‘Aides fret over Trump's policy impulses’

WASHINGTON: The ostensible meltdown of the Trump Presidency as chronicled by Bob Woodward apparently has at least some world leaders worried. It’s a sentiment that may well be running through the Indian establishment as two of President Trump’s cabinet principals, secretary of state

Mike Pompeo

and defense secretary James Mattis, arrived in New Delhi for a 2+2 dialogue with their Indian counterparts on Thursday, with an invitation to the US president to attend the January 26 Republic Day celebration on the table.


In several episodes related in Woodward’s book ‘Fear:Trump in the White House’, President Trump comes across as both ignorant and impulsive on foreign policy issues. His staff and cabinet colleagues are often shown as restraining influence on him, with the implication that they do not trust him and, if anything, regard him as a clear and present danger to US security and interests.

In one particularly telling instance, Woodward relates that Trump wanted to assassinate Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad after a chemical weapon attack on the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhoun that killed at least 85 civilians. “Let’s f**king kill him! Let’s go in. Let’s kill the f**king lot of them,” Trump is quoted as telling secretary of defence Mattis, referring to Assad and his forces. After hanging up with Trump, according to Woodward, the secretary reportedly told one of his senior staffers: “We’re not going to do any of that. We’re going to be much more measured.”

Mattis in fact emerges as one of the more sober influences on Trump, frequently warding of the mercurial president’s impulses. Woodward recounts that after a testy meeting on South Korea — in which Trump questioned why the US backs it financially and militarily (apparently clueless about the Korean war or the region’s history) — Mattis told associates that the president acted and understood things like “a fifth- or sixth-grader and “secretaries of defence don’t always get to choose the president they work for.”

Mattis has strongly denied making such remarks but such is the toxic atmosphere in Washington — which one commentator likened to cockroaches in a kitchen -- that there is constant speculation as to who will survive for how long and why. More than a dozen Trump associates have left the White House, some of them in disgrace.

Woodward also recounts an instance showing leaders across the world may be keenly following the developments in Washington with regards to the Mueller probe. When Trump calls the Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to discuss the release of an aid worker from captivity, the Egyptian leader reportedly asks him “Donald, I’m worried about this investigation. Are you going to be around?” The US President later tells his lawyer (according to Woodward) that his chat with Sisi was “like a kick in the nuts.”