9/9/20: Team Trump, to use a sports
metaphor, finds itself trailing after an errant pass from quarterback D. J. “Bone
Spurs” Trump is intercepted by journalist Bob Woodward, and run back 105 yards for
a pick-six.
____________________
“We’re in crazytown.”
White House Chief of
Staff Gen. John Kelly
____________________
Or to put
in political terms, for some inexplicable reason, President Trump decided to
begin talking to Woodward, the man who helped bring Nixon down, sitting with or
talking by phone – on the record – a total of eighteen times. Considering
Woodward’s first book on the Trump years was titled Fear, and the next,
out Tuesday will bear the title Rage, you wonder what Trump was
thinking.
Ego and
narcissism likely blinded the fool.
So, far,
what we’re hearing is even worse than what we read in Fear, if we were
the reading type.
 |
| Also known as: "Crazytown." |
For today,
let’s stick to revisiting some of the quotes Woodward provided in Fear:
On page 47,
Steve Bannon described Trump, after his surprise election victory: “This is a
guy totally unprepared….Trump hasn’t spent a second [emphasis added, unless
otherwise noted] getting ready for this moment.”
Gary Cohn, Trump’s
chief White House economic advisor, told Woodward what he was most proud about
having done before he resigned: “It’s not what we did for this country,” he explained.
“It’s what we saved [Trump] from doing.” (xix)
Cohn
eventually came to see Trump in a stark light. “He’s a professional liar,”
he told people. (209; 338)
Former White
House aide Rob Porter seconded Cohn in his thinking: “A third of my job was
trying to react to some of the really dangerous ideas that he had and
try to give him reasons to believe that maybe they weren’t such good ideas.” (xix)
Secretary of
State Rex Tillerson famously described the president this way: “He’s a fucking
moron.” (On page 225, Woodward explained why.)
Trump’s
first White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus, offered a clear-eyed view of
his former boss. “The president,” he said, “has zero psychological ability
to recognize empathy or pity in any way.” (235)
Nor was Priebus
impressed with Trump’s management style. When “you put a snake and a rat and a
falcon and a rabbit and a shark and a seal in a zoo without walls,” he said, “things
start getting nasty and bloody.” (237)
Gen. John Kelly,
who replaced Priebus, was no more a fan. “The president’s unhinged,” he warned at one point. “He’s an idiot,” he
told other top aides after one more disastrous meeting. “It’s pointless to try
to convince him of anything. He’s gone off the rails. We’re in crazytown.” (263;
286)
John Dowd, the
lawyer charged with building a defense during the Mueller investigation,
despaired at times. During a prep session, in case Trump had to testify under
oath, he realized that if Trump didn’t know an answer, “He just made something
up. That’s his nature.” Eventually, Dowd reached a startling conclusion. “Don’t
testify,” he told the president. “It’s either that or an orange jump suit.” (353;
354)
In fact, I
think we can assume the president was too lazy to read the book, before
deciding to give Woodward access this time.
Fear ends on page 357, with this:
But in the man and his
presidency Dowd had seen the tragic flaw. In the political back-and-forth, the
evasions, the denials, the tweeting, the obscuring, crying “Fake News,” the
indignation, Trump had one overriding problem that Dowd knew but could not
bring himself to say to the president: “You’re a fucking liar.”
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