Mark Perry reports on the internal rifts inside the Trump administration over the Qatar crisis:
A close associate of the secretary of state says that Tillerson was not only “blind-sided by the Trump statement,” but “absolutely enraged that the White House and State Department weren’t on the same page.” Tillerson’s aides, I was told, were convinced that the true author of Trump’s statement was U.A.E. ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba, a close friend of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner. “Rex put two-and-two together,” his close associate says, “and concluded that this absolutely vacuous kid was running a second foreign policy out of the White House family quarters. Otaiba weighed in with Jared and Jared weighed in with Trump. What a mess.” [bold mine-DL] The Trump statement was nearly the last straw for Tillerson, this close associate explains: “Rex is just exhausted. He can’t get any of his appointments approved and is running around the world cleaning up after a president whose primary foreign policy adviser is a 31-year-old amateur.”
This is consistent with other reports, and it matches up with my view of the splitbetween the State Department and the White House during this crisis. The rift between Tillerson and Trump on this issue has been impossible to miss, and it has been the latest in a series of episodes in which Trump publicly undermines or contradicts his own Cabinet officials about what the U.S. position on a given issue is. That dysfunction has been on display for months, but it finally seems to be exhausting the patience of Trump’s top Cabinet members. Under these circumstances, it is hard to see how Tillerson can effectively do his job when he is being repeatedly sabotaged and overridden and everyone in foreign governments knows that he has little or no clout with the president. The role of Kushner in all this helps explain why Trump has so credulously accepted the Saudi-Emirati line, since Kushner has close ties with both Mohammed bin Salman and the UAE’s crown prince.
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