Special: President Trump's decision to ban transgender people from serving in the military makes headlines

ROBERT COSTA: Hello. I’m Robert Costa. And this is the Washington Week Extra.

There may be another power struggle underway between the White House and the Pentagon. Secretary of Defense James Mattis is reportedly appalled by the president’s decision to ban transgender people from serving in the military. The unexpected announcement is also getting pushback from some Republican lawmakers. Arizona Senator John McCain, who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, criticized the president for announcing the new policy, as he does, on Twitter. Iowa Senator Joni Ernst, a 20-year military veteran, also spoke out, saying “Americans who are qualified and can meet the standards to serve in the military should be afforded that opportunity.” The chairman of the Joint Chiefs has told his officers to stand down until the secretary of defense receives the president’s directive. Chairman General Joseph Dunford told his staff “…we will continue to treat all of our personnel with respect.” Secretary Mattis had just begun a six-month review of how transgender people affect military readiness. The question on everybody’s mind, Geoff, is why did the president get ahead of Secretary Mattis.

GEOFF BENNETT: There’s some reporting out there that this decision was entirely a political one, that the advisors to the president wanted Democrats in Rust Belt states to really have to own this in the next election. And I think the fact – the process, I think, actually bears out a lot of that reporting. And I was speaking with a military veterans advocate who says if you go back and look at that note that Dunford sent to his military chiefs, there’s not a single line of support in that – in that guidance for the president’s ban. And I’m told that was intentional, that everything that comes from the Joint Chiefs office is vetted, and for good reason. And so there are issues there. There are issues also with the process, that the military doesn’t ever like to be in a position of having to scramble, of having to play catch-up. And from what we know, they were completely caught off-guard as it relates to this guidance, that came by way of Twitter of all things.

NANCY CORDES: You know, this issue had been percolating because of this Hartzler amendment in the House that had gone down a couple weeks earlier by a very narrow margin, a Republican amendment to prevent transgender troops from getting taxpayer money for gender reassignment surgery, so this was something that Republicans on the Hill had talked about with the White House. But the most interesting take that I saw this week – I can’t claim credit for it – came from Rick Tyler, a Republican strategist, who said that President Trump is obsessed with President Obama’s legacy. And the Republican Party has been engaged in a six-month process to try to roll back his signature achievement, Obamacare, and they haven’t been able to do it. And in the absence of that, he argued that perhaps Donald Trump was striking out at another piece of President Obama’s legacy, which was allowing transgender troops in the military, because it really did come out of nowhere. This is not something that anyone was clamoring for. So it’s hard to figure out where this – where the instinct for this came from exactly. And the question now is, you know, what happens to these troops who were told a year ago, you know, you are welcome in this military? Do you now kick them out? That’s the question.

MR. COSTA: Alexis, what’s your read on what drove President Trump to make this decision? Was it because of House conservatives saying they needed to have this kind of policy to pass a budget, or was it because the president wanted to reenter or enter the culture wars?

ALEXIS SIMENDINGER: Well, I think there’s probably a little bit of all of that in there. But I do think that one of the things that we’ve seen with the president is he did react almost more robustly about this idea that the question that the Pentagon was really wrestling with had to do with the finances, the actual expenditures, as Nancy is suggesting, to support medical care, and the Pentagon’s concern that at the – if they kept this policy in place they were going to need some safeguards because they didn’t want to become a magnet for recruits or those who might want to sign up in order to have this very expensive medical care provided to them. The president may have overreacted in some way to that idea that this was something that they needed to do entirely. But President Trump also does things where he then retreats and says we’re going to study this, and I would not be surprised if this ends up in a Pentagon study that goes on for some additional period of time. The president has done that in the past, and we’ve seen the Pentagon immediately say there is no change in policy, we’re going to study it.

MR. BENNETT: But as he sort of does walk back into the culture wars, it strikes me as a misread of cultural policies, you know, where we are in the moment and where we’re headed, because the core – Trump’s core supporters weren’t really, you know, won over by sort of the traditional Christian conservative culture war. They bought into things like his stances on immigration, his support for the police, manufacturing, jobs, that sort of thing. So then to sort of use this as the issue to sort of get people behind him, I think, doesn’t necessarily work.

MR. COSTA: He did in his convention speech speak to the LGBT community and try to, in a sense then, it seemed, make an overture to them.

MS. CORDES: Yeah. And, you know, when you’ve got someone like Orrin Hatch, a conservative Republican senator from Utah in his 80s, saying this is wrong, we need to allow everyone in the military, you know, regardless of their gender identity, you know, it’s proof that this issue is – you know, does not come down neatly along the same lines that it might have 10 or 15 years ago. I think there could be an even simpler explanation for the origin of all of this, which is just that this is a president who delights in creating shock and surprise. And almost on a daily basis, he does something or says something which seems aimed purely at getting a rise out of everyone, whether it’s positive or negative. And it’s quite possible that that was just what he felt like shocking us with on Tuesday or Wednesday or whatever it was, and he has now moved on to something else.

MR. COSTA: You say the shocks happen day by day. Sometimes it feels hour by hour.

MS. CORDES: Not the best way to make policy, of course, but –

MR. COSTA: Well, we’ll have to see how it all plays out. For sure, this will be a challenge on the plate of the new chief of staff, John Kelly, who came in Friday.

Let’s stay with Capitol Hill because both houses of Congress voted nearly unanimously to impose new sanctions on Russia, Iran and North Korea. The Republican-controlled Congress also voted to severely limit President Trump’s ability to lift the sanctions, which he has opposed. The move triggered Russia to seize two American diplomatic properties and order the U.S. to cut its diplomatic staff in Russia. The president hasn’t signed the sanctions into law. And, Alexis, what’s the holdup over at the White House?

MS. SIMENDINGER: Well, one of the deliberations is – and I’ve seen this with previous presidents – when you have the White House in the same party that the – where you’re getting rebuked in legislation, you have to decide, do I really want to see an override of my veto? Because that is what lawmakers are saying would happen. And in this particular case, after a string of disappointments and you could say failures, is that really where the president wants to go on this particular issue, right? And it’s so sensitive. And it’s just another example of what we saw on the Hill, where Republicans were ready to try to ward off the Trump be Trump inclinations on Russia. I mean, this was a(n) almost unanimous description of Congress rising up as the legislative branch and saying, Mr. President, we’re going to check you.

MR. BENNETT: And giving themselves an unprecedented role in oversight as it relates to these sanctions. I mean, Republicans on the Hill by and large, and important Republicans too, wanted to show publicly that they at least care about Russia’s role in the 2016 elections, and making the Kremlin pay for it.

MS. CORDES: I mean, this was as much a message to the president, as Geoff and Alexis have both pointed out, as it was to Russia. It passed 98 to 2 in the Senate. I think it was 417 to 3 in the House. When do you ever see that kind of near unanimity? And so, you know, the – it’s almost a moot point whether the president tries – decides to sign it or veto it, because they have, you know, well more than a veto-proof majority to override anything that he tries to do.

MR. COSTA: Anthony Scaramucci, the new communications director, said in an interview that the president may decide to avoid putting his signature on this legislation, because he may push for his own, tougher sanctions. Does the White House really – are they ready over there to pay the political cost of not signing this bill?

MS. SIMENDINGER: Well, let me just first address the question, does the communications director know a lot about legislating? The answer is no. And so when I heard that, I didn’t think he really understood exactly where Congress had already gotten on this legislation and what the president’s options were. So putting that aside, are they ready to go into battle? I think the president is willing to battle on anything. But is he going to get advice from his new chief of staff or anyone else who’s involved in this and the White House counsel? He’s got a new counsel coming in, as Ty Cobb is supposed to be the new special counsel coming into the White House. And we haven’t seen him start yet. And I can, you know, tell you that a lot of people are going to listening to see what kind of advice the president is getting from his outside team and his inside team.

MR. BENNETT: Coming, of course, with the backdrop of these active Russia investigations happening in the House and the Senate and the special counsel probe, so clearly there’s a lot of dynamics here at play, you know, as the president makes up his mind about what he’s going to do about these sanctions.

MR. COSTA: Let’s stay on the topic of Russia, because Congress is continuing its investigation into meddling in last year’s presidential election. And this week two really high-ranking White House advisors were answering questions on Capitol Hill about their meetings last June with a Russian attorney. What did investigators learn?

MR. BENNETT: Well, we don’t know exactly what they talked about. But we know for sure they wanted to learn a lot more about that now-infamous 2016 meeting that you mentioned, with a Russian attorney in Trump Tower. So Paul Manafort, the president’s one-time campaign chairman, and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and key advisor, met privately with the Senate Intelligence Committee. And Kushner also met for hours in private with the House Intelligence Committee.

And of course, there was also this bit of drama with the Senate Judiciary panel issuing a subpoena for Manafort to come testify publicly. We learned later that that was really just their way of getting him to agree to come back to the negotiating table to speak with them privately, because there’s this sort of turf war happening here with these several congressional committees trying to, you know, flex their muscle and show that they’re also relevant in this overall investigation.

MR. COSTA: And I said there were two White House advisors. One former campaign advisor, Paul Manafort, one current advisor, Jared Kushner, the senior advisor. Nancy, what was – what was Kushner’s impact when he came to Capitol Hill? He said he never colluded. He talked privately with the committee.

MS. CORDES: Right. You know, he – I think that they felt that he was forthcoming. He obviously sort of laid out all the facts for them. Obviously, they’re going to check his facts with the information that they have already gathered. There’s really two things that they’re looking at as relates to Kushner and these four Russia meetings that he has now acknowledged having with either Russian officials or Russian – in one case a Russian lawyer, in one case a Russian banker. One is what they discussed, whether there was anything that crossed the line. Certainly it raises some eyebrows when Kushner says I asked the Russian ambassador if we could set up a secure – go use the secure line at his embassy so that the Russian government could give us information before the president had even taken office. To which the Russians had to say, no, we can’t do that. That crosses a line for us.

MR. BENNETT: That’s a bridge too far.

MS. CORDES: When the Russians are saying no, we can’t – we can’t do that, then, you know, that’s – you know, that’s a sign that perhaps that’s not that appropriate. But beyond that, I think the question that they’re trying to answer is, why was it that he and other people in the president’s orbit were so solicitous to the Russians in the first place, above and beyond foreign dignitaries from any other country, from our allies, especially after the intelligence community had just determined that Russia massively interfered with our election, you know, using, you know, cyber and fake news and all the rest. Why was it that – you know, that Kushner was willing to talk to this Russian banker at the ambassador’s request? Why wasn’t he meeting with – you know, with officials from other countries? He did, but it certainly seems like Russia got special attention.

MR. BENNETT: And Kushner paints a picture of himself as a novice to politics at the time, that the contacts he had with the Russians were just four among the thousands of contacts that he had with foreigners. The same cannot be true – or the same cannot be said, rather, about Paul Manafort, who has a very long lobbying and consulting career, has well-known contacts to Russian politicians and businessmen. He’s a central figure in all of this. And it’s one of the reasons why congressional investigators have been clamoring to speak with him. The other reason why they want to speak with him is because we know he took contemporaneous notes from that Trump Tower meeting in 2016. And that will be crucial in understanding how all of this played out.

MR. COSTA: And, Alexis, of course, the White House’s main concern is not really these congressional committees, but Robert Mueller, the special counsel.

MS. SIMENDINGER: Right. The White House is very – as we can see from the president’s own tweets and his own public statements, he is very animated about this, and just refuses to put it aside and try to wall it off, or find a nice place to park his anxiety, and it comes out all the time. And the concern is now the president’s heightened interest is that the special counsel is not deterred and is examining the president’s personal financial and his company financial affairs. And of course, has asked the White House to retain and preserve all information related to the meetings in 2016. And the president is just beside himself about this idea that the special counsel can access his tax records, can access his business records, and that they may actually want to question him. I wouldn’t be surprised. I think they’re preparing for that.

MS. CORDES: You know, I don’t think these congressional investigations will ever get out in front of the special counsel. You know, they are never going to uncover something that the special counsel hasn’t already found out about. But the problem with the congressional investigations for this White House is the optics. When Jared Kushner goes to meet with the special counsel, if he ever does, we won’t know about it. We won’t see it. You know, he’s not going to have to walk past a phalanx of reporters and cameras to do it, the way that he has to when he comes to Capitol Hill. You know, Don Jr. or Paul Manafort, testifying in public before a committee, you know, has its own PR damage that comes with it and peril.

And the more you say publicly, if it contrasts with what you’ve said before or with what’s in other documents, it creates more problems. And because members of Congress like a show and they like to get attention, you know, every time that there’s a new shoe to drop, as John McCain would say, you know, you’ve got some member of Congress saying: Let’s have a hearing. Let’s bring them forward and let’s hear what they have to say.

MR. COSTA: We’ll see who maybe comes up to the Hill next week, and we’ll leave it there.

That’s it for this edition of the Washington Week Extra. While you’re online, read my conversation with Bloomberg Reporter Josh Green. His new book, dives into the relationship between President Trump and advisor Steve Bannon. Plus, be sure to take the Washington Week-ly News Quiz.

I’m Robert Costa. See you next time.