{"id":6688,"date":"2018-03-22T21:58:43","date_gmt":"2018-03-23T04:58:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=6688"},"modified":"2018-03-22T21:58:43","modified_gmt":"2018-03-23T04:58:43","slug":"trump-chooses-bolton-for-3rd-security-adviser","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=6688","title":{"rendered":"Trump Chooses Bolton for 3rd Security Adviser"},"content":{"rendered":"

When President Trump\u00a0tweeted Thursday evening<\/a>\u00a0that he was firing National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster and replacing him with John Bolton, effective April 9, Bolton\u00a0told Fox News a few minutes later<\/a>\u00a0that he’d been surprised by Trump’s offer, though they had\u00a0apparently discussed the move<\/a>\u00a0for weeks. But Trump’s decision to fire McMaster so abruptly also “surprised senior White House aides who had been preparing a single statement announcing the departure of multiple top Trump officials,”\u00a0\u00a0citing two senior administration officials.<\/p>\n

White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, who supported ousting McMaster, had been planning to announce the firing of Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, and maybe several senior White House aides at the same time as they announced McMaster’s departure,\u00a0Politico<\/em>\u00a0says<\/a>. “It’s unclear which other West Wing officials were possibly set to depart with McMaster, but the two senior administration officials said they believed it would be easier to manage the optics if multiple firings were made public in a single statement instead of drawn out.”<\/p>\n

Such an announcement wouldn’t have been made for at least another week, until after inspector general reports on Carson and Shulkin were out. “Trump upends whatever he wants to upend,”\u00a0a White House official told\u00a0Politico<\/em><\/a>. Trump called McMaster Thursday afternoon to thank him and give him a heads-up about his ouster, not wanting to publicly humiliate him as he had outgoing Secretary of State Rex Tillerson,\u00a0The Washington Post<\/em>\u00a0reports<\/a>, but the mounting rumors of McMaster’s firing had made it difficult for him to do his job. “Everyone in the White House knew that,” a senior official told the\u00a0Post<\/em>. “It was the same as Rex. Everyone knew their days were numbered, so people didn’t take them seriously.”\u00a0Peter Weber<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When President Trump\u00a0tweeted Thursday evening\u00a0that he...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-u-s-a"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6688"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6688\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6689,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6688\/revisions\/6689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}