Spicer was determinedly dour and looked miserable. He was puffy, pinched and pale. And little wonder: Trump has sucked the lifeblood out of him.
.. Washington is abuzz with speculation about when Spicer will be shown the door, but it doesn’t really matter. His credibility, and his dignity, have already been defenestrated.
.. Trump has a long history of walking out of disasters unscathed. It’s those around him — the Spicers of the world — who are destroyed.
- Trump entities filed for bankruptcy protection six times. Investors, lenders and workers took hits — and Trump moved on.
- Trump was caught on tape boasting to Billy Bush about sexually assaulting women — and Billy Bush lost his job.
- Corey Lewandowski and
- Paul Manafort poured themselves into Trump’s campaign and were unceremoniously dumped.
- Michael Flynn is out and potentially in legal trouble.
- The FBI’s Comey arguably handed Trump the election — and learned of his dismissal from TV.
- Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein tarnished his sterling reputation in just two weeks.
- Vice President Pence has been “unflagging in his loyalty,” only to be made “the public face of official narratives that turn out to be misleading or false.”
- Trump humiliated Steve Bannon by publicly downplaying their association.
- Trump repaid House Speaker Paul Ryan’s loyalty by winking at calls for Ryan’s ouster.
- Attempts to defend Trump by aides Reince Priebus and Kellyanne Conway and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have left them sounding clownish.
.. avoided answering questions by saying no fewer than 22 times how very “clear” he or Trump had been about this or that.
.. And, as many a Trump loyalist has discovered, you are useful to Trump until you are not — and then you are cast aside.
Trump Reaches Beyond West Wing for Counsel
Mr. Trump’s West Wing aides, like President Bill Clinton’s staff two decades before, say they sometimes cringe at the input from people they can’t control, with consequences they can’t predict. Knowing these advisers — who are mostly white, male and older — is a key to figuring out the words coming from Mr. Trump’s mouth and his Twitter feed.
.. Sean Hannity
Presidents always deploy surrogates to appear on television to spout their talking points, but Mr. Trump has expanded on that by developing relationships with sympathetic media figures like Mr. Hannity who also serve as advisers. Mr. Hannity, the Fox News host, defends Mr. Trump’s most controversial behavior in public, but privately, according to people close to Mr. Trump, he urges the president not to get distracted, and advises him to focus on keeping pledges like repealing the Affordable Care Act.
.. Chris Ruddy
The chief executive of Newsmax Media is a longtime Mar-a-Lago member and was a Trump cheerleader among conservative media well before the website Breitbart joined the parade. He employs writers and editors who tracked Mr. Trump’s career when they were at The New York Post.
.. Sheri A. Dillon
Ms. Dillon seemed out of place when she spoke at a too-large lectern in the lobby of Trump Tower on Jan. 11, describing the steps Mr. Trump planned to take to separate himself from his business. But Ms. Dillon, an ethics lawyer who worked out a highly criticized plan for Mr. Trump to retain ownership of his company but step back from running it, has repeatedly counseled the president about the business and made at least one White House visit.
.. Corey Lewandowski
Despite his “you’re fired” slogan, the president dislikes dismissing people. Mr. Lewandowski, Mr. Trump’s hot-tempered first campaign manager, was fired in June but never really went away. A New England-bred operative whose working-class roots and clenched-teeth loyalty earned him Mr. Trump’s trust, he continued to be in frequent phone contact with Mr. Trump until the election and beyond. Friends of Mr. Lewandowski say that he can see the windows of the White House residence from his lobbying office on Pennsylvania Avenue, and that the view is even better during his visits to the West Wing
.. Thomas Barrack Jr.
Mr. Trump divides the people around him into broad categories: family, paid staff and wealthy men like Mr. Barrack whom he considers peers.
.. Under Mr. Barrack’s leadership, Mr. Trump’s inaugural committee raised a record $106.7 million, much of it from big corporations, banks and Republican megadonors like the Las Vegas billionaire Sheldon Adelson. Mr. Barrack also helped usher Paul Manafort, the international political operative now under scrutiny for his ties to Russia, into the Trump fold last year.
.. Phil Ruffin
Mr. Trump has 20-odd business partners, but none is closer to him than Mr. Ruffin, 82, a Texas billionaire who has lent his ear and private jet. The president was best man at the 2008 wedding of Mr. Ruffin to his third wife, a 26-year-old model and former Miss Ukraine. Mr. Ruffin has a knack for showing up when Mr. Trump needs him most and remains a die-hard defender.
.. Carl Icahn
Rounding out Mr. Trump’s roster of wealthy octogenarians is this 81-year-old corporate raider and real estate mogul, who occupies perhaps the most respected perch in the president’s circle of businessmen buddies. The affection is longstanding: The Queens-bred Mr. Icahn has known Mr. Trump and his family for decades. It’s also numerical: Mr. Icahn is worth an estimated $16 billion, a major plus in the eyes of a president who keeps score. Mr. Icahn serves as a free-roving economic counselor and the head of Mr. Trump’s effort to reduce government regulations on business.
Mrs. Trump is uninterested in the limelight, but she has remained a powerful adviser by telephone from New York. Among her roles: giving Mr. Trump feedback on media coverage, counseling him on staff choices and urging him, repeatedly, to tone down his Twitter feed. Lately, he has listened closely, and has a more disciplined Twitter finger.
Mr. Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and palace gatekeeper, has shown a capacity to hobble his rivals, but few have been finished off. The most durable has been Mr. Christie, whose transition planning, several West Wing aides now concede, should not have been discarded.
Onetime Trump Campaign Manager Lewandowski to Launch Consulting Firm
Its offices lie just blocks from the White House on 1717 Pennsylvania Avenue, according to its website–the same building that is currently housing Mr. Trump’s transition team.
.. The launch of a new political consulting firm by top Trump allies clashes with Mr. Trump’s pledge during the campaign to “drain the swamp” in Washington of lobbyists and consultants. Since being elected, Mr. Trump has tapped several top donors and some recently deregistered lobbyists for his transition team and administration posts.
.. “What it will do is it will provide companies opportunities to get a fast answer from the federal government,” he said. “That doesn’t mean it’s the answer they want.”
He added: “Helping provide strategic counsel to companies to get a fast no is more beneficial to them than a long maybe.”
.. Increasingly in recent years, those who previously registered as lobbyists have avoided doing so, calling themselves consultants or advisers instead.
Corey Lewandowski’s very odd explanation of Donald Trump’s ‘facts’
Donald Trump’s old campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, would like us to treat the president-elect’s facts with all the seriousness of a guy at a bar who is two PBRs deep, riffing on current events. And that’s not really that hyperbolic.
Here’s what Lewandowski, who is now a CNN contributor, said Thursday night at Harvard’s 2016 campaign postmortem forum:
This is the problem with the media. You guys took everything that Donald Trump said so literally. The American people didn’t. They understood it. They understood that sometimes, when you have a conversation with people, whether it’s around the dinner table or at a bar, you’re going to say things, and sometimes you don’t have all the facts to back it up.
So we should basically take nothing Trump says at face value. Or assume that his facts are, um, factual. Got it.
.. One thing that’s been interesting this campaign season to watch is that people that say facts are facts — they’re not really facts. Everybody has a way — it’s kind of like looking at ratings or looking at a glass of half-full water. Everybody has a way of interpreting them to be the truth or not true. There’s no such thing, unfortunately anymore, of facts. And so Mr. Trump’s tweet, amongst a certain crowd — a large part of the population — are truth. When he says that millions of people illegally voted, he has some facts — amongst him and his supporters — and people believe they have facts to back that up. Those that do not like Mr. Trump, they say that those are lies and there’s no facts to back it up.
.. Whatever you think of just how literally Trump should be taken, this approach to the truth is an almost perfect cop-out for basically anything Trump says or does as president. His team is basically asking for a Get Out of Jail Free card that can be redeemed over and over again by the single most powerful person in the country.
This approach from the Trump campaign has created an adversarial relationship with the media, for sure. That’s because the media’s No. 1 obligation is to the truth, and when Trump says something that clearly isn’t true, our first impulse is to say, “That’s not true!” As it should be. Lewandowski and Hughes don’t like this, because their favored candidate’s grasp of the facts is not good.
I’ll even admit here that I agree with them that Trump probably doesn’t meanto be taken literally at all times. But if we’re to adopt this approach to the Trump presidency, there is absolutely no accountability. If Trump doesn’t follow through on something he promised to do over and over again — like putting Hillary Clinton in jail — he can just argue that this wasn’t supposed to be taken literally. If Trump doesn’t follow through on his promise to tax companies who move jobs overseas, he can just flash the Get Out of Jail Free card again. He didn’t mean to say that thing he said over and over again, somehow. But this other thing that he actually succeeded on? He meant that one.