With his appointments, Trump may be ‘institutionalizing conflict’ in the White House

WASHINGTON — While Donald Trump faces vexing questions regarding the formation of his nascent administration, a former policy adviser to president Bill Clinton thinks the president-elect may be deliberately creating an environment of “conflict” within in staff to maximize his ability to govern.

Since former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney emerged as Trump’s favorite choice for secretary of state and top aide Kellyanne Conway responded by publicly airing her opposition to such an appointment, ostensible infighting among the Trump camp has been fully on display.

William Galston, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution and a former top aide to Clinton during his White House years, believes the incoming president may be deliberately sowing seeds of discord.

Having a “team of rivals” comprise an administration, as Abraham Lincoln’s team was described, is a way of “maintaining control,” he told The Times of Israel recently. “If your most senior people are not always on the same page, then you always get to make the decision.”

Galston, who was Clinton’s deputy assistant for domestic policy, said he first saw such a dynamic unfolding when Trump announced Republican national committee chair Reince Priebus as his chief of staff, along with a more controversial pick — former Breitbart chief Stephen Bannon — for chief strategist.

Some presidents, like Dwight Eisenhower, a five-star general who was supreme commander of the allied forces in Europe during World War II, institutionalize their White House under a “military hierarchical relationship where it’s clear who’s on top and who’s reporting to whom,” Galston said.

But others want to “institutionally conflict at the top ranks,” he said.

That may be what Trump did by giving both Priebus, who is popular with the Republican establishment, and Bannon, a provocateur who once led an incendiary website accused of peddling racism and xenophobia, an equal rank inside the halls of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

“He may see it as a way of making sure a wide range of voices and views are represented, or that a single, all-powerful chief of staff is not screening out important dissenting opinions,” Galston said.

Under an arrangement in which there is no single chief of staff controlling which issues command the president’s attention, Trump will have access to a greater flow of information and will be able to ultimately make more of his own decisions, according to Galston. “Perhaps that’s what Mr. Trump is very deliberately doing,” he said.

The appointment of Bannon has been a source of much controversy during the early days of Trump’s transition. Democrats, Republicans and various Jewish organizations have denounced the decision, saying that Bannon represents a brand of populist nationalism that emboldens racists and should not be near the Oval Office.

As executive chairman of Breitbart News from 2012 to 2016, Bannon pushed a nationalist agenda and turned the publication into what he called “the platform for the alt-right,” a movement associated with white supremacist ideas that oppose multiculturalism.

Including someone like Bannon in the administration, Galston emphasized, will keep happy a portion of the base that helped catapult Trump into office. “They will certainly feel as though they have a powerful voice about as close to the seat of power as you can get,” he said. “They will not feel that they’re on the outside peering in.”

But while Bannon’s entry into presidential politics marks a clear break from the personnel of past administrations, an arrangement whereby the president retains both a formal chief of staff and a chief strategist is hardly unprecedented, according to Anita McBridge, former assistant to President George W. Bush and chief of staff to First Lady Laura Bush.

If you look at the beginning of the last two presidencies, they too relied on similar arrangements.

President Barack Obama appointed then-congressman Rahm Emmanuel as his chief of staff and David Axelrod, who was chief strategist on his campaign, to be his senior adviser.

Likewise, Bush appointed Andrew Card to be his chief of staff and brought in Karl Rove from his campaign to be senior adviser.

“It takes people around you that you trust, that you have confidence in, that can work with each other, to make sure that what you have promised and the way you want to govern is executed in the way that you want,” McBride, who is now the executive-in-residence at American University’s Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies, told The Times of Israel.