Reverse, again

President Trump on Monday put the brakes on a preliminary plan to impose additional economic sanctions on Russia, walking back a Sunday announcement by U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley that the Kremlin had swiftly denounced as “international economic raiding.”

[...]

Haley had said on CBS News’s “Face the Nation” that sanctions on Russian companies behind the equipment related to Assad’s alleged chemical weapons attack would be announced Monday by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.

  WaPo

This is the damnedest administration I ever heard tell of. In any country.

Trump conferred with his national security advisers later Sunday and told them he was upset the sanctions were being officially rolled out because he was not yet comfortable executing them, according to several people familiar with the plan.

How can anyone work with this man?

Administration officials said the economic sanctions were under serious consideration, along with other measures that could be taken against Russia, but said Trump had not given final authorization to implement them.

Then what was Nikki Haley doing telling everybody they were going forward?

Early in the Trump administration, there were conflicts between Haley’s team and the president on Russia. Shortly after Trump’s inauguration, Haley delivered a speech at the United Nations that recommitted the White House to the Obama administration’s policy on sanctions related to Russian aggression in Ukraine. The speech was cleared by David Cattler, then a senior official on the National Security Council, but the remarks frustrated Trump, who demanded to know who had approved them.

“Lots of people got yelled at — some by the president,” said a U.S. official at the United Nations. Cattler, in turn, was pushed out of his job a couple of weeks later in a reorganization of the NSC by McMaster.

[...]

In early March, following a relatively small-scale chemical weapons attack in Syria, Trump was upset there was not a ready set of options, so then-national security adviser H.R. McMaster prepared a series of measures that were not enacted.

And then he got fired.

Sometime after Haley’s comments on CBS, the Trump administration notified the Russian Embassy in Washington that the sanctions were not in fact coming, a Russian Foreign Ministry official said Monday.

How can any other country work with us?

Haley said Sunday on CBS: “You will see that Russian sanctions will be coming down. Secretary Mnuchin will be announcing those on Monday, if he hasn’t already. And they will go directly to any sort of companies that were dealing with equipment related to Assad and chemical weapons used. And so I think everyone is going to feel it at this point. I think everyone knows that we sent a strong message, and our hope is that they listen to it.”

And they're not going to take any 'message' seriously ever again.

But, Trump apparently got Russia's message:

After Haley’s comments, Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov told reporters in Moscow that the sanctions were a U.S. ploy to oust Russia from international markets and constituted “undisguised attempts of unfair competition.”

[...]

Russian lawmakers were crowing Friday that they were going to make the United States pay for already imposed sanctions, potentially by blocking American imports or U.S.-Russian aerospace cooperation, or allowing Russians to violate U.S. intellectual property rights. Russia, one top lawmaker promised, was going to “hit the Americans in the gut.”

[...]

Asked Monday morning why it had taken 24 hours for the administration to walk back Haley’s comments, one White House official said only that there had been confusion internally about what the plan was.

There is constant internal confusion in this White House, and nobody knows what's going to happen next.  Not even after we've been told. This is ridiculous. It's dangerous.  It alone should cause the GOP to consider impeachment.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.