| | | |  Another shakeup in John Bolton’s National Security Council staff? Keith Kellogg, a retired Army general who had been chief of staff to previous national security advisers Michael Flynn and H.R. McMaster, will now serve as national security adviser to Vice President Mike Pence. After Flynn resigned his post in February 2017, and before McMaster was appointed, Kellogg briefly served as acting NSA for President Trump. His name had been discussed as a possible successor to both Flynn and later to McMaster, though he has not been particularly popular among the NSA staff. Kellogg had been an adviser to Trump’s presidential campaign. Kellogg joins the VP’s staff after Pence’s initial pick for the job, Jon Lerner, withdrew shortly after getting the nod. Lerner, who is a deputy to United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley but has close professional ties with Pence chief of staff Nick Ayers, had run an anti-Trump PAC during the 2016 Republican primary. |
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| | Macron Watch—Tuesday night’s state dinner honoring French president Emmanuel Macron will feature dishes that incorporate French-influenced American food, like an onion soubise and jambalaya. Earlier in the day, First Lady Melania Trump will take her counterpart, Brigitte Macron, to the National Gallery of Art to view an exhibit of portraits from French painter Paul Cézanne.
Amy Henderson, writing in the magazine, reviewed what she called a “well-curated” exhibition, the first to study exclusively the neo-impressionist’s portraiture work. “The 60 portraits in this exhibition have been selected with a keen curatorial eye from private and public collections around the world,” she writes. “Arranged chronologically, they convey how Cézanne's artistic voice evolved over time, ranging from early works when he used a palette knife and applied paint thickly, to later portraits when he lightened his paint to create a greater sense of luminosity. Cézanne was always searching for the new, and his portraits deftly reinforce the argument that he opened the door to 20th-century modernism—that he was the figure whom Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso both reportedly called ‘the father of us all.’”
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JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images Donald Trump and Emmanuel Macron plant a tree watched by Trump's wife Melania and Macron's wife Brigitte on the grounds of the White House April 23, 2018. The tree, a gift from Macron, comes from Belleau Woods, near the Marne River in France, where in June 1918 U.S. forces suffered 9,777 casualties, including 1,811 killed in the Belleau Wood battle during World War I. |
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| | President Trump’s nominee for secretary of state narrowly cleared a committee vote Monday, paving the way for a full Senate vote to confirm Mike Pompeo for the top diplomat job later this week. For much of the day, it seemed that Pompeo would not receive the backing of the 21-member Senate Foreign Relations committee, where he faced strong opposition from ten Democrats and one Republican, Rand Paul.
But Paul changed his tune Monday afternoon after reportedly receiving a phone call from President Trump. “After calling continuously for weeks for Director Pompeo to support President Trump’s belief that the Iraq War was a mistake, and that it is time to leave Afghanistan, today I received confirmation that Director Pompeo agrees with Donald Trump,” Paul tweeted prior to the vote.
Meanwhile, Pompeo’s fortunes on the Senate floor improved earlier in the day when two moderate Democrats, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Joe Donnelly of Indiana, announced they would support Pompeo’s nomination. That brought his number of presumptive Democratic “yes” votes to three and all but assures his eventual confirmation by the Senate. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Monday took Democrats to task for their opposition to Pompeo’s nomination, calling their resistance “pointless obstruction to score cheap political points with their base as a willful attempt to undermine American diplomacy.” | |
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| | Cabinet Watch—President Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Veterans Affairs seems to have hit a significant snag. The Washington Post has more:
Senate lawmakers have postponed the confirmation hearing for Ronny L. Jackson, President Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs, after top Republicans and Democrats raised concerns about his qualifications and oversight of the White House medical staff, White House and other administration officials were told Monday. The development came just two days before Jackson, the White House physician, was scheduled to testify before the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs and threw what was looking to be a difficult confirmation process into further jeopardy.
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| | One day after President Trump mistakenly claimed on Twitter that North Korea has “agreed to denuclearization” ahead of talks between Trump and Kim Jong-un, the White House struggled Monday to articulate what Trump’s goals are for the talks and even what the administration’s stated goal of “denuclearization” means.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders declined to state to reporters whether the White House would accept anything short of a complete denuclearization before easing pressure on North Korea, saying only that “the goal is denuclearization” and that they would maintain pressure until they saw Kim taking “concrete actions” toward that end.
Asked to clarify further how Trump defines “denuclearization”—for months the White House’s central stated aim on Korean policy—Sanders dodged. “I’m not going to negotiate with you guys,” Sanders said. “I’m going to leave that to the president and Kim Jong-un to walk through what some of those details would look like when that meeting takes place.” The administration has maintained for months that the “maximum pressure” campaign, which is designed to isolate North Korea both diplomatically and economically from the international community, will not be lifted until North Korea commits to “complete and total denuclearization”—a demand that presumably includes the Kim regime giving up their current nuclear stockpile. But so far, Pyongyang has promised no such thing. | |
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