Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump addresses an election rally in Kansas City, Mo., on March 12. (Photo: Nati Harnik/AP)
Donald Trump’s thundering vows to wage a trade war with China or make Mexico pay to build a thousand-mile wall along the U.S. border seem all the less likely to become reality when you consider how mightily he has struggled with a much more easily achievable campaign promise: to announce an unprecedented A-team of foreign policy advisers.
Under normal circumstances, Republican experts on world affairs would be lining up behind the frontrunner for their party’s presidential nomination, eagerly claiming the mantle of “official adviser” and jockeying with rivals for top jobs should the candidate triumph in November.
The 2016 race for the White House is many things, but “normal circumstances” it is not.
Trump’s surprise jump to the head of the GOP pack has confounded the party’s foreign policy community, a large number of whom have signed up to oppose, not support, his unorthodox campaign. Behind the scenes, influential national security figures are watching their friends and colleagues, ready to use what one former senior defense official described to Yahoo News as “peer pressure” to treat any “symptoms of creeping Trumpism.”
The brash former reality-TV star, who took some heat last August after saying he got his military advice from the Sunday talking-head TV shows, promised on February 9 that he would release a list of formal foreign policy advisers “in about two weeks.” On February 17, he said it was coming “in about a week.” He modified that to “very shortly” in a March 3 interview.
On March 8, Trump told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program that while “there’s no team” yet, he’s been meeting “with far more than three people” who were “tremendous,” and that he would name names in a “fairly short period of time.”
So far, Trump has only showcased one formal foreign policy adviser: Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., who has served on the Senate Armed Services Committee since taking office in 1997. A senior Sessions communications aide, Stephen Miller, now working for the campaign, has also shouldered parts of the job, sources say. (Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks told Yahoo News that Miller is “a policy adviser to Mr. Trump,” and said his role was “not specific to foreign policy.”)
Sessions is known as an anti-immigration hawk, not a foreign policy luminary. But the aide who handles his Armed Services Committee portfolio, Sandy Luff, is very well regarded by Capitol Hill colleagues in both parties. Luff did not return an email asking whether she was advising the campaign. Neither did Hicks. Sessions’ Senate office was also silent.
Trump has been relying on Sam Clovis, whose biography describes him as a retired Air Force colonel and whose title with the campaign is “senior policy advisor.” Clovis has been a gatekeeper, and sometimes a spokesman, for Trump’s foreign policy.
While the media and rival campaigns press the maverick marketeer to keep his promise to disclose where he’s getting advice on world affairs, it’s not clear that any voters care that he hasn’t made that list public, or that he feels any particular urgency to do so, despite his promises.
“He keeps his own counsel,” Roger Stone, a longtime Trump friend and former consultant to his campaign, recently told Yahoo News. “He has succeeded so far by being his own man, so it’s very tough to convince him not to continue on the course that has brought him this far.”
Trump’s foreign policy outlook combines economic nationalism — tariffs on Chinese goods, and building a wall on the Mexican border to keep out immigrants he blames for U.S. job losses — with pressure on traditional allies like Japan and Germany to shoulder more of the financial burden of U.S. military deployments. He has praised Russian President Vladimir Putin. He has famously called for a halt to Muslim immigration to the United States, but hasn’t laid out detailed plans for how he would battle the Islamic State or handle Afghanistan, where the next president will inherit a U.S. troop presence of about 10,000. At a Republican debate last week, Trump did not oppose the idea of sending 20,000 to 30,000 more U.S. troops to battle the Islamic State. “We really have no choice,” he said. “We have to knock the hell out of them.”
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