US President Donald Trumps closest friends and allies have begun to publicly warn the president that his Twitter tirades are fueling mayhem in the White House and risk jeopardizing his presidency.
“The tweeting makes everybody crazy,” said Trump’s close friend Tom Barrack, chairman of Colony Northstar, at a Bloomberg conference in New York Tuesday. “There’s just no gain in doing it.”
The campaign by Trump’s closest supporters amounts to a remarkable appeal to a sitting commander-in-chief, a sort of public intervention with the aim of convincing Trump to give up behavior that they believe is doing lasting damage to his presidency.
The tweets do more than simply distract from the administration’s attempts to highlight Trump’s policies. Across the administration, a sense of mayhem prevails as Trump’s staff find themselves unable to plan and are constantly playing defense because of uncertainty over what the president may next say on Twitter or elsewhere, with his positions constantly shifting, one former administration official said.
A Washington consultant whose clients work closely with the administration said the tweets feed into a sense that the White House is losing its way.
Barrack’s criticism followed a Trump tweetstorm over the weekend, sparked by the London terrorist attack that killed seven people. Trump criticized the city’s mayor and the U.S. Department of Justice for its legal defense of his travel ban.
The tweets shocked the British and caused days of distraction, overshadowing the White House’s public roll-out of a plan to overhaul the U.S. air-traffic control system. Trump’s allies were so alarmed that several have publicly called for him to stop.
