To President Trump, no place is more comfortable than the middle of a fight.
.. This week had it all: Vicious tweets, nasty nicknames, an entrenched foe in the mainstream media and the reprisal by Trump of one of his favorite roles — the victim.
.. For Trump and his legions of loyalists, the media has become a shared enemy.
“They like him, they believe in him, they have not to any large degree been shaken from him, and the more the media attacks him, the more it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy on the side of the Trump supporters who fervently believe the media treat him unfairly,” said Tony Fabrizio, the chief pollster for Trump’s campaign. “It’s like, ‘Beat me with that sword some more!’ ”
.. Fabrizio estimated that just a quarter of Americans know who Brzezinski is and predicted that conservatives would instinctively side with Trump, as they did when he attacked then-Fox News Channel anchor Megyn Kelly and other media personalities during last year’s campaign.
“Everybody inside the Beltway knows who she is, but the average working guy doesn’t know who she is,” Fabrizio said of Brzezinski.
.. Certainly a big part of the success the president had last year was this sweeping, counterculture pushback against information being dictated to the American people.”
.. Roger Stone, a former Trump adviser and longtime confidant, likened Trump’s attacks on the media to the strategy employed by former president Richard M. Nixon to discredit organizations such as The Post that were breaking stories on the Watergate investigation.
“The difference is Nixon had no Internet-based alternative media [that] would aggressively cover his side of the argument,”
.. West Wing officials viewed CNN’s mistake as a public vindication that the Russia investigation — and its ensuing media coverage — is simply a “witch hunt,”
Outrage at sexist remarks used to be my job. With Trump, it isn’t enough.
Some of my fellow feminist journalists saw a paradoxical benefit in Trump’s untrammeled misogyny. The flimsy mask of presidential civility Trump could muster has now slipped; we are back to a woman bleeding from her whatever. “Trump’s persistent attacks on women affirm what feminists have been saying all along: that sexism is still pervasive at all levels of American society,” wrote The Post’s Alyssa Rosenberg.
.. I can’t fault Hillary Clinton’s campaign for its failed strategy of trying to hang Trump by his own words, with commercials juxtaposing his nastiness with children and young women.
.. Trump’s sexist recidivism — our nation’s collective, surreal Groundhog Day — shows the diminishing returns of outrage culture as an end in itself. That there would be no consequences, that he never really needed to apologize, has been Trump’s clearest insight, one he learned and perfected long before he got into politics.
.. Learned helplessness, a term psychologists use to describe mute acquiescence in the face of repeated trauma, is what abusers thrive on.
.. hinging political mobilization on someone being offensive has now been perfected by conservative media, which decries political correctness
Trump Mocks Mika Brzezinski; Says She Was ‘Bleeding Badly From a Face-Lift’
The president described Ms. Brzezinski as “low I.Q. Crazy Mika” and claimed in a series of Twitter posts that she had been “bleeding badly from a face-lift” during a social gathering at Mr. Trump’s resort in Florida around New Year’s Eve. The White House did not explain what had prompted the outburst, but a spokeswoman said Ms. Brzezinski deserved a rebuke because of her show’s harsh stance on Mr. Trump.
.. “My first reaction was that this just has to stop, and I was disheartened because I had hoped the personal, ad hominem attacks had been left behind, that we were past that,” Senator Susan Collins, a moderate Republican from Maine who is a crucial holdout on the effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, said in an interview.
“I don’t think it directly affects the negotiation on the health care bill, but it is undignified — it’s beneath a president of the United States and just so contrary to the way we expect a president to act,” she said. “People may say things during a campaign, but it’s different when you become a public servant. I don’t see it as undermining his ability to negotiate legislation, necessarily, but I see it as embarrassing to our country.”
.. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, urged the news media to move on, arguing during the daily White House briefing that Mr. Trump was “fighting fire with fire” by attacking a longtime critic.
Ms. Brzezinski had called the president “a liar” and suggested he was “mentally ill,” added Ms. Sanders, who defended Mr. Trump’s tweets as appropriate for a president.
.. “As the first lady has stated publicly in the past, when her husband gets attacked, he will punch back 10 times harder,” Mrs. Trump’s spokeswoman wrote in a statement, referring to the first lady’s remarks during the campaign.
.. Mr. Trump’s oldest friends say it is difficult for him to distinguish between large and small slights — or to recognize that his office comes with the expectation that he moderate his behavior.
And his fiercest, most savage responses have almost always been to what he has seen on television.
.. After lashing out at Mr. Scarborough and Ms. Brzezinski at one point last summer, Mr. Trump told an adviser, “It felt good.”
.. reporters interrupted Ms. Sanders’s defense of the president to ask how she felt about them as a woman and a mother.
She responded that she had only “one perfect role model”: God.
“None of us are perfect,” she said.
The Obscure Lawyer Who Might Become the Most Powerful Woman in Washington
If the deputy attorney general resigns or gets fired, oversight of the Trump-Russia investigation would fall to the Justice Department’s No. 3, Rachel Brand.
Senate Democrats who opposed her nomination to the No. 3 job at the Justice Department said her legal career reflected a tendency always to support Big Business against the little guy, and they questioned her commitment to civil liberties during her years in the department under President George W. Bush.
.. She has a “heavily skewed pro-corporate agenda,” said Senator Patrick Leahy
.. Brand was confirmed to her job on a party-line Senate vote of 52 to 46.
.. Rosenstein .. has privately conferred with Brand about the possibility that she will need to take over the department’s oversight of Mueller
.. She was active in the Federalist Society, the conservative lawyer’s group that has long been a talent pool for anyone interested in serving in the administration of a Republican president or on the Supreme Court.
.. hired as a Supreme Court clerk to Justice Anthony M. Kennedy
.. In 2011, Brand became a top lawyer for the United States Chamber of Commerce
.. “If you hire a lawyer, they are going to represent your view. We can’t assume an attorney personally believes in what they are advocating on behalf of their clients. Just ask criminal defense lawyers.”
.. she might now be confronting the “tough task of insulating the investigation from the erratic and inappropriate behavior of President Trump.”
.. Rosenstein might welcome turning over the responsibilities to Brand because it would take him out of the immediate line of fire