The Washington Post has a great
insider account of what happened at the White House over the last week. But it's the lede that says it all:
Executive time began early on Thursday, just after sunrise.
Feeling exasperated and feisty as he awoke in the White House residence, President Trump fired off his grievances on Twitter about how the media had been covering his Helsinki summit. And, refusing to be cowed, Trump gave national security adviser John Bolton an order: to schedule a second summit and officially invite Putin to visit Washington.
The two presidents had already discussed the likelihood of a follow-up meeting, but at Trump’s direction Thursday morning, Bolton sprang into action to make it official, making an overture to the Kremlin. By midafternoon the White House announced that plans were underway for a fall summit in Washington.
The bulletin landed midway through a remarkably candid interview of Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats at the Aspen Security Forum that underscored the disconnect and tension on Russia policy between Trump and his administration. The intelligence chief criticized Trump’s performance during the Helsinki summit and — taking a deep breath and then offering a prolonged grimace-laugh — made clear that he had no advance knowledge of the follow-up meeting with Putin.
“That’s going to be special,” Coats said wryly, as the crowd in Aspen, Colo., rallied around him in sympathy for being left in the dark.
For Trump and his White House, the days that followed the Helsinki summit amounted to an unofficial Walk Back Week — a daily scramble of corrections and clarifications from the West Wing. Each announcement, intended to blunt the global fallout of the president’s Russophilic performance in Helsinki, was followed by another mishap that only fueled more consternation.
