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National

Multiple officials from foreign governments who deal with the White House have all made the same observation to me recently: this administration is stretched too thin.

Why this matters: There is barely enough top flight talent confirmed across the government to manage the basic day-to-day, let alone the dizzying array of foreign policy battlefronts Trump has opened up — especially when it comes to trade.

Trump has taken on over half a dozen epic fights at the same time, all with overlapping interests and problems:

He's trying to cut a major economic deal with China, while threatening them with tariffs on $150 billion worth of Chinese imports.

He's about to meet with Kim Jong-un to try to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula, an effort inextricably linked to China and the bullet point above.

He's trying to wrap up NAFTA negotiations with Canada and Mexico, while threatening both countries with massive steel and aluminum tariffs.

He's threatening the rest of the world with steel and aluminum tariffs, and his team is going through a lengthy and complicated process of determining which countries and products get exemptions. There's about 9,000 of the latter!

His team is working through the fine details of the renegotiated U.S.-Korea trade deal after reaching an agreement in principle.

He's blowing up the Iran nuclear deal and threatening to reimpose sanctions on European companies, while tasking Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to try to get a stronger deal with the Europeans. (Good luck with that, the Europeans say privately. They’re still mad about the steel tariffs.)

There are barely enough Trump administration officials to handle all of this. And I haven't even mentioned just the regular day-to-day work at the World Trade Organization (and sanctions and trade remedies) — which is also very busy! 

"Even if you just look at the trade component of this, it is overload in terms of the amount of work that needs to be done, the stakes of things, and the complexity of these negotiations,” said one source close to the White House who has discussed the overcapacity problem with senior officials there.

"There's not enough bandwidth to do it all at once — both from the staffing perspective, and just from our ability to be engaged in so many fronts internationally simultaneously," the source said.

“You’ve got four or five different major trade negotiations, all high stakes, all with a time fuse of a sort," the source added. "I remember just a couple months ago [U.S. Trade Representative Bob] Lighthizer complaining that he only had one political person, confirmed person, in with him."

The pushback: USTR spokeswoman Emily Davis noted that the situation has recently improved with the Senate finally confirming their nominated deputies in March.

"With four deputies in place, the best career staff in the government, and the necessary expertise, USTR is fully capable of carrying out its responsibilities," she told me.

A White House stretched too thin

Trump has taken on over half a dozen epic fights at the same time, all with overlapping interests and problems.

John Kelly, White House Chief of Staff, listens. Photo: Zach Gibson-Pool/Getty Images

Politics

Inside the White House

Xerox scraps merger plan with Fujifilm

Citing a new settlement with two major shareholders.

The Xerox Tower in downtown Rochester. Photo: James Leynse/Corbis via Getty Images

Business

Mergers and acquisitions

The Trump team is bitterly divided over what's happening with China.

Between the lines: Treasury Steven Mnuchin and Larry Kudlow, Trump's top economic adviser, want a deal that has China buying billions in U.S. products in exchange for not facing retaliations on alleged theft of IP.  But while hardliners Peter Navarro and Bob Lighthizer have been publicly silent, people familiar with their thinking say that they believe it would betray Trump’s economic agenda, missing a once-in-a-generation opportunity to force China to change its industrial practices.

Three sources outside the White House who are familiar with the Trump officials' recent Beijing trip told me Mnuchin ran his own meetings with the Chinese on the last day of the trip, mostly keeping the rest of the U.S. team in a holding room. 

There has been some concern within the administration that Mnuchin is trying to run these negotiations unilaterally. "Mnuchin marginalized the team and positioned himself as the guy," a source familiar with the talks told me.

An administration source familiar with the China meetings pushed back hard against this, saying it's a narrative being "pushed by interested parties both inside and outside" of the administration. He said the President is the one in charge of the deal and Mnuchin's one-on-one talks with Liu He were brief, "completely appropriate," and "highly choreographed," adhering to protocol.

"Everybody who knows what's actually happening knows that this is the President's decision to make," the official said. "There's going to be no deal that the President doesn't sign off on."

Be smart: "Whatever deal they might make will be temporary," says Richard McGregor, a senior fellow at Sydney's Lowy Institute, who is well-sourced in Beijing. "The Chinese expect the U.S. to pocket whatever concessions they might make and then come back for more in a few months."

Top White House officials feud over China

The Trump team is bitterly divided over China.

Donald Trump and Xi Jinping of China. The trade delegations are currently negotiating. 

President Trump and Xi Jinping leave a business leaders event at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing in November of 2017. Photo: Nicolas Asfouri/AFP/Getty Images

Trump trade war

Top stories & latest news on the Federal Reserve, real-time data, plus the biggest shifts happening in the U.S. and global economy.

Economy

After a record economic expansion, the coronavirus pandemic sent the U.S. economy into a recession as unemployment soared to staggering heights. The country now faces urgent questions about how much stimulus is needed for reeling consumers and businesses, and what a recovery might look like.

Economy & Business

This White House leaks like there’s no tomorrow.

The big picture: The leaks come in all shapes and sizes: small leaks, real-time leaks, weaponized leaks, historical leaks. Sensitive Oval Office conversations have leaked, and so have talks in cabinet meetings and the Situation Room. You name it, they leak it.

My colleague Mike Allen, who has spent nearly 20 years covering the White House, says we learn more about what's going on inside the Trump White House in a week than we did in a year of the George W. Bush presidency.

This White House leaks so much that meetings called to bemoan leaks begin with acknowledgement the bemoaning will be leaked, which is promptly leaked...by several leakers in a smallish room.

Why does this White House leak like it’s going out of style? I reached out to some of the Trump administration’s most prolific leakers — people who have been wonderful sources to me (and, I assume, plenty of other reporters) — to get them to explain the draw.

"To be honest, it probably falls into a couple of categories,” one current White House official tells me. "The first is personal vendettas. And two is to make sure there's an accurate record of what's really going on in the White House."

"To cover my tracks, I usually pay attention to other staffers' idioms and use that in my background quotes. That throws the scent off me," the current White House official added.

"The most common substantive leaks are the result of someone losing an internal policy debate," a current senior administration official told me. "By leaking the decision, the loser gets one last chance to kill it with blowback from the public, Congress or even the President."

"Otherwise," the official added, "you have to realize that working here is kind of like being in a never-ending 'Mexican Standoff.' Everyone has guns (leaks) pointed at each other and it's only a matter of time before someone shoots. There's rarely a peaceful conclusion so you might as well shoot first."

A former senior White House official who turned leaking into an art form made a slightly more nuanced defense of the practice. "Leaking is information warfare; it's strategic and tactical — strategic to drive narrative, tactical to settle scores,” the source said.

Another former administration official said grudges have a lot to do with it. "Any time I leaked, it was out of frustration with incompetent or tone-deaf leadership,” the former official said.

“Bad managers almost always breed an unhappy workplace, which ultimately results in pervasive leaking," the former official added. "And there has been plenty of all those things inside this White House. Some people use leaking to settle personal scores, or even worse to attack the President, but for me it was always to make a point about something that I felt was being unjustly ignored by others."

Be smart: To any would-be leakers who are considering the practice, I'm also told leaking is pretty fun. Give me a call if you'd like to try it out.

White House leakers leak about leaking

You name it, they leak it at the Trump White House.

Donald Trump at the White House, which has a problem with leakers leaking about leaks.

President Trump at the White House. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

2024 will be an election year like no other, as President Biden seeks re-election amid economic uncertainty, two wars and questions about his age. His likely foe, former President Trump, faces felony charges and vows revenge on his political enemies. Meanwhile, Americans generally are dissatisfied with those choices and are divided over immigration, race, education and more.

Politics & Policy

John Bolton, President Trump's national security advisor, threatened Europe with economic sanctions over the Iran deal, reinforcing a growing fear of a new world of no permanent alliances.

Quick take: Bolton's threat, made on CNN, further undermines the seven-decade alliance between the U.S. and Europe, a central factor in a sharp rise in global living standards and peace among the major powers. 

Why it matters: If Europe decides it cannot rely on the U.S. and American rivals understand the same thing, Trump could risk jeopardizing an international system that had — until now — been led by the U.S.

The centrality of the Atlantic Alliance cannot be overstated. Look at the rest of the world, and you grasp how unusual it is. Since the Soviet collapse, Russia has formed no similarly fixed alliances, but instead has transactional relationships with countries like Iran, Syria and Hungary. Similarly, China's closest relationships may be with North Korea and Pakistan.  

Yet history, writes the FT's Edward Luce, may recall this as the time "the U.S. abandoned its belief in allies."

I asked several foreign policy hands whether we are watching the end of alliances as we've known them, at least for now. Here are their replies:

Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group 

"America’s alliances are deteriorating because we are leaving a world of values-based relationships; the United States is becoming much more transactional in international orientation. Our allies are, in turn, hedging much more accordingly. 

But NATO isn’t going away. Institutions are pretty sticky. The problem is they’re getting eclipsed by new areas of engagement and new threats: In the same way that NAFTA isn’t as relevant because most U.S.-Mexico trade is services and data, NATO isn’t as relevant because most national security isn’t about tanks coming across the border. And there’s very little effort to bolster existing institutions or create new ones. 

China is developing increasingly strong fixed alignments, if not quite alliances, based on economic (and, increasingly, technological) dependence."

Mathew Burrows, director at the Atlantic Council and former counselor, U.S. National Intelligence Council:

"Trump would like to deal bilaterally with everyone and dispense with multilateral frameworks. But the Europeans at least increasingly see their missions as trying to preserve them, hoping that after Trump, the U.S. will revert back to supporting multilateral institutions. For trans-Atlantic institutions like NATO, the Department of Defense doesn’t want to see it wither and can put a brake on Trump — at least so long as [Secretary James] Mattis is around. As we saw with the recent Syrian strikes, Trump had to go along with Mattis. He also got convinced that it was better to do the airstrikes with two allies. 

The big test for trans-Atlantic relations will be if the U.S. sanctions EU firms doing business in Iran. There are French-German differences over what the EU should do. If the EU takes the U.S. to the WTO over the sanctions or steel tariffs and wins big, then I think you will see a huge trans-Atlantic crisis. You could see Trump defy the WTO.  I think that could open the door much wider to economic nationalism and protectionism on the part of others.         

In general, global institutions are waning, but I would not count them completely out. It’s hard to really kill them. The Europeans for one want them. Even Russia and China have found them useful at times. And the U.S. has a love/hate relationship depending on who is in power and what the issue." 

Cliff Kupchan, chairman of the Eurasia Group:

"Alliances are in the hospital but not not dead. This is the Trump period, we have to remember. This president is way out of the American mainstream. Under any future president, U.S. alliances will get a shot in the arm. And the EU faces a dilemma — where else are they going to go? Are Germany and France really going to leave the U.S. umbrella? No.

Now, if Trump is re-elected, it's a different ballgame. Can the "allies" stand six more years of being ignored? Open question. Then there's a real chance it's game over with alliances."

Sanctions threat further frays NATO alliance

Trump's economic nationalism may be jeopardizing the world's strongest alliance.

Future

NATO

World

Conflicts, policies and powers are intersecting and shaping the world. Breaking news and analysis of national security, foreign policy and global crises.

Note: Data is limited to 37 confirmation votes for cabinet, Supreme Court and top leadership positions in the executive branch; Data: U.S. Senate, Axios analysis of voting records; Graphic: Chris Canipe/Axios

A handful of Senate Democrats are committed to opposing President Trump’s executive branch nominations at every turn — and the group bears an uncanny resemblance to the rumored 2020 frontrunners.

Between the lines: Democrats like Kirsten Gillibrand, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Cory Booker have nothing to lose by voting against Trump's nominations — and a lot to gain with the Democratic voters they'll need if they decide to run for the White House.

The winner: The list is topped by Gillibrand, who voted to confirm David Shulkin (an Obama holdover) and Nikki Haley, but no others for prominent leadership roles. She was the lone vote against Jim Mattis as Defense Secretary.

The flip side: The Senate Democrats who have voted against Trump nominees the least include red-state Democrats Joe Manchin (16.2%), Heidi Heitkamp (16.2%) and Joe Donnelly (27%) — as well as independent Angus King (24.3%). Manchin and Donnelly are the only Democrats who have committed to voting to confirm Gina Haspel as CIA director.

The Senate Democrats who keep saying no to Trump nominees

Frontrunners for 2020 are leading the pack.

2020 presidential election

2020 election

Axios AI+

Anand Chandrasekher, who had been leading Qualcomm's efforts to crack the server chip business, has left the company. 

Why it matters: The move comes as Qualcomm appears poised to end its effort to challenge Intel in the data center. Bloomberg reported last week that Qualcomm was looking to sell or shutter the unit.

The backstory: Chandrasekher joined Qualcomm in 2012 from Intel to lead its marketing efforts, but was moved to the data center job after taking a shot at Apple, a large customer.

After a long development effort, Qualcomm started selling a server chip, known as the Centriq 2400, last year. The company has recently been paring back efforts not seen as core to its future.

A Qualcomm representative declined to comment on Chandrasekher's departure, the fate of the server chip unit or say who is now running that business.

Qualcomm server boss exits as unit's fate in limbo

Anand Chandrasekher, a former Intel executive, joined the company in 2012.

The Centriq, seen here, was Qualcomm's effort to get into the data center. Photo: Qualcomm

Technology

Qualcomm

Big Tech

From the Valley to D.C., Big Tech players like Facebook, Google and Amazon are under more scrutiny than ever as new technology develops and privacy and antitrust concerns grow in lockstep with companies’ ambitions.

Millennial women are redefining modern motherhood, according to a new survey — they are likely to embrace traditional notions of motherliness, and while most work, few are optimistic about combining parenting and career.

Quick take: The survey by Motherly, a news site aimed at millennials, suggests that the generation now aged 22 to 37 — much maligned as reluctant to take on responsibility — is growing up, says Liz Tenety, the website's co-founder. 

Millennial women are embracing motherliness

But few are optimistic about combining parenting and career.

Axios

Sunday's top stories

A White House stretched too thin

Xerox scraps merger plan with Fujifilm

Top White House officials feud over China

White House leakers leak about leaking

Sanctions threat further frays NATO alliance

The Senate Democrats who keep saying no to Trump nominees

Qualcomm server boss exits as unit's fate in limbo

Millennial women are embracing motherliness

Trump and Xi working on plan to save Chinese phone maker ZTE

Trump's attempt to forge a new international order

Dems' 2020 road tests could redefine the left

Many states ban teacher strikes. It hasn't stopped them yet

Thousands prepare for evacuations in Hawaii as volcanic eruption looms