As the White House continues to screw up even the most rote duties of the presidency, still, the new word from within the administration is that the Trump team is going to give up on providing public summaries of discussions between Trump and other foreign leaders. As in, at all. CNN reports that it is “unclear” whether the halt to providing such readouts is “temporary or permanent,” and that the White House is refusing to clarify.
So the White House refusal to publicly summarize what Donald Trump discussed with Vladimir Putin during their private, no-other-officials-allowed meeting wasn’t a one-off. It’s the new policy.
Trump has had at least two calls with other leaders in the last two weeks, including Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The White House confirmed that the calls took place after they were reported by foreign media, but declined to elaborate on what was said.
There are no doubt several reasons for this shift in longstanding White House tradition, but the most prominent one is that the White House communications team may be literally unable to craft those documents. It is not clear that they have any means to oblige Trump to tell them what was discussed. It is likely professionally dangerous to them to even attempt it, given that if even a single sentence of the “readouts” results in public outcry, the Oval Office Garbage Fire will blame them, not himself, for the new scandal.
Further complicating things, Trump has been shrinking the number of advisers allowed to listen in on his calls, so there may not be anyone aside from Trump able to tell the rest of the White House staff what Donald may have said or what he may have promised—but Trump himself is a notorious liar, even to his own lawyers and staff, and so his own supposed “recollections” of each call wouldn’t be credible information to begin with. It’s not a question of breaking with tradition for any strategic White House reason: Trump’s staff may simply be unable to clarify just what the hell Trump tells other foreign leaders. At all. Thus, they’re scrapping “readouts” of those summits and telephone calls entirely.
The danger here is, of course, that this means that every conversation between Donald Trump and any other foreign leader will be publicly summarized by that government, with no official response or clarification from our own. And that, obviously, is a public relations advantage for everyone in the world who is Not Us. A minor one, most likely, but an advantage nonetheless; if the Turkish president announces that Donald Trump has promised his nation eleventy billion dollars because reasons, it falls to the U.S. government to scramble to refute those claims only after they have been widely announced.
On the other hand, does it matter? Donald Trump has no credibility, either among other world leaders or within our own government; everybody at this point is fully aware of his habit of pointlessly lying about even the most trivial matters. A “readout” that has been scrubbed by the White House to bear no particular relation to an actual meeting is already a pointless bit of propaganda. That is a function of the White House’s dishonesty; the incompetence of being unable to even put a cursory document together stems, in the end, from the White House inability to curtail Trump’s lying to begin with.