[AMV] Amerikaanse politiek #335 Worstelend door het Capitool

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Op vrijdag 7 juli 2017 15:53 schreef Monolith het volgende:
Trump doet akward handje schudden met X, Macron doet akward handje schudden met Trump, enzovoort. Lekker relevant.

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President Donald Trump won office on promises to shake up how Washington works, and so far that’s been most apparent in his own West Wing, where his top advisers have built up personal staffs to support their own agendas instead of using a traditional White House policy and messaging operation.

Chief strategist Steve Bannon has two special assistants, a deputy assistant, an executive assistant and a body man working in his “war room” — plus his external press hand, something his predecessors under President Barack Obama, David Axelrod and David Plouffe, never had while working in the White House.

Senior adviser Jared Kushner has two staffers working directly below him, as well as another five in the newly created Office of American Innovation who are focused on his portfolio of White House issues. Included in that mix is a communications adviser, Josh Raffel, a former Hollywood PR exec who previously repped Kushner’s real estate work.

“It is a new development for a White House staffer to have their own individual PR people,” said Ari Fleischer, who served as White House press secretary during George W. Bush’s first term.

Fleischer could not recall any staffers in the Bush White House having their own media contact aside from Karl Rove, who retained former Justice Department spokesman Mark Corallo to handle inquiries about his involvement in the Valerie Plame leak investigation. Corallo is currently representing Trump's legal team on matters relating to the Russia investigation.

The expansion of staff assigned to individual senior advisers has helped the people closest to Trump build up their own brands and policy portfolios — such as Kushner’s focus on technology and Middle East peace — but also reinforces factionalism within the West Wing. The aides help bolster competing camps when they’re squaring off to influence the president on everything from climate change to trade and health care.

Current and past White House aides say such an arrangement also risks distracting from a unified Trump agenda.

“The person it hurts is Donald Trump,” said Tommy Vietor, a former National Security Council spokesman under Obama. “Their aides aren’t working to push his agenda forward; instead, they’re doing the bidding of their bosses.”

In past White Houses, staff members have been assigned to bodies like the National Security Council or the Domestic Policy Council, while top-ranked aides to the president — assistants, deputy assistants, or special assistants to the president — made do with relatively few direct subordinates.

Obama’s senior adviser Valerie Jarrett was criticized by fellow staffers in 2008 for designating her aide Michael Strautmanis, who helped oversee the office of public engagement and intergovernmental affairs, as a “chief of staff” — a title typically reserved for the president’s top deputy or for those running the established offices within the West Wing.

Trump’s White House has taken that approach to a new level.

Senior counselor Kellyanne Conway, whose portfolio spans opioids, veterans issues and communications, has a chief of staff, Renee Hudson, who manages one person below her. Hudson, who has the title of deputy assistant to the president, was a chief of staff to Rep. Todd Rokita (R-Ind.) and is considered a strong policy aide to Conway, taking the lead on many of her issues, including opioid abuse and military spouse employment. Even more critically, she fills in for Conway at senior meetings when she’s traveling around the country advocating for Trump’s agenda at rallies.

Ivanka Trump also has a chief of staff, Julie Radford, who holds the title of special assistant to the president and manages only a single person below her.

As Obama’s chief strategist, Axelrod had two special assistants and an executive assistant underneath him. Plouffe had a deputy senior adviser and two special assistants when he took over the role — half as many dedicated staffers as Bannon or Kushner have.

The extensive personal offices also illustrate the distrust among top West Wing officials in the White House communications shop, which is stocked with loyalists to chief of staff Reince Priebus who used to work with him at the Republican National Committee.

“There is no trust in the current structure to defend everyone equally,” said one White House official.

The White House defended the arrangement, with some officials saying the organizational chart is designed to let each senior aide manage their own policy portfolios from top to bottom. They also argued it helps advance the priorities of the president, who is known for delegating.

“It’s a great thing that staffers are so engaged at such a high level and have created very ambitious portfolios within the president’s agenda,” said deputy White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. “We are shaking things up, and it's a great thing for which the results will ultimately speak for themselves.”

Most noticeable is the proliferation of spokespeople operating parallel to the White House press office.

That includes Raffel, a commissioned officer with a senior title and salary who sits in on the White House’s daily communications meetings and routinely handles queries concerning administration initiatives in Kushner and Ivanka Trump’s portfolios.

He's worked to promote initiatives from the Office of American Innovation, like a recent tech CEO event, and also focuses on issues like Middle East peace, one of Kushner’s top priorities, and paid leave, a signature issue for Ivanka Trump. Raffel previously represented Kushner Cos. when he worked at Hiltzik Strategies, a New York firm.

Bannon relies on an outside press person, former Breitbart spokeswoman Alexandra Preate, who formerly represented Trump donor and Breitbart backer Rebekah Mercer. But her job is primarily to keep Bannon’s name out of the press, to avoid distracting from Trump’s agenda, according to two White House officials.

Kushner's and Bannon’s respective PR hands are the first to respond to inquiries from reporters, rather than the White House communications shop overseen by press secretary Sean Spicer — and often respond separately on issues where Trump’s advisers disagree.

The White House communications shop is more likely to respond on the record to an inquiry about Priebus than anyone else, in part because many people who work there worked for Priebus at the RNC, including Spicer and deputy press secretary Lindsay Walters.

“He brought his own PR firm inside with him,” said the White House official.

The Trump White House still has about 100 fewer staffers than the Obama administration had during its first and final years in office, with 377 staffers. First lady Melania Trump has 19 fewer staffers working for her than Michelle Obama did in 2009. And only 17 Trump staffers make the top White House salary of $179,700 per year, compared to 20 in Obama’s first year.

While the proliferation of chiefs of staff and PR people appears to naturally reflect Trump’s own hyper awareness of brand development, former White House officials still say it’s taking the West Wing in a whole new direction.

“They’re redesigning how the White House staffs,” said Betsy Myers, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton.

http://www.politico.com/s(...)staff-kushner-240244

twitter:

HallieJackson twitterde op vrijdag 07-07-2017 om 17:31:47 An hour and 25 minutes after their meeting began, Presidents Trump and Putin are *still* talking, per pool. Had been sched. for abt 30 mins. reageer retweet

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Op vrijdag 7 juli 2017 17:39 schreef KoosVogels het volgende:

[..]

Die Poetin is Trump flink aan het inpakken. Gehaaide ex-KGB'er versus narcistisch rijkeluiskindje. Alsof Kasparov schaakt tegen een kind met het syndroom van down.

twitter:

JenniferJJacobs twitterde op vrijdag 07-07-2017 om 18:28:53 What was planned as a 30-minute Trump-Putin meeting has stretched past 130 minutes. Started about 10:10 a.m. easte… https://t.co/b5yhh4Wqln reageer retweet

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Op vrijdag 7 juli 2017 19:28 schreef Nintex het volgende:
The trolls are winning on all fronts:

twitter:

polNewsForever twitterde op donderdag 06-07-2017 om 23:36:35 Yesterday, /pol/ had an idea: download the CNN app, give it a 1-Star review, delete the app.Today, it's national… https://t.co/hcHeBPVuAK reageer retweet

[ afbeelding ]

Real diplomacy, art of the deal

twitter:

markknoller twitterde op vrijdag 07-07-2017 om 19:01:32 State Dept officials say the Trump/Putin talks ran 2 hr 16mins. nearly four times the 35 mins originally planned. Awaiting briefing. reageer retweet

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Op vrijdag 7 juli 2017 19:42 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

[..]

Ok, bedankt voor de feedback.

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Op vrijdag 7 juli 2017 19:54 schreef Nintex het volgende:
[ afbeelding ]

Art of the Deal

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HAMBURG, Germany (AP) — The United States and Russia have reached agreement on a cease-fire in southwest Syria, three U.S. officials said Friday as President Donald Trump held his first meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The deal marks a new level of involvement for the Trump administration in trying to resolve Syria’s civil war. Although details about the agreement and how it will be implemented weren’t immediately available, the cease-fire is set to take effect Sunday at noon Damascus time, said the officials, who weren’t authorized to discuss the cease-fire publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Jordan and Israel also are part of the agreement, one of the officials said. The two U.S. allies both share a border with the southern part of Syria and have been concerned about violence from Syria’s civil war spilling over the border.

The deal is separate from an agreement that Russia, Turkey and Iran struck earlier this year to try to establish “de-escalation zones” in Syria where violence would be reduced. The U.S., wary of Iran’s involvement, was not a part of that deal. Follow-up talks this week in Astana, Kazakhstan, failed to reach agreement on how to finalize a cease-fire in those zones.

Previous cease-fires in Syria have collapsed or failed to reduce violence for long, and it was unclear whether this deal would be any better.

Earlier in the week, Syria’s military had said it was halting combat operations in the south of Syria for four days, in advance of a new round of Russian-sponsored talks in Astana. That move covered southern provinces of Daraa, Quneitra and Sweida. Syria’s government briefly extended that unilateral cease-fire, which is now set to expire Saturday — a day before the U.S. and Russian deal would take effect.

The new agreement to be announced Friday will be open-ended, with no set end date, one U.S. official said, describing it as part of broader U.S. discussions with Russia on trying to lower violence in the war-ravaged country. Officials said the U.S. and Russia were still working out the details as Trump and Putin concluded their more than two-hour meeting on Friday.

Implications for Syria aside, the deal marks the biggest diplomatic achievement for the U.S. and Russia since Trump took office. Trump’s administration has approached the notoriously strained relationship by trying to identify a few limited issues on which the countries could make progress, thereby building trust for a broader repair of ties.

For years, the U.S. and Russia have been backing opposing sides in Syria’s war, with Moscow supporting Syrian President Bashar Assad and Washington supporting rebels who have been fighting Assad. Both the U.S. and Russia oppose the Islamic State group in Syria.

The U.S. has been resistant to letting Iran gain influence in Syria — a concern shared by Israel and Jordan, neither of which wants Iranian-aligned troops amassing near their territories. A U.S.-brokered deal could help the Trump administration retain more of a say over who fills the power vacuum left behind as the Islamic State is routed from additional territory in Syria.

Though U.S. and Russian officials had been discussing a potential deal for some time, it didn’t reach fruition until the run-up to Trump’s meeting with Putin on the sidelines of the Group of 20 economic summit in Germany, officials said.

Yet ahead of the meeting — Trump’s first with the Russian leader — Secretary of State Rex Tillerson signaled that Syria’s civil war would be high on the agenda and potentially the most fruitful area for cooperation given the dismal state of relations between the U.S. and Russia overall.

Tillerson said in a statement before departing for Germany that the U.S. remained open to cooperating with Russia through “joint mechanisms” to lower violence in Syria, potentially including no-fly zones.

“If our two countries work together to establish stability on the ground, it will lay a foundation for progress on the settlement of Syria’s political future,” Tillerson said on Wednesday.

The Trump administration has struggled to determine how actively to involve itself in Syria’s civil war, beyond the U.S.-led fight against the Islamic State group there. Although Trump has backed away from the previous U.S. administration’s steadfast demand that Assad leave power, the limited U.S. military forces on the ground in Syria have grown more assertive in recent months, especially as the prospect that IS will soon be defeated has increased the urgency of discussions about Syria’s political future.

In recent weeks, U.S. forces have shot down a Syrian aircraft that got too close to U.S. forces as well drones believed connected to Iranian-backed forces aligned with Assad — another sign of U.S. concern about Tehran’s influence in Syria. Earlier this year, Trump also ordered airstrikes for the first time against Assad’s forces, aiming to punish him for using chemical weapons.

Some of those steps have deepened the rift between the U.S. and Russia over Syria, complicating efforts to work together. Russia, which has bolstered Assad through an aggressive air campaign in recent years, had troops at the Syrian air base when the U.S. struck. And after the U.S. shot down the Syrian plane, Russia warned it would start considering U.S.-led coalition aircraft over Syria as potential targets.

Tensions have been on the rise recently in southern Syria amid a renewed government offensive on the contested province of Daraa where western backed rebels as well as Islamic militants challenge the Syrian government’s control. Iranian-backed Hezbollah fighters have shifted south after the Russian-backed cease-fire that was announced in May and have been getting closer to the border with Jordan, raising concerns in the kingdom.

Israel has also struck Syrian military installations on several occasions in the past few weeks after shells landed into the Israeli-controlled side of the Golan Heights Golan Heights.

https://apnews.com/eaa310ccb6e04e0580759d4ce36e778b

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Op vrijdag 7 juli 2017 20:19 schreef Ulx het volgende:
In dat stuk Syrië vecht men toch ook amper meer?

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Op vrijdag 7 juli 2017 20:24 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Wel een prestatie van Trump dan. Misschien kan hij gelijk wat aan de Berlijnse Muur doen nu hij toch in Duitsland is met Poetin.