Unless your weekend was spent on a distant, isolated island—one where people are still allowed to travel to the United States without the threat of being randomly exported to a country without a Donald Trump-branded golf course—it was hard to miss the spiral of bigotry, bungling, and plain old bastardry that surrounded Trump’s executive order on immigration. In a single week of delivering on his worst promises, Trump has sparked a level of protest the nation hasn’t seen since the 1960s.
But an immigration ban that conflated illegal use of nationality with unconstitutional basis on religion wasn’t Trump’s only work over the weekend. On Saturday, Trump signed a trio of new executive orders. Among them was one that shuffled the chairs in the National Security Council to ...
… give [Steve] Bannon a regular seat on the principals committee—the meetings of the most senior national security officials, including the secretaries of defense and state.
That memo also states that the director of national intelligence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff will sit on the principals committee only when the issues to be discussed pertain to their “responsibilities and expertise.”
So Trump ousted the nation’s highest-ranking general to make room for the real-life Pepe the frog.
It’s a structure that drew a few comments from someone with experience.
Susan Rice’s comments were attached to a re-tweet of this statement.
Experience out, Nazis in—it’s the whole Trump transition in a nutshell.
With Bannon to provide Trump’s policy, and Priebus there to nod reflexively to any suggestion, there’s really no need to have advice from the generals. After all, during the campaign Trump said that he knew more than all the generals. Now he’s going to prove it.
One of the other orders Trump signed on Saturday was to direct Mattis to create a “plan to defeat ISIS” within 30 days. But don’t expect to see an actual plan. After all, Trump has said repeatedly that he wouldn’t reveal anything about military strategy. At least, not until Bannon says he can.
National Security Council
Regular |
Vice-President
Secretary of State
Secretary of Treasury
Secretary of Defense
Attorney General
Secretary of Homeland Security
Chief of Staff
Chief Strategist
National Security Advisor
Homeland Security Advisor
|
Mike Pence
Rex Tillerson*
Steven Mnuchin*
James Mattis
Jefferson Sessions*
John Kelly
Reinhold Priebus
Steve Bannon
Michael Flynn
Tom Bossert
|
Optional |
Counsel to the President
Deputy Counsel to the President
Director of the Office of Management and Budget |
Donald McGahn
Mick Mulvaney |
Topical |
Director of National Intelligence
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff |
Dan Coats
Joseph Dunford |
* Unconfirmed Nominee