Missy Ryan, Jonathan Lemire, Nancy A. Youssef, and Michael Scherer report:

During Donald Trump’s first term, his top advisers attempted to run a traditional process for shaping foreign policy, tapping experts from the White House’s National Security Council, debating recommendations from across the government, and steering the president away from decisions that they feared would damage America’s interests. But Trump was deeply mistrustful of the NSC, which he saw as too big, too cumbersome, and too attached to Republican orthodoxy.

Back in office, Trump has pushed away the help of career experts, and major decisions—the handling of the war in Gaza, for example, and negotiations over Ukraine—are now made by a tiny core group of loyal advisers, including Vice President J. D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Chief of Staff Susie WiIes, and one or two others. The president “is now fully the quarterback, and he doesn’t want too many guys in the huddle,” a former official, who remains in close contact with the White House, told us. “And those that are there need to run the play he calls, no questions asked.”

This time, Trump has a better understanding of the levers of power and greater trust in his own instincts—he doesn’t want to be slowed down by contrary viewpoints, according to nearly a dozen current and former White House officials, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to give a candid assessment of sensitive deliberations. Trump is more Trump in his global statecraft.

By shrinking the number of people involved in major decisions and making fealty the indispensable trait in selecting aides, Trump has pushed the system in a more personalized direction. The more centralized setup allows Trump’s impulses—his disregard for historic alliances, his love of dealmaking, and his focus on perceived abuses of American largesse—to drive U.S. policy.

But by isolating his decision making, Trump has limited his ability to harness expertise, or to ensure that his decisions are executed by an often unwieldy bureaucracy. And by discarding a process designed to surface different views and analyze moves from all sides, he has increased the risk of unintended consequences. [Continue reading…]