It’s not clear Donald Trump knows what he’s doing, but his tendency of agreeing with whoever he last spoke to is already turning government into a bit of a clusterfudge:
Days before taking office, President-elect Donald Trump made two surprise calls to the Air Force general managing the Pentagon’s largest weapons program, the Lockheed Martin Corp. F-35 jet.
Listening in on one of those calls was Dennis Muilenburg -- the CEO of Lockheed’s chief rival, Boeing Co.
Alright, so Trump had some questions about the Lockheed's F-35 program, which he's criticized as "out of control" but also has pointed to as evidence of his imaginary business genius.
So why, precisely, was he asking those questions when the CEO of Lockheed's key rival was in the room? Reading between the lines here, he seems to have tasked the Air Force general with justifying the program in comparison to Boeing's own offering. Presumably based on his conversation with the Boeing CEO just minutes earlier.
After speaking with Trump, Bogdan wrote two three-page memos, titled “phone conversations with President-Elect,” dated Jan. 10 and 18th and stamped “For Official Use Only,” to limit distribution, according to the people. The memos outlined Trump’s questions about the capabilities of Boeing’s Super Hornet fighter and how it might compete against Lockheed’s F-35C. About a dozen Pentagon officials were alerted to the calls after they occurred, the people said.
Now, whatever you might think of the F-35 program, it's not the freaking same plane as an F-18. But it's not out of the question, at all, to think that Boeing could sell more of their fighters if the F-35 program is reduced or suffers delays. And Trump is going to bat for Boeing in a sustained way on this one.
Defense Secretary James Mattis in a memo last month translated Trump’s tweet into action when he asked Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work to oversee a review that “compares F-35C and F/A-18E/F operational capabilities and assesses the extent that F/A-18E/F improvements (an advanced Super Hornet) can be made in order to provide a competitive, cost effective, fighter aircraft alternative.”
Well, alrighty then. So to sum up: Donald Trump meets CEO. Donald Trump, who is known for parroting back the point of view of whoever last spoke to him then called up an Air Force general—with the Boeing CEO still in the room—and asked him to justify the military buying a Lockheed fighter instead of the product being peddled to him by that CEO. And now people are drafting memos to Donald Trump explaining the differences between the two planes.
That's ... a little odd. Nobody can say it ranks in the top hundred odd things we've learned about Donald Trump of late, perhaps, but it's still a little odd. And it fits with what we know about Trump's so-called "management" style: create chaos, create infighting, and then side with whoever's left standing.