The latest media focus is the public contradiction of President Trump’s positions by his own secretaries of Defense and State and his economic adviser.
Defense Secretary James Mattis on Wednesday told reporters, "We are never out of diplomatic solutions," just hours after Trump said in a tweet that "talking is not the answer" to the standoff over North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missile programs.
Mattis also was among senior aides including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and White House economic adviser Gary Cohn who implicitly criticized Trump's response to the violence at the rally organized by white nationalists in Charlottesville, Va.
Presidents often disagree with senior advisers, but the differences usually are confined to internal deliberations and become public only through leaks or much later in memoirs, historians and former government officials say.
“I haven’t seen a modern president with a pattern of this many high officials saying things like that,” says presidential historian Michael Beschloss.
“These are people protecting their reputations in real time, and that is something you usually do not see in high-level officials around a president,” he says.
But, in Mattis, at least, there seems to be a desire to protect the morale of the military.
After the Charlottesville violence, Mattis was recorded in a video uploaded to Facebook speaking off the cuff to a small group of American troops in Jordan. “Our country, right now, it’s got problems that we don’t have in the military,” Mattis told them. “You just hold the line until our country gets back to understanding and respecting each other and showing it.”
Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, says in an opinion article in Politico Magazine, "The president is experiencing a bout of insubordination from his top officials the likes of which we haven't witnessed in the modern era.”
"The new measure of power in Washington is how far you can go criticizing the president at whose pleasure you serve," he says.
Then there’s Breitbart. It’s running an interview by Editor-in-chief Alex Marlow with Mike Cernovich (who promoted the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory alleging that top Democrats were operating a child sex trafficking ring at a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor, according to Right Wing Watch, a project of the liberal group People For the American Way).
Cerner says he’s heard that Trump is under "house arrest," that chief of staff John Kelly has taken Trump’s phone and "there is some kind of coup going on there."