Ben Smith, writing over at Semafor:

And yet — just as Trump often ignored his conventional advisers in the first term, he’s stunned loyalists by sweeping aside this carefully assembled apparat in 2025. He ignored the DoD aides who opposed an attack on Iran, and humiliated his nominal top spy, the anti-establishment Tulsi Gabbard, when she downplayed the Iranian nuclear threat. He’s left the bloggers to defend keeping Jeffrey Epstein’s secrets. He’s replaced talk of sinister tech monopolies with embracing Big American Tech, largely refashioned as Big American AI.

“It turns out that personnel isn’t policy,” the executive director of The American Conservative, Curt Mills, told me glumly over lunch in Washington last week.

That’s a good enough observation as far as it goes, but it’s worth keeping in mind that Trump’s cabinet is a “team of rivals” and/or vipers.  Sure, Trump has “non-interventionists” like Gabbard and JD Vance around him. But he also has Marco Rubio and Mike Waltz and John Ratcliffe around him, who were all on the more hawkish side of the foreign policy spectrum. The fact that one faction didn’t get its way in a key policy decision doesn’t mean that all factions have no discernible influence on the president.

Then again, if one anecdote from reporting in the New York Times is accurate, the president’s decision-making can be influenced by what he’s seeing on Fox News Channel.

Political advisers to Mr. Trump had been swapping notes on various public and private polls examining the popularity of military action against Iran, noting that American support for an operation depended in part on how pollsters asked the question. While polls showed that an overwhelming majority of Americans did not want the United States to go to war with Iran, most Americans also did not want Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon.

The president was closely monitoring Fox News, which was airing wall-to-wall praise of Israel’s military operation and featuring guests urging Mr. Trump to get more involved. Several Trump advisers lamented the fact that [Tucker] Carlson was no longer on Fox, which meant that Mr. Trump was not hearing much of the other side of the debate.

Past reporting about Trump’s first term indicates that the president spends a lot of his day on the phone, talking with people and asking what they think. Getting a call from the president, and hearing him ask, “What do you think?” is probably very flattering, and makes the person on the other end of the phone believe that they are an influential “Trump adviser.” But there is a significant gap between hearing advice and following advice.