A White House In Chaos

In assessing President Trump’s apparent about-face on gun control on Wednesday, a quick reminder of a quote from a faraway time called “a week-and-a-half ago”:

“For everyone, [the Parkland school shooting] was a distraction or a reprieve,” said the White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect internal conversations. “A lot of people here felt like it was a reprieve from seven or eight days of just getting pummeled.”

Got that? Good.

Because Wednesday was pretty much seven or eight days of getting pummeled in one 24-hour period. Much of it, in fact, a hangover from the aforementioned pummeling the White House received in the wake of White House staff secretary Rob Porter’s departure, which happened only three weeks ago but now seems about as distant as the Punic Wars.

There was, for example, the news that White House senior adviser Jared Kushner had his security clearance level downgraded, part of the continuing fallout from the revelation that Trump’s son in law, like Porter, was one of scores of White House officials handling highly sensitive intelligence with a temporary clearance.

And there was the news that Hope Hicks, White House communications director, and inner-circle Trump confidante, had resigned. Hicks, you may recall, was reportedly dating Porter when the scandal hit and nonetheless helped draft White House chief of staff John Kelly’s official statement on his departure.

There was a resignation over at the Department of Interior, too, with Secretary Ryan Zinke’s special assistant, political appointee Christine Bauserman, forced out after she was found to have regularly posted anti-Muslim, anti-LGBT, and “birther” conspiracy theories on social media.

And there was the news that Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson had, in the midst of sharp proposed cuts at his department, overshot his office decorating allowance by $26,000 on one dining set alone.

But the news cycle wasn’t done with Kushner, not by a long shot. Into the Washington Post’s reporting that at least four foreign governments have been actively looking for ways to manipulate Kushner via his winning combination of sprawling business interests, debt, and naiveté, the New York Times dropped its own scoop: Kushner’s business got two huge loans from two companies, Citigroup and Apollo, after Kushner took White House meetings with their heads.

There was a little something extra in store for Hicks, too. With speculation swirling that her departure may have been connected to her testimony before the House Intelligence Committee the day before (was it the “white lies” she admitted to telling on Trump’s behalf, or something else she may have said?), new reports surfaced that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s prosecutorial team is asking questions about statements Hicks made to the Times about the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russian operatives.

All this on top of the news that Mueller is looking into Trump’s apparent efforts to dismiss Attorney General Jeffrey Sessions (a.k.a., Mr. Magoo), as part of a probe into potential obstruction of justice.

So, with all that going on, the gun debate seems to be the national conversation Trump thinks we should keep having, with him at the center. And with his support for arming teachers looking perhaps a little less brilliant on a day that saw a Georgia teacher open fire from his classroom, what better than to stir things up with a bipartisan “pivot”?

Or was it a head fake? Those with short memories may want to recall Trump’s last televised commitment to a bipartisan solution, on DACA recipients—so-called Dreamers—in which he said he would “take the heat” for signing an immigration fix free of Republican “poison pills.” Maybe you remember how that turned out.

But surely this analysis is too cynical in the face of the president’s good-faith embrace of sensible gun reform, right? We’ll let the president have the last word.