insistence on lecturing NATO allies about spending more on defense rather than offering reassurances of any sort; another version relayed to others by several White House aides is that Trump’s nationalist chief strategist Steve Bannon and policy aide Stephen Miller played a role in the deletion. (According to NSC spokesman Michael Anton, who did not dispute this account, “The president attended the summit to show his support for the NATO alliance, including Article 5. His continued effort to secure greater defense commitments from other nations is making our alliance stronger.”) 

Either way, the episode suggests that what has been portrayed—correctly—as a major rift within the 70-year-old Atlantic alliance is also a significant moment of rupture inside the Trump administration, with the president withholding crucial information from his top national security officials—and then embarrassing them by forcing them to go out in public with awkward, unconvincing, after-the-fact claims that the speech really did amount to a commitment they knew it did not make.

In the end Trump always throws his employees under the bus.  Always.  And he did this not out of "skepticism" but because it directly benefited his actual patron, Vladimir Putin.

So yes, he sandbagged his own foreign policy team on this.  Makes you wonder what else he's screwed his cabinet picks over with, and maybe it explains why he still can't find anyone willing to be FBI Director after more than a month and why scores of cabinet positions at the senior level remain unfilled.

After all if Trump just ignores their advice and does things because of "instinct" who needs advisers, cabinet members, and their deputies and support staff?

Not Trump. He doesn't need anyone.

But Vlad.