In May, all West Wing staff were briefly ordered to wear masks at work. To this day, many continue to do so by opting for their safety and health, with one senior Trump official telling The Daily Beast that they wear one because “I’m not a moron.” That you think the first senior official to appoint someone might get credit from his colleagues.
But this is the Trump White House, where logic is not always king and small personal beefs can easily turn national policies on its head. A select group of officials has become increasingly frustrated with Deputy National Security Adviser Matt Pottinger – because they put on a mask shortly after the coronavirus outbreak was declared a pandemic.
Months later, these senior officials still left Pottinger behind closed doors for his decision to wear a mask at a time when her boss, President Donald Trump, and other senior administration officials chose to avoid face-to-face coverage, according to three senior officials. and one former official. Some in Trump’s neighborhood saw Pottinger’s wearing of a mask as an indication that the deputy national security adviser was the president in public, one of those senior officials said.
“That was something that made a lot of people angry and confused,” said one of the officials familiar with the matter. ‘The thinking was:’ We’re being tested all the time, what’s the point? ‘ [Some officials] warned him that this was something the president could piss on. But Matt did not. ‘
Last month, Pottinger’s boss, National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien, tested positive for the virus.
The president and his allies have repeatedly questioned whether he agrees that wearing a mask is really necessary to help contain the virus. On July 17, Trump said in a Fox News interview that he disagreed with Director of Centers for Disease Control Robert Redfield that everyone should wear masks to alert the virus. “I do not believe in that, no,” Trump told Wallace. “I do not agree with the statement that if everyone wore a mask, everything would disappear.”
A few days later, Trump posted a photo of himself on Twitter wearing a mask, saying, “Many people say it’s Patriotic to wear a face mask if you can not distance yourself socially. There’s no one more patriotic than me, your favorite president! ”
“Trump has joked that he is not sure if the deputy national security adviser will ever remove the mask, said one administration official. ”
Behind closed doors, Trump has plotted behind his back for wearing a mask for him. Trump has joked that he is not sure if the deputy national security adviser will ever take it, said one administration official.
Such a mockery of the president down has been a kiss of death for other officials. In 2017, for example, then-professional emergency lot Steve Bannon was sealed from the White House when the president started yelling at the West Wing about how much of a “leaker” he thought Bannon was.
But Pottinger continues to play a prominent role in Trump’s biggest priority: punishing Beijing.
In the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, some of Trump’s top advisers are pushing ahead with plans to secure significant gains for foreign policy as a way to win the president’s chances in November. As part of these efforts, national security officials have made zero commitment to revamping the White House’s approach to dealing with the Chinese government.
In the last several months, as the coronavirus has spread around the world, Trump’s trade sales with Beijing have begun to unmask. Some experts say that the Chinese are tens of billions behind on their purchase promises and that the president urged his closest China hawk trustees, including Peter Navarro, to pull Trump out of the deal altogether. Now officials are trying to correct course and move forward for any negative press about that phased deal shrinking by announcing new, tougher actions against Beijing ahead of the elections.
Pottinger, the deputy national security adviser and former director of Asia at the National Security Council, is leading that campaign. Officials close to Pottinger say he, perhaps more than any other official working in the national security apparatus, has contributed to the implementation of something closer to a comprehensive China policy that seeks to hold Beijing accountable for its cultural genocide in Xianjing. , their widespread theft of intellectual property, and the reduction of protests in Hong Kong – even though Trump himself does not seem interested in going to President Xi Jinping for such abuses.
Sometimes that’s Pottinger in violation of the commander in chief and other top Trump administration figures. For example, in February 2017, Trump Xi stated that Washington would recognize the Chinese position that Taiwan was part of China and that the People’s Republic of China is the only legal government. Meanwhile, the Department of Commerce announced with many deals with China that on the surface seemed like an attempt to sign Beijing as a strategic business partner – something that Pottinger has opposed.
Most recently, Pottinger sounded the alarm about the dangers posed by the coronavirus, while Trump and others ruled out the possibility of a pandemic. Pottinger urged the administration to address Beijing for its delayed communication about the virus’ existence and its origins. And he lobbied his bosses early on to publicly refer to COVID-19 as the “Wuhan virus” or the “China virus.”
Pottinger is respected by Republicans on Capitol Hill and is seen in the top national security elements of the administration as “a soldier,” as one former official put it. (He is actually a Retired Marine and served as a military intelligence officer in Iraq and Afghanistan.)
The result has been multiple profiles in news stores for the past six months for Pottinger, who worked as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal for his military career. And that attention – along with wearing a mask – made certain individuals in the White House even more so. One profile mainly caused tensions with O’Brien, officials said. That article, in The Washington Post, described Pottinger as an official who “has a quiet but powerful influence” and is a leader in “shaping the administration’s hard-line stance” against Beijing. The piece even quoted an interview with O’Brien’s predecessor HR McMaster, who called Pottinger “central to the biggest shift in U.S. foreign policy since the Cold War, which is the competitive approach for China.” With increasing attention to Pottinger also came control of his work on China, particularly by O’Brien, who regarded the declining trade deal as a problem brought in in part by his deputy.
“If he is shoved out, who will be able to do that job? No one.”
Supporters of Pottinger, officials working with him in the administration and several in the Washington Memorial, say each backlog is limited to a small cohort of officials. But these supporters underscore the risk that such a backlog could be made in any attempt to advance China’s administration’s strategy in the weeks leading up to the elections.
“If he’s been kicked out, who else will be able to join him?” said one individual with knowledge of the situation. “No one.”
One way Pottinger has helped ensure his own survival in a goofy, backstabbing Trumpworld, an arena famous for its rapid fire turnover, is simple: He learned how to please the boss, and how to deal with his notorious short attention span.
First in the administration, Pottinger developed a specific, concise style of informing Trump, finding ways to keep the president’s attention and not carry him, according to a former White House official in the chamber. has been when Pottinger and Trump spoke. He was not known as someone who had flashy, touching moments when he was in private conversation with Trump and generally kept his head down during the tumult, scandal and unexpected palace intrigue of the early months of the administration. Although he was never considered a Trump loyalist, the fact that he was responsible for and initially assigned to a position by former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn gave Pottinger some “MAGA street cred” that helped protect him from immense suspicion, noted this former official.
And although Pottinger is not as personally close to the president as some of Trump’s other Chinese hawks, he was known to fly with the president on Air Force One, even on domestic flights, in the early years of the Trump era, specifically to brief him on China affairs. But Pottinger’s recurring focus on human rights in China has often remained on the sidelines, at least as far as the incumbent president is concerned.
Three months after Pottinger, speaking Mandarin, delivered a speech in May praising the ‘millions of Hong Kong citizens who demonstrated peace for the rule of law last year,’ Trump went on a Fox Sports Radio show and shrugged to the crisis. According to the president, the crisis in Hong Kong is “a bit difficult from certain points of view”, because, “you know … it’s a part, if you look, I mean, look at a map. It’s close to China. . ”
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