Donald Trump arrives on stage during CPAC Conference 2024 at Gaylord National Resort Convention Center in Washington DC on February 24, 2024
According to a political commentator and producer for The Rachel Maddow Show, the Donald Trump White House may be beginning to collapse in on itself. While Trump has only been in office a few months, Steve Benen wrote that there are some clear signs of “emerging and deepening fissures within Trump’s team.”
Writing on the MaddowBlog, Benen pointed to a recent report by the Wall Street Journal stating that Trump’s decision to pause his tariffs for 90 days came about due to a secret ambush of the president by out Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick while his pro-tariff trade adviser, Peter Navarro, was in another meeting.
Related:
Sources told the publication that Bessent and Lutnick persuaded Trump to pause the tariffs and tell the American people immediately so the markets could stabilize. Trump agreed.
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“For one thing, functional White Houses are not supposed to work this way,” Benen said, “with Cabinet secretaries quietly scheming to work around a misguided anti-trade trade adviser.”
He also said that assuming the reporting from the Journal is accurate, it signifies “an implicit acknowledgement that Trump has no real understanding of his own policy agenda, which in turn creates an environment in which Cabinet secretaries, confident in the knowledge that the president will agree with the last person he spoke to, have to engage in skullduggery to prevent global economic ruin.”
Benen also acknowledged other reported clashes between members of Trump’s inner circle, including hostility between Elon Musk and several officials (namely, Navarro, Bessent, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio).
“Throughout American history, there have been administrations with rival factions, but those divisions usually take time,” Benen wrote. “On Team Trump, the cracks are bursting into view just three months after Inauguration Day.”
“In theory,” he continued, “a strong president could intervene, resolve differences, unite his or her own team and establish a clear vision for his or [her] administration to follow. In practice, however, Trump appears content to play the role of President Bystander, watching these divisions get even worse.”
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