Trump’s Cabinet officials work as a cleanup crew

After President Donald Trump said that deporting undocumented immigrants was 'a military operation,” Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, speaking in Mexico, clarified that there would be 'no use of military force in immigration operations.”

After Trump, standing next to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, upended decades of U.S. policy by saying he was open to a one-state solution to the conflict in the Middle East, U.N. envoy Nikki Haley asserted that the United States 'absolutely” supports a two-state solution.

And after Trump alarmed European allies by declaring NATO obsolete, Vice President Mike Pence flew to Munich and Brussels, where he reassured a worried continent that the president remains 'fully devoted to our transatlantic union.”

One of the unofficial duties of Trump's Cabinet, it seems, is cleaning up the statements of the man they serve. Five weeks into Trump's tenure, his deputies have found themselves softening, explaining and sometimes outright contradicting the president.

This public and often yawning gulf between Trump and his agency heads has added to the sense of chaos and turmoil emanating from the White House, sending his secretaries scrambling to interpret their boss' exact positions and leaving other nations confused as to who, exactly, speaks on behalf of the administration.

‘Awkward position'

'It puts the Cabinet officials in an awkward position,” said Ryan Williams, a Republican strategist. 'They serve the president and obviously don't want to contradict him, but at the same time they have to articulate administration policy, which sounds like an oxymoron - contradicting the president by articulating administration policy - but that's been the case in some instances so far.”

When Pence traveled to Europe a week ago to offer a message of support for NATO and the European Union, he managed to temporarily soothe nervous allies. But diplomats and foreign leaders nonetheless emerged from 2½ days of meetings uncertain whether he really spoke on behalf of the president or whether his words could be undone by a tweet from Trump.

Military mixup

And in Mexico City, Kelly chided the press for misrepresenting the facts.

'There will be no - repeat, no - use of military force in immigration operations. None,” he said.

But the news reports to which Kelly referred were quoting Trump himself, who earlier in the day had touted 'a military operation” in the United States to help deport undocumented immigrants.

Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, ultimately suggested that Trump was using 'military” as an adjective referring to the precision and efficiency with which deportations were occurring - not the operations themselves.

At Odds with Mattis

As Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has traveled the world, he, too has found himself playing interpreter and explainer for the administration, often taking stances that seem not quite in line with the White House message.

On a recent trip to the Middle East, for instance, Mattis seemed to break from - or at least add clarity to - two of the president's recent comments. Trump recently tweeted that he views the news media as an 'enemy of the American people” - a claim he reiterated Friday at the Conservative Political Action Conference. The defense secretary disagreed with the label.

During a meeting with reporters in Baghdad, Mattis also pushed back on comments Trump made last month, in which the president said the U.S. should have 'kept the oil” during the drawdown from the Iraq War.

'We're not in Iraq to seize anybody's oil,” Mattis said.

White House rebuttal

Of course, the Trump White House is hardly the first in which Cabinet officials have disagreed with the president. In former President Barack Obama's administration, there was vigorous debate on several major issues, including whether to authorize the Navy SEAL raid in Pakistan that ultimately killed Osama bin Laden.

An official in the current White House cast the disagreements between Trump and his Cabinet officials as questions of nuance and semantics, not true ideological conflict.

'Our president chose bold leaders, not a group of yes-secretaries, and from time to time the language may differ slightly, but they are all pulling together in the same direction to make our country great again,” said Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump's principal deputy press secretary.

Unprecedented

Robert Dallek, a presidential historian and biographer, said he found the stream of contradictions and cleanups worrying - and unprecedented.

'I don't understand how this administration can be so full of errors and stumbles and retreats,” he said. 'It's as if what someone says doesn't matter, because the next minute they change it. They don't seem to understand that the words coming out of a presidential administration or a top adviser to the president count for something and resonate and reach people, not only in the media but across this country and around the world.”