Their boss had made a decision with major consequences
Politico reports in that monster-Trump piece that the failed casino tycoon ignored what his own National Security people urged him to say at NATO in favor of bullying them the way he’d always wanted to.
[T]he president also disappointed—and surprised—his own top national security officials by failing to include the language reaffirming the so-called Article 5 provision in his speech. National security adviser H.R. McMaster, Defense Secretary James Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson all supported Trump doing so and had worked in the weeks leading up to the trip to make sure it was included in the speech, according to five sources familiar with the episode…
It was not until the next day, Thursday, May 25, when Trump started talking at an opening ceremony for NATO’s new Brussels headquarters, that the president’s national security team realized their boss had made a decision with major consequences—without consulting or even informing them in advance of the change.
Well you see he’s the boss. That’s all there is to it really. He’s the boss, he can do whatever he wants to, and they can’t tell him what to do. It’s nursery school with nuclear weapons.
Added a senior White House official, “There was a fully coordinated other speech everybody else had worked on”—and it wasn’t the one Trump gave. “They didn’t know it had been removed,” said a third source of the Trump national security officials on hand for the ceremony. “It was only upon delivery.”
The president appears to have deleted it himself, according to one version making the rounds inside the government, reflecting his personal skepticism about NATO and insistence on lecturing NATO allies about spending more on defense rather than offering reassurances of any sort; another version relayed to others by several White House aides is that Trump’s nationalist chief strategist Steve Bannon and policy aide Stephen Miller played a role in the deletion.
He does what he wants. Nobody can stop him. We’re fucked.
By now they shouldn’t be surprised. This is a pattern with him. The fact that they can still be surprised indicates that they have an unrealistic view of what Trump is, and what he can be. At this point, Trump needs to be given “presidential toys” to play in the corner while the grown ups do government.
I wonder if the “surprised” part is a fig leaf for their inability to get him to take their advice. Perhaps more hopes that each thought that they’d had a “Xi’ moment, where someone successfully explains something to him and he gets it, however briefly. In this case it didn’t take. With any of them.
They probably forgot the cake.