Thread: Ever a Showman, Donald Trump Keeps Washington Guessing

Ever a Showman, Donald Trump Keeps Washington Guessing

By PETER BAKER and MAGGIE HABERMAN
FEB. 28, 2017

WASHINGTON — The speech was written, the rollout strategy was set. And then President Trump began talking and the plan went out the window. Unless that was the plan all along.

When Mr. Trump sat down with television anchors at the White House for an off-the-record lunch on Tuesday, he was supposed to preview his first address to Congress. Instead, he suddenly opened the door to an immigration bill that would potentially let millions of undocumented immigrants stay in the country legally.

Such legislation from the “build the wall” president would roil politics in the capital, and Mr. Trump told the anchors that nothing like that was actually in the speech as it was then drafted. But he turned to aides and suggested that maybe they should include it. After the lunch was over, aides rushed off to alert their colleagues, including Stephen K. Bannon and Stephen Miller, the architects of the president’s immigration crackdown.

Once again, the unlikeliest of presidents had torn up the script and thrown his young administration into upheaval. Once again, Washington was left trying to fathom what his strategy was. Was it mad genius, an improvisational leader proposing a Nixon-goes-to-China move to overhaul immigration after making a point of deporting “bad hombres”? Or was it simply madness, an undisciplined political amateur unable to resist telling guests what he thinks they want to hear even at the expense of his own political base?

In the end, he did not include it in the speech. And yet, rising to the occasion, Mr. Trump on Tuesday night sounded as presidential as he ever has since taking office. He invoked Abraham Lincoln and Dwight D. Eisenhower, heralded Black History Month, condemned anti-Semitic vandalism, celebrated American entrepreneurs like Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison and promised a “renewal of the American spirit.” He followed the written text on the teleprompters more closely than any major speech of his presidency.

Still, the paradox remained. He called for working “past the differences of party,” just hours after he called Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader from California, “incompetent.” He declared that “the time for trivial fights is behind us” just weeks after engaging in a public Twitter war with Arnold Schwarzenegger over the ratings for “Celebrity Apprentice.” He paid emotional tribute to a slain Navy SEAL on the same day he blamed his death on “the generals.”

And then there was that immigration trial balloon. If nothing else, Donald Trump the showman kept the attention right where he wanted it — squarely on himself. By the time he took the rostrum in the House chamber on Tuesday night for the functional equivalent of a State of the Union address, he had generated considerable suspense around what he would actually say and how it would be received.

President Trump said promises that Americans could keep their doctor and health plan under the Affordable Care Act were broken. By THE NEW YORK TIMES on Publish Date February 28, 2017. . Watch in Times Video »

As lawmakers strained to listen for a potential shift, Mr. Trump boasted of deporting “gang members, drug dealers and criminals,” saying that “bad ones are going out as I speak.” He introduced guests in the first lady’s box whose families had suffered at the hands of criminals in the country illegally.

But he talked about “reforming our system of legal immigration,” saying as he has before that the United States should base its admission of foreigners on merit. “I believe that real and positive immigration reform is possible as long as we focus on the following goals,” he added, “to improve jobs and wages for Americans, to strengthen our nation’s security and to restore respect for our laws.”

Whether this was all an intentional distraction remained unclear by the time he wrapped up and headed back down Pennsylvania Avenue. This is, after all, a White House that revels in what its current occupants refer to as the “head fake,” where the president gives the impression of moving one way when he is really moving in a completely different direction, even diverting attention from one controversy by creating another.

That leaves allies and adversaries alike scratching their heads about what Mr. Trump really believes. In private discussions, a mystified Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican majority leader from Kentucky, has said Mr. Trump appears uncertain about precisely where he stands on critical issues. Thus, many search for ways to influence a malleable president prone to spouting out off-the-cuff ideas depending on his audience.

Mr. Trump’s advisers have said privately that they wanted this speech to be more optimistic than his Inaugural Address, an 18-minute jeremiad against what he called “American carnage” and the establishment he blamed for it. Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump has privately expressed concern about the harsh tone of her father’s rhetoric over many months.

No president in modern times had shown up for his first speech to Congress with approval ratings so low — just 42 percent in the latest Gallup poll. His 40 days of careening from one crisis to another, many of them self-created, had sowed deep doubts about his leadership not only among Democrats and independents but even among many Republicans. His challenge for this address was to move beyond these moments and establish himself as a president.

The speechwriting was described by one senior administration official as an “accordionlike process,” stretching to include multiple contributors inside and outside the administration, and then shrank back to include just a few people. In addition to Mr. Bannon and Mr. Miller, they included Vince Haley, a former adviser to Newt Gingrich, and Mario Loyola, a conservative writer, according to two senior administration officials. Other advisers like Kellyanne Conway also were involved.

One official said Mr. Trump had taken ownership of this speech in a way that he had not before. He practiced it repeatedly, adjusting once again to a teleprompter format that has never felt totally comfortable to him. As the hour went on, Mr. Trump grew more comfortable.

Immigration was one area where he was evidently still trying to calibrate. After all, Mr. Trump was not always so strident on the issue. After the 2012 election, he denounced Mitt Romney for supporting what he called “self-deportation,” calling it “a crazy policy” that cost Mr. Romney the Hispanic vote. The Democrats, he said then, did not have a policy “but what they did have going for them is they weren’t meanspirited about it.”

So perhaps it was not so surprising that Mr. Trump pivoted at the lunch with anchors. Asked about efforts to deport immigrants in the country illegally, Mr. Trump without prompting raised the idea of legislation, noting that there had not been anything comprehensive on the subject since Ronald Reagan’s amnesty program in the 1980s.

Mr. Trump told the anchors it was time for a bill that would grant legal status to many of those in the country illegally as long as both sides compromised. He said he recognized that it would cause him political problems with his conservative base voters, according to people in the room, but added that he thought he could keep them happy since they had stuck with him throughout last year’s Republican primaries.

When Mr. Trump offered the idea, he let the word “compromise” hang in the air, gauging the reaction. The president’s aides glanced at each other, then moved quickly to alert Mr. Bannon and Mr. Miller.

That the proposal did not ultimately make it into the speech may speak to the influence of Mr. Bannon’s wing. But the town was confused and off balance, just the way Mr. Trump likes it.

Follow Peter Baker at @peterbakernyt and Maggie Haberman at @maggienyt

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/u...mp-speech.html

LOL!! Was he gaming them? After all, this was a private meeting and everything was supposed to be "off the record", yet the anchors proved they couldn't be trusted. Not only the anchors can't be trusted, Trump now knows that one of the aides in the lunch leaked the conversation to the press.