Trump National Security Team Blindsided by NATO Speech
They thought the president would commit to the principle of collective defense. They were wrong.
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It was not until the next day, Thursday, May 25, when Trump started talking at an opening ceremony for NATOs new Brussels headquarters, that the presidents national security team realized their boss had made a decision with major consequenceswithout consulting or even informing them in advance of the change.
They had the right speech and it was cleared through McMaster, said a source briefed by National Security Council officials in the immediate aftermath of the NATO meeting. As late as that same morning, it was the right one.
Added a senior White House official, There was a fully coordinated other speech everybody else had worked onand it wasnt the one Trump gave. They didnt know it had been removed, said a third source of the Trump national security officials on hand for the ceremony. It was only upon delivery.
***The president appears to have deleted it himself,*** according to one version making the rounds inside the government, reflecting his personal skepticism about NATO and insistence on lecturing NATO allies about spending more on defense rather than offering reassurances of any sort; another version relayed to others by several White House aides is that Trumps nationalist chief strategist Steve Bannon and policy aide Stephen Miller played a role in the deletion. (According to NSC spokesman Michael Anton, who did not dispute this account, The president attended the summit to show his support for the NATO alliance, including Article 5. His continued effort to secure greater defense commitments from other nations is making our alliance stronger.)
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/05/trump-nato-speech-national-security-team-215227