The White House has no communications director at the moment, which means the job effectively belongs to President Trump himself.
And it shows.
The Washington Post's Philip Rucker, Josh Dawsey and Robert Costa report that “the president spent much of Monday afternoon glued to the television,” watching cable news coverage of the FBI's raid on the office, home and hotel room of his personal attorney, Michael Cohen. Rather than delegate the White House's response, Trump took matters into his own hands and vented to reporters on Monday evening.
In doing so, he lent credence to speculation that spokesmen have worked to tamp down — that he might fire special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.
“We'll see what happens,” Trump said, adding that “many people have said, 'You should fire him.' ”
Trump similarly freelanced last week when he told reporters that he did not know, at the time, that Cohen paid porn star Stormy Daniels $130,000 shortly before Election Day 2016 to keep quiet about her alleged affair with Trump. White House spokesmen had previously declined to provide direct answers to questions about whether Trump knew of the payment.
As The Fix's Aaron Blake wrote on Tuesday, Trump's explicit denial may have been a misstep that helped make the warrant for the Cohen raid easier to obtain. Records related to the payment presumably would not be covered by attorney-client privilege, since attorney and client never discussed the payment, according to Trump.
A communications director might have steered the president away from these unhelpful public statements. There is no guarantee that Trump would have taken the advice, of course. But in the absence of Hope Hicks, who filled the role longer than anyone else and was one of the president's longest-serving and closest advisers, Trump's messaging strategy appears to be guided only by his own impulses.
This passage in the Rucker-Dawsey-Costa report encapsulates the situation:
This was Trump’s first crisis without Hope Hicks, the recently departed White House communications director who knew her way around the broader Trump orbit, getting to the bottom of what was happening, counseling the president and intuiting how he would want the situation handled.
Trump also navigated Monday’s turn without a full slate of legal advisers. He has yet to replace John Dowd, who resigned last month as his personal attorney in the Russia matter. Reached briefly Monday afternoon, one White House official sighed when asked about Trump’s strategy, pointing to the “evident” limitations of the current legal team, as well as the absence so far of a public-relations plan to counter the hotly anticipated release next week of former FBI director James B. Comey’s memoir, “A Higher Loyalty.”
There was fear in Trump’s orbit that the president is liable to erupt in anger in coming days, escalating his attacks against Mueller at a time when his attorneys are negotiating a possible interview. And there was concern in some quarters that Trump, who has been shaking up his administration in recent weeks, may also seek to terminate Mueller.
The forward-looking statements are the most telling. With no one empowered to direct White House communications, more Trump outbursts could be on the way this week and next. The Comey book release is accompanied by a media tour that includes stops on “The View,” “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” and all three cable news channels.
Trump may not be able to resist the urge to tune in — and to handle the White House answer on his own.