On the menu today: When you’re covering Washington, you must cover what the president says — it is a big deal. But as we’ve learned, what Donald Trump says and what the Trump administration does are not always in alignment, and what the president says is going to happen doesn’t always happen. This weekend brought another threat to Hamas, another vague implied suggestion of consequences to Vladimir Putin, and a report that the Pentagon wants to deprioritize countering China and Russia in our national defense strategy. Meanwhile, the media has to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into covering another “local crime story.”
The No-Follow-Through Administration
President Trump, Sunday afternoon: “Everyone wants the Hostages HOME. Everyone wants this War to end! The Israelis have accepted my Terms. It is time for Hamas to accept as well. I have warned Hamas about the consequences of not accepting. This is my last warning, there will not be another one.”
Hamas still holds 48 hostages, with 20 believed to still be alive. Two of the bodies were American citizens.
You may recall that on February 11, Trump warned Hamas, “If all of the hostages aren’t returned by Saturday at 12:00 — I think it’s an appropriate time I would say cancel it and all bets are off and let hell break out.’” And then on Truth Social, March 5:“‘Shalom Hamas’ means Hello and Goodbye — You can choose. Release all of the Hostages now, not later, and immediately return all of the dead bodies of the people you murdered, or it is OVER for you.”
Somewhere, the devil is standing around with an unpaid bill for hell, fuming that the president assured him that Hamas would be covering the costs.
Back on August 22, Trump was asked about Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and his military continuing airstrikes in Ukraine, including a strike on an American-owned electronics factory in a remote corner of far western Ukraine.
“I’m not happy about anything having to do with that war,” Trump responded. “We’ll see what happens. I think over the next two weeks we’re going to find out which way it’s going to go. And uh, I better be very happy.”
Today is September 8, so we are now more than two weeks past that statement. And as last week’s column in that other Washington publication made clear, since returning to office in his second term, Trump has made warning after warning to Putin; the dictator has ignored them all.
Yesterday, Trump again gave mixed messages in his public statements. On his way to the U.S. Open in New York, Trump was asked, “Are you ready to move to the second phase of sanctions against Russia?” and the president responded, “Yeah, I am.”
But then in a later press gaggle with reporters:
Q: [Putin’s] not really giving you anything that you want. Is that making you less trustful of him?
Trump: Well, nobody was tougher in Russia than me. That has to do with the pipeline as, you know, Nord Stream Two and lots of other things. But I’m not happy. I’m not happy. I’m not happy about the whole situation. You know, it’s interesting. It doesn’t affect us because it’s not our soldiers, but they’re losing now, I used to tell you 5,000, they’re losing 7,000, between Ukraine and Russia, 7,000 soldiers . . . every single week.
Uh, it’s such a horrible waste of humanity. So, no, I am not thrilled with what’s happening there, I will tell you. I think it’s gonna get settled. So I settled seven wars. This I would’ve said would’ve been maybe the easiest one to settle of all, but with war, you never know what you’re getting. But we’re gonna get it. I believe we’re gonna get it settled.
But I am not happy with them. I’m not happy with anything having to do with that war. It’s just such a waste of great humanity.
Later Trump was asked, “When do you plan to speak to President Putin next?” and Trump responded, “Very soon, over the next couple of days.”
There’s always some other big phone call coming up, some other last chance to be offered, some other reason to hold off on enforcing threats and consequences.
It’s not that Trump always chickens out, as the TACO acronym alleges; if you doubt that, check out the status of the Iranian nuclear program. Maybe it’s TOCO — Trump often chickens out.
Putin’s shamelessness is almost understandable when you realize how many American presidents have threatened him with serious consequences and then failed to enforce them. After former President Joe Biden’s lone summit with Putin in June 2021, Biden said of the possibility of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny dying in prison: “I made it clear to him that I believe the consequences of that would be devastating for Russia.”
About two and a half years later, Navalny died in prison, with many Russians believing he was murdered on orders from Putin. Asked about those promised devastating consequences, Biden replied, “That was three years ago. In the meantime, they faced a hell of a lot of consequences. They’ve lost and/or had wounded over 350,000 Russian soldiers. They’ve made it into a position where they’ve been subjected to great sanctions across the board.”
In other words, those so-called devastating consequences had already been inflicted, so there was nothing left for Biden to do.
But the lack of follow-through from Trump manifests in more than just dealings with Hamas and Putin. All year long, Trump has happily announced big trade deals to great fanfare — in many cases without any details of the deal written down. And when the details do finally arrive months later, they don’t line up with the administration’s lavish boasts. As Reason laid out:
The Japan deal that Trump claims to have struck is more puzzle than promise. The White House fact sheet on the new deal claims, “Japan will invest $550 billion directed by the United States to rebuild and expand core American industries,” and that 90 percent of the return from investment would go to the United States. However, this language veers in a different direction from the Japanese cabinet release, which says “Japan will enable government-affiliated financial institutions to provide up to $550 billion in capital contributions, loans, and loan guarantees.” Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow Brad Setser has called the investment pledge “vaporware.”
The E.U. deal is, if anything, even thinner on details, with European negotiators rushing to clarify it was only a preliminary framework — political, provisional, and definitely not legally binding.
Trump is who he is, and he’s always going to be spinning a lot of plates and jumping around from issue to issue. This is where a good cabinet and good White House staff are supposed to come in and take the president’s words and turn them into actual policy. But that presumes that everyone on the president’s team agrees on what the president actually wants, and what the intended goal is.
I thought one of the most revealing and under-discussed anecdotes of the Trump administration so far came through the experience of Japan’s trade negotiators:
The presence of three top U.S. negotiators with differing stances on trade is adding a layer of complexity to tariff talks with Japan.
Open disagreements, competition and confusion among Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer have made it hard for the Japanese side to judge the Trump administration’s intentions, according to sources close to the negotiations.
“At one point, the three cabinet officials put the talks with the Japanese side on hold and began debating right in front of them,” said one source.
Why is it proving so difficult to reach trade deals that achieves America’s objectives? Well, one complication appears to be that the American negotiators don’t agree on what America’s objectives are.
In that vein, in July, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby authorized a pause on weapons shipments to Ukraine without coordinating with the White House. When reporters asked Trump about it, the president responded by saying he had no knowledge of the decision and hadn’t ordered it.
And now there is this eye-opening report that the Pentagon is preparing to deprioritize China and Russia in our national defense strategy:
A draft of the newest National Defense Strategy, which landed on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s desk last week, places domestic and regional missions above countering adversaries such as Beijing and Moscow, according to three people briefed on early versions of the report.
The move would mark a major shift from recent Democrat and Republican administrations, including President Donald Trump’s first term in office, when he referred to Beijing as America’s greatest rival. And it would likely inflame China hawks in both parties who view the country’s leadership as a danger to U.S. security. . . .
The new strategy would largely overturn the focus of the first Trump administration’s 2018 National Defense Strategy, which placed deterring China at the forefront of the Pentagon’s efforts.
“It is increasingly clear that China and Russia want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model,” the opening paragraphs of that document said.
The shift “doesn’t seem aligned with President Trump’s hawkish views on China at all,” said a Republican foreign policy expert briefed on the report, who like others was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive issues.
(Does the president have hawkish views on China? The president is maintaining the current levels of Chinese students studying at U.S. universities, refusing to enforce the ban on TikTok, barring Taiwanese officials traveling to the U.S., and allowing American companies to sell advanced chips to Chinese companies.)
Are domestic and regional missions important? Sure. But domestic threats have traditionally been primarily handled by domestic agencies (FBI, DEA, DHS) and the U.S. Coast Guard. And it’s not like there’s any force on earth that brings more to the table than the U.S. military when it comes to deterring potential Chinese military aggression or ongoing Russian military aggression.
Right there in the U.S. Navy’s mission statement: “The United States is a maritime nation, and the U.S. Navy protects America at sea. Alongside our allies and partners, we defend freedom, preserve economic prosperity, and keep the seas open and free. Our nation is engaged in long-term competition. To defend American interests around the globe, the U.S. Navy must remain prepared to execute our timeless role, as directed by Congress and the President.”
Finally, I was pleased when, shortly after John Ratcliffe became CIA director, the agency announced that their analysis indicated that a lab leak was more likely to be the cause of the Covid-19 global pandemic than a natural origin. (It is extremely difficult to believe that that analysis was just sitting on somebody’s desk for years, and no one thought it was all that important.) This aligns the CIA with the analysis of the FBI, the biological weapons specialists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Livermore Labs, and the man who oversaw safety programs at the U.S. Army’s maximum-containment lab at Fort Detrick, Md.
Large swaths of the U.S. government’s most experienced and smartest experts on virology have concluded that, at minimum, a lab leak is a strong possibility, and some have concluded it is the most likely explanation.
But what consequences have those declarations had?
[Sound of crickets chirping]
ADDENDUM: On August 22 — more than two weeks ago — on a Charlotte, N.C., light rail train car, Decarlos Brown, unprovoked, pulled out a knife and stabbed Iryna Zarutska to death. Brown is a longtime violent felon, who “has been arrested multiple times since 2011, according to court records. Charges have included felony larceny, robbery with a dangerous weapon, and communicating threats. Almost all charges were dropped.”
Zarutska was a 23-year-old refugee from Ukraine. (No getting around it, Zarutska looked like a supermodel, which is likely one of the factors that is generating the high level of public interest in the horrific crime.)
This morning, our George Leef points out how Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles is left making excuses, and insisting nothing could be done:
When she finally could not avoid talking about the killing, Charlotte’s lefty mayor lamely said that we can’t arrest our way out of social problems like violent crime. But the assailant in this case had previously been arrested, several times, and released. Imagine if this had been a shooting of a black man — Mayor Vi Lyles would no doubt be screeching about the need for gun control. According to leftists, we can in fact legislate solutions to the problem of violence, as long as it suits their political needs.
The mainstream media is starting to notice; CNN has a story about the crime this morning.
AG Hamilton noted over the weekend, “It really is something to take note of what national news outlets choose to cover and which stories they choose to ignore. I just checked because I assumed this was an exaggeration but can’t find anything on the North Carolina attack in the NYT, CNN, WaPO, the AP etc.”
I’m old enough to remember when abortionist Kermit Gosnell’s house of horrors was dismissed as a “local crime story.” (As our Robert VerBruggen quipped, “Makes sense. Similarly, national gun-policy people do not cover local crime in places like Aurora or Newtown.”)
I mean, on paper, the police killing George Floyd was a local crime story. So’s a bunch of racist yahoos getting together in Charlottesville, Va. So’s the Cambridge police arresting Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates, believing he was a burglar. Or a bunch of LAPD cops beating up Rodney King.
A lot of big national controversies start out as “local crime stories.”