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https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-white-house-c-word-1501711817" The White House C-Words "
" Words unheard from Anthony Scaramucci: credibility, coherence and consistency. "
By Daniel Henninger
" Years from now, anthropologists will struggle to explain how Anthony Scaramucci became a household name. Or how the country’s political culture came to obsess over Sean Spicer and Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
These cultural excavators will try to explain to baffled students that in 2017, during the Age of Twitter , the Trump White House had a seemingly insoluble “communications problem.” The anthropologists will describe how after a series of public firings, the president decided that the “Celebrity Apprentice” phase of his presidency was finally over. And that with the appointment of retired four-star Marine Gen. John Kelly as White House chief of staff, President Trump signaled the time had arrived for focused seriousness.
Enough with the August reveries. We are living through a time of cultural evanescence, and there’s no reason why that should not include the easy-come, easy-go White House careers of Anthony Scaramucci and the others.
The danger of a pop-culture presidency is that real events, including political land mines, don’t get noticed. This week, the Trump presidency had a near-death experience.
It wasn’t the health-care failure. That left the Republican Party, not Donald Trump, with one foot in the grave. The noteworthy event for Mr. Trump was the vote in the House and Senate to impose sanctions on Russia, Iran and North Korea.
The sanctions themselves are notable, but the big story was the extraordinary vote totals. In the House, the sanctions bill passed 419-3 and 98-2 in the Senate.
No other issue in the political firmament would produce such lopsided votes, and the reason for it wasn’t Russia. This was a no-confidence vote in a sitting American president. One Republican senator told us privately, “We just don’t trust him on Russia.” A second senator independently confirmed the vote was a hedge against Mr. Trump’s chameleon-like behavior on Vladimir Putin.
Incidentally, a short memo about that sanctions vote for the progressive celebrities still weeping about the “death of our democracy”: The American system of checks and balances works. With the Obama White House, which tried to reorder the country by executive decree, constraints came from the judicial branch. The Russia sanctions vote shows that the checks on Mr. Trump, if necessary, will be legislative.
What is happening here in midsummer is that the Trump presidential adventure has arrived at another of its routine tipping points.
Indeed, Mr. Trump’s most remarkable attribute may be that he has a gyroscopic ability not to tip over completely. After caroming around for a week with White House departures, the president appointed Mr. Kelly, whose job description while leading the Marines in Iraq’s Anbar Province included getting things done with powerful tribal chiefs. He should get along fine with Donald Trump.
Far be it from me to load the future of the republic onto John Kelly, but a lot of people in government just now are in duty-to-country mode.
There will be no plea or expectation here for Mr. Kelly to get control of the White House’s fratricidal leaks. The modern press standard for anonymity is that there is no standard. No name, no problem. The no-name bombshell stories fill the clickbait needs of an internet-dependent media and the political pathologies of their sources. It’s Beltway binge-watching, and Mr. Kelly should ignore it—unless he can find a leaker to put up against a wall.
Instead, Mr. Kelly’s new job is to deploy across the Trump White House the three c-words that Anthony Scaramucci did not use in his New Yorker interview: credibility, coherence and consistency. Without them, no American presidency can succeed or survive as a functioning political force.
Credibility arrives with Mr. Kelly’s résumé. Coherence—OK, maybe I’m overreaching with that one. Consistency, however, is crucial.
To avoid a humiliating override of his veto, Mr. Trump signed the sanctions bill Thursday, declaring many provisions are “clearly unconstitutional.” Maybe so. But policy inconsistency produced the anti-Trump sanctions votes. It happened because of the most troubling thing Mr. Trump said during the campaign—his recurring, never-explained compliments for Mr. Putin.
We suppose it’s possible that, like Rosebud in “Citizen Kane,” Robert Mueller’s investigations will find some vestigial explanation for Mr. Trump’s Putin fascination. Of late, though, the Trump administration’s Russia policy has become unequivocal.
This week, Vice President Mike Pence is delivering strong statements of strategic support in Estonia, Georgia and Montenegro, accusing Russia of “undermining democracies”—even as Moscow prepares a massive military exercise involving 100,000 troops on NATO’s periphery.
Signing the sanctions bill, Mr. Trump said, “As President, I can make far better deals with foreign countries than Congress.” We’ll see. Beyond Russia for Mr. Trump lies the need to create policies for North Korea and Syria. If he lets his new chief of staff install credibility, coherence and consistency as standard operating procedure for this White House, he’ll never have to sign another sanctions bill. "