But behind the scenes, the president soon began entertaining the idea of firing Mr. Mueller even as his staff tried to discourage him from something they believed would turn a bad situation into a catastrophe, according to several people with direct knowledge of Mr. Trump’s interactions. A longtime friend, Christopher Ruddy, surfaced the president’s thinking in a television interview Monday night, setting off a frenzied day of speculation that he would go through with it.
For now, the staff has prevailed. “While the president has every right to” fire Mr. Mueller, “he has no intention to do so,” the White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters late Tuesday.
.. But people close to Mr. Trump say he is so volatile they cannot be sure that he will not change his mind about Mr. Mueller if he finds out anything to lead him to believe the investigation has been compromised.
.. his ability to endure a free-ranging investigation, directed by Mr. Mueller, that could raise questions about the legitimacy of his Electoral College victory, the topic that most provokes his rage
.. In his testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee later in the day, Attorney General Jeff Sessions refused to answer what he said was a hypothetical question of whether he would support Mr. Mueller.
.. The president was pleased by the ambiguity of his position on Mr. Mueller, and thinks the possibility of being fired will focus the veteran prosecutor on delivering what the president desires most: a blanket public exoneration.
.. For Mr. Trump, the line between whim and will is always thin. It is often erased in moments of anger, when simmering grievance boils over into rash action ..
.. after a weekend of brooding
.. Mr. Trump was especially outraged by Mr. Comey’s admission last week that he had leaked a memo with details of his interactions with the president in hopes of spurring the appointment of a special counsel.
.. Among the aides most alarmed by the idea of firing Mr. Mueller, according to people familiar with the situation, was Reince Priebus
.. Donald F. McGahn II, the White House counsel, has also advised against firing Mr. Mueller.
.. Melania, has adopted a more temperate tone, telling her husband that she believed the appointment of Mr. Mueller would speed resolution of the Russia scandal and expressing her view that he would be exonerated
.. Mr. Ruddy has told friends that he went public with the Mueller story, in part, to prevent Mr. Trump from making a rash decision.
The dark source of Roger Ailes’s power
he was trotting out his standard case about the lack of respect he received in New York, despite his immense professional accomplishments.
.. They all look down their noses at me.” Roger was having trouble making his point, though, because of the parade of well-wishers who kept interrupting to shake his hand, kibitz and flatter
.. “Kind of undermines your point, doesn’t it? Half this restaurant is kissing your ring.” “Yeah,” he replied without irony. “But they hate doing it.”
.. That worldview of unending grievance was the cornerstone
.. The Internet did not, as is so often alleged, usher in the siloed media environment.
.. Ailes did that — by proving that there is money, influence and power to be found in serving well-defined interest groups instead of trying to please the widest possible audience.
.. Ailes knew that repetition is the key to buy-in
.. The channel’s ideological prism also insulated Fox News from the bane of traditional outlets — the slow news day
.. Producers could always unearth obscure stories that would be judged trivial by traditional journalistic standards and fit them into a larger narrative about the assault on values
.. The War on Christmas, anyone?
.. “But if you try to come after me from the right, I’ll have to kill you.”
.. he had a different objective: turn talking points into news items for millions of persuadable eyeballs.
Modi Picks Hindu Nationalist to Lead India’s Most Populous State
Promotion of Yogi Adityanath is seen representing the rise of Hindu power
.. Prime Minister Narendra Modi appointed a hard-line Hindu nationalist politician to lead India’s most-populous state over the weekend, a surprise move that marks a swing toward contentious religious politics by a leader who had stuck largely to a development-focused agenda.Yogi Adityanath, a Hindu priest and parliamentarian for nearly 20 years, is known for his divisive and incendiary speeches targeting Muslims... Mr. Adityanath will serve a five-year term as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, a state where nearly 20% of the residents, or 40 million people, are Muslims and where religious tensions easily and frequently flare.
.. Mr. Adityanath’s promotion.. represents the rise of a muscular, Hindu India and a chance to correct what they see as years of official policy going too far to accommodate India’s Muslim minority.
.. “It signifies a new reading on the BJP’s part that public opinion will now accept what was considered politically imprudent not so long ago.”
.. Mr. Adityanath is among the strongest voices in the BJP pushing for the construction of a temple in a place in Uttar Pradesh where, in the 1990s, a Hindu mob destroyed a 16th century mosque
.. He campaigns against so-called love jihad, which he describes as an “international conspiracy” by Muslims to kidnap or lure Hindu women to marry and convert them.
He has exhorted Hindus to respond to attacks on members of their community with tenfold violence.
.. his choice for chief minister harks back to the Hindu nationalist roots of his party, which arose out of a nine-decades-old movement to establish India as a Hindu nation.
.. Mr. Adityanath built a support base in Uttar Pradesh by projecting India’s 80% Hindu majority as victimized and shortchanged by his political rivals, who he accuses of a pro-Muslim bias
Kellyanne Conway gave a master class in not answering questions in her Fox News interview
We are having a culture that does not respect life from conception to natural death and this president gave the most — this Manhattan male billionaire, who was pro-choice most of his adult life gave the impassioned defense of life that anybody has ever heard coming from a presidential podium.
.. WALLACE: And chief strategist Stephen Bannon went much further. Quote, “The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while.”
But Bannon wasn’t finished. “The media has zero integrity, zero intelligence and no hard work. You’re the opposition party. Not the Democratic Party. You’re the opposition party.”
Kellyanne, do you understand how offensive that is?
.. CONWAY: I understand how offensive it was to never be taken seriously that Donald Trump could be elected president. On great days, we were ignored. On most days, we were mocked.
WALLACE: A lot of us — a lot of us reported on it fairly, and that’s a different issue.
CONWAY: No, no, no, it is the issue, because it extends into this presidency, Chris. You can’t put a piece of tissue paper between the way Donald Trump was covered as the Republican candidate, the Republican nominee, the president-elect, and the president. It’s all the same. It’s an anti-Trump screed. It’s completely disrespectful to the Office of the President.
Why — look at what happened this week. Nobody is interested in learning the policies. It’s just —
WALLACE: I’ve been asking about policies today. I asked you about the vetting.
CONWAY: Well, look —
WALLACE: I asked about Mexico. I asked you about the Supreme Court.
(CROSSTALK)
WALLACE: Those are legitimate questions, are they not?
.. WALLACE: Let me get if I may to the real point, politicians complain about bad press. I think you have some legitimate complaints about bad press. The First Amendment protects the press. We are in the Constitution.
And it’s offensive, quite frankly, that have folks — any politician, but folks who have been in the White House for a week lecture us about what we should and shouldn’t do and that we should keep our mouth shut.
.. CONWAY: — what my colleague Steve Bannon is saying is, why don’t you talk last and listen to America more. Let me tell you something, I know what he meant. I worked with him everybody. The media failed to learn America. Donald Trump prove something that the media failed to do, which is he understood America. The idea that we were never taken seriously —
.. WALLACE: — we have zero intelligence and zero integrity, and that we shouldn’t keep our mouths shut is offensive.
CONWAY: I think it’s called listen more.
.. And let me just say something else happens. It’s the way that everything is cherry picked. Bias media coverage it’s easy to detect. It frankly helps us because this was such an elite rejection of election, where the establishment, the elites were all rejected by the voters.
It turns out they’re a heck of a lot more of them than us, Chris. And that’s how we won. Why is that relevant? It’s relevant because people — who is cleaning house? Which one of the first network to get rid of these people who said things that just weren’t true.
Talk about fake news, talk about alternative facts, what happened last week? I went on three network Sunday shows. I spoke for 35 minutes on three network Sunday shows. You know what got picked? The fact that I said alternative facts, not the fact that I ripped a new one to some of those hosts for never covering the facts that matter to America’s women, 16.1 million women in poverty as we sit there, the 12.4 million who have no health insurance. Everybody should feel outraged.
.. The billions of dollars we have spent as a nation on public education, only to have millions of kids trapped in schools that fail them and never really promote and protect their intelligence and prepare them for the world that they all deserve. They shouldn’t be restricted by the zip code where they live. They should be lifted up.
.. There’s no question that when you look at the contributions made by the media, money contributions, they went to Hillary Clinton. We have all the headlines, people should be embarrassed. Not one network person has been let go. Not one silly political analyst and pundit who talked smack all day long about Donald Trump has been let go
.. Who’s the first editorial — the first blogger that will be left out that embarrassed his or her outlet? We know all their names. I’m too polite to call them by name. But they know who they are, and they’re all wondering, will I be the first to go?
The election was three months ago. None of them have been let go. If this were a real business, if the mainstream media were a thriving private sector business that actually turn a profit, which is not true of many of our newspapers, Chris, 20 percent of the people would be gone. They embarrassed, they failed to protect their shareholders and their board members and their colleagues.
.. WALLACE: And let me say, you didn’t rip me a new one.