Donald Trump's Policy Reversals - The New York Times

For Trump, a Steep Learning Curve Leads to Policy Reversals

4/13/17

The New York Times

By PETER BAKER55

© Doug Mills/The New York Times President Trump in the Oval Office.   As the first president in American history never to have served in government or the military, he has faced an especially steep learning curve.

WASHINGTON — For President Trump, the road to changing his mind on China included a discussion with corporate executives in the State Dining Room of the White House in February. When the conversation turned to China’s currency, the executives had a simple message for the president: You’re wrong.

Mr. Trump had long insisted that China was devaluing its currency and should be punished, but the executives pushed back and told him Beijing had actually stopped. And while Mr. Trump at first resisted — as late as this month calling the Chinese “world champions” of currency manipulation — after many talks like the one in February he reversed himself, declaring this week that “they’re not currency manipulators” after all.

Sign Up For the Morning Briefing Newsletter

For any new occupant of the White House, the early months are like a graduate seminar in policy crammed into every half-hour meeting. What made sense on the campaign trail may have little bearing on reality in the Oval Office, and the education of a president can be rocky even for former governors or senators. For Mr. Trump, the first president in American history never to have served in government or the military, the learning curve is especially steep.

The past week has made that abundantly clear. He discovered that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia may not be the “best friend” he imagined and that staying out of the civil war in Syria was harder than he assumed. He acknowledged that 10 minutes of listening to China’s president made him realize he did not fully understand the complexity of North Korea. He dropped his opposition to the Export-Import Bank after learning more about it. And he said he no longer thought NATO was “obsolete.”

Just weeks ago, in the midst of failed efforts to scrap President Barack Obama’s health care program, he acknowledged that the issue was more involved than the repeal-and-replace mantra of a campaign rally. “Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated,” he said with amazement. Nobody except anyone who had spent any time in Washington policy making. But for Mr. Trump, never much of a policy wonk, it was an eye opener.

“As he governs, he is realizing that the campaign talk doesn’t fit neatly into governing and he needs a different approach, one that gets results,” said Christopher Ruddy, the chief executive of Newsmax Media and a friend of the president’s. “So he will discard things and people that don’t work out, and those that do work, he will magnify. That’s how he became successful in business and entertainment.”

One person’s education, of course, may be another’s betrayal. To some of his supporters, the pivots suggest that Mr. Trump the outsider may have been captured by Wall Street veterans in his White House, while Stephen K. Bannon, his chief strategist, is sidelined.

It got to the point that Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist radio show host, focused his Thursday program on defending the president against his own base. “Is Trump selling us out?” Mr. Jones asked. “And the answer is no. In fact, Trump is attempting to co-opt the establishment.”

To be sure, Mr. Trump remains a historically unpredictable president, given to impulse, still tilting at the Washington establishment and supporting ideological measures popular with his conservative base, including legislation he signed on Thursday targeting Planned Parenthood. Even as establishment figures seek to influence him, he has not given up on his most polarizing priorities, and few can forecast where he will take his presidency. Mr. Trump is still Mr. Trump, and he believes he got to the White House by following instinct.

But he arrived at the White House surrounded by advisers who, like him, were neophytes to governance. His White House chief of staff, chief strategist, senior adviser, counselor and national economics adviser have no prior government experience of consequence. Nor do his secretaries of state, Treasury, commerce, housing or education.

At first, Mr. Trump dismissed the importance of receiving his intelligence briefing every day, arguing that he did not learn much. He figured it would be easy to ban visitors from several predominantly Muslim countries and build a border wall while forcing Mexico to pay for it. He had never heard of the congressional procedures that forced him to push for health care changes before overhauling the tax code.

But as seasoned hands got access to him, he retreated from some of his provocative promises. He put on hold his vow to move the American Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem after King Abdullah II of Jordan rushed to Washington to warn him of a violent backlash among Arabs. He abandoned his intention to bring back torture in terrorism interrogations after Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told him it was ineffective.

He has not appointed a special prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton, ripped up or renegotiated the nuclear agreement with Iran, reversed Mr. Obama’s Cuba policy or terminated his predecessor’s program permitting younger unauthorized immigrants to stay.

So much of this is new to Mr. Trump that only after he publicly accused Mr. Obama of having wiretapped his telephones last year did he ask aides how the system of obtaining eavesdropping warrants from a special foreign intelligence court worked.

The Export-Import Bank, which helps finance purchases of American exports, is a telling example. During the campaign, Mr. Trump sided with conservatives who wanted to eliminate it because the government should not finance large corporations and effectively pick winners and losers in a free-market economy. But on Wednesday, Mr. Trump embraced the bank.

“I was very much opposed to Ex-Im Bank because I said what do we need that for IBM and General Electric,” he told The Wall Street Journal. “It turns out that, first of all, lots of small companies will really be helped, the vendor companies. But also maybe more importantly, other countries give” such aid, and so “we lose a tremendous amount of business.”

Fred P. Hochberg, who just stepped down as chairman of the bank, said he was heartened by Mr. Trump’s reversal, noting that Ronald Reagan and Mr. Obama had also opposed the bank only to rethink their positions.

“I’ve probably never met a chief executive who didn’t have a different perspective when they occupy that chair than when they’re on the outside, whether you’re a mayor or you’re running a company,” Mr. Hochberg said. “And we ought to applaud people when they learn and they change their minds.”

In the same Journal interview, Mr. Trump described his learning process on North Korea, which is developing nuclear-capable ballistic missiles. When he invited President Xi Jinping of China to his Mar-a-Lago estate, Mr. Trump said he believed Beijing could simply pressure North Korea to stop its activities. Then, he said, Mr. Xi reviewed the history of China and Korea for him.

“After listening for 10 minutes, I realized that it’s not so easy,” Mr. Trump said. “You know, I felt pretty strongly that they had a tremendous power over” North Korea, he added. “But it’s not what you would think.”

Mr. Trump sometimes cloaks his evolving positions by declaring victory before retreating. For instance, he had criticized NATO for not fighting terrorism and leaving the financial burden to the United States. As he met with NATO’s secretary general on Wednesday, Mr. Trump asserted that the alliance had changed.

“You look at the president’s position, where he wanted to see NATO, in particular, evolve to, and it’s moving exactly in the direction that he said,” Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, said on Thursday.

But the alliance has hardly changed in three months. Just three more members out of 28 have committed to raise military spending to target levels by next year, and the only shift in NATO’s approach to terrorism was to create a new intelligence office before Mr. Trump’s inauguration.

Karen Hughes, who was White House counselor to President George W. Bush, said no president can be fully informed about all the issues that will confront him.

“Obviously, most presidents aren’t nuclear scientists,” she said. “What is important is that the White House provide a disciplined process for the experts to present their views, which are often differing. The president’s role as the chief executive and decision maker is to listen to, question and probe the expert recommendations, then apply informed judgment to the decision.”