I didn’t get his endorsement when I ran for governor — but the severely troubled man I met has only gotten worse
In 1994, I visited the home of Donald Trump. He was a Democrat then, of sorts, and I was the party’s nominee for governor of Connecticut. He’d taken an interest in our state owing to his keen desire to lodge a casino in Bridgeport, an idea I found economically and morally dubious. I had scant hope of enlisting him, but made the trip anyway, thinking that if I convinced him I might win, he’d be less apt to bankroll my opponent.
.. Trump soon appeared and we began to converse, but not really. In campaigns, we candidates do most of the talking; because we like to, and because people ask us lots of questions. Not this time. Not by a long shot.
Trump talked very rapidly and virtually nonstop for nearly an hour; not of my campaign or even of politics, but only of himself, and almost always in the third person. He’d given himself a nickname: “the Trumpster,” as in “everybody wants to know what the Trumpster’s gonna do,” a claim he made more than once.
He mostly told stories. Some were about his business deals; others about trips he’d taken or things he owned. All were unrelated to the alleged point of our meeting, and to one another. That he seldom even attempted segues made each tale seem more disconnected from reality than the last. It was funny at first, then pathetic, and finally deeply unsettling.
On the drive home, we all burst out laughing, then grew quiet. What the hell just happened? My first theory, that Trump was high on cocaine, didn’t feel quite right, but he was clearly emotionally impaired: in constant need of approbation; lacking impulse control, self-awareness or awareness of others. We’d heard tales of his monumental vanity, but were still shocked by the sad spectacle of him.
.. Over time, his mental health seemed to decline. He threw more and bigger public tantrums; lied more often and less artfully. The media, also in decline and knowing a ratings magnet when it saw one, turned a blind eye. Sensing impunity, Trump revived the racist ‘birther’ lie. In 2011, he told the “Today” show’s Meredith Vieira he had unearthed some dark secrets:
Vieira: You have people now down there searching, I mean in Hawaii?
Trump: Absolutely. And they cannot believe what they’re finding
As Trump recycled old lies, Vieira had a queasy look but no apparent knowledge of the facts. Of course, there weren’t any. Trump had no proof of Obama being born in Kenya. (Since there is none.) It’s highly doubtful he had any researchers in Hawaii. (It was only after Vieira asked him that he claimed he did.) Later, when Trump’s story crumbled, he followed a rule taught by his mentor, Roy Cohn, infamous architect of McCarthyism: Admit nothing. To Trump, a lie is worth a thousand pictures
A West Coast Plea to an Unstable President
I’ll let Leon Panetta, the wisest of West Coasters and former secretary of defense, speak for us:
“You’ve got two bullies chiding each other with outrageous comments,” he told Politico this week. He worried that the bully in Bedminster may feel that the bully in Pyongyang is “attacking his manhood,” an age-old trigger for war. The similarities between the two of you are unavoidable: the preening, the insecurity, the pathological narcissism, the chronic lying, the bad haircuts.
.. But we sometimes can’t tell the statements between the two of you apart. Was it Kim or your magnificence who said you would turn the other’s capital city into a “sea of fire”? Or force the other’s country to suffer “fire and fury like the world has never seen?”
.. one of your top advisers, Sebastian Gorka, has been trying to sound like you, ratcheting up the my-nukes-are-bigger-than-yours brinkmanship. “We are not just the superpower,” he said. “We are now a hyperpower.” If only he were talking about a Marvel Comics character.
And it’s equally unsettling that your evangelical adviser, the Texas pastor Robert Jeffress, is now giving you cover from the Bible. “God has endowed rulers full power to use whatever means necessary — including war — to stop evil,” he said, speaking for God.
.. It will take more than “the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake,” more than calling President Xi Jinping of China a good guy one day, a bad guy the next. Diplomacy is hard. But it beats the alternative.
President Trump Dictated Don Jr.’s Misleading Statement on His Russia Meeting: Report
There isn’t really a good way to tell the world that you took a meeting with a Kremlin-connected lawyer after being promised dirt on Hillary Clinton as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” But Donald Trump Jr. made the revelation that he met with attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya during the campaign even worse when he offered two contradictory explanations in a 24-hour period.
.. This is what he came up with:
It was a short introductory meeting. I asked Jared and Paul to stop by. We primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago and was since ended by the Russian government, but it was not a campaign issue at the time and there was no follow up.
I was asked to attend the meeting by an acquaintance, but was not told the name of the person I would be meeting with beforehand.
.. That explanation would be contradicted and expanded multiple times (eventually it was reported that eight people were in the meeting). And if the Post report is correct, President Trump’s personal lawyer, Jay Sekulow, lied to the press on more than one occasion. He said on Meet the Press, “I do want to be clear — that the president was not involved in the drafting of the statement and did not issue the statement.”
.. “The thing that really strikes me about this is the stupidity of involving the president,” said Peter Zeidenberg, the deputy special prosecutor who probed the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity. “They are still treating this like a family-run business and they have a PR problem … What they don’t seem to understand is this is a criminal investigation involving all of them.”
Trump’s Lawyers Sound Like They’re Getting Nervous
As Mueller’s probe expands, the president’s legal team is treading carefully... Back in June, Donald Trump was still treating the Russia investigation like some sort of defamation suit, one of a countless number of lawsuits that Trump has been involved in over the years. The first attorney he retained to lead his legal team, Marc Kasowitz, was his longtime personal lawyer from his New York real-estate days, and he responded as if former F.B.I. director James Comey’s sworn Senate testimony was just another meritless claim he could dismiss with a cease-and-desist letter. “Comey’s excuse for this unauthorized disclosure of privileged information . . . appears to be entirely retaliatory,” Kasowitz said in a statement at the time, reflexively going on the offensive. “We will leave it [to] the appropriate authorities to determine whether this leaks [sic] should be investigated along with all those others being investigated.”.. Special Counsel Robert Mueller has impaneled a grand jury, and Jay Sekulow, who occupies the role of Trump’s “TV lawyer,” defending the president on news shows, has apparently tempered his rhetoric... Despite their best efforts, they’re dealing with a client who is almost pathologically incapable of telling the same story twice. When he fired Comey, Trump made his situation worse by offering a constantly evolving set of justifications for his dismissal... A similar problem arose when Sekulow went from claiming that Trump played no role in crafting Donald Trump Jr.’s misleading statement about his infamous meeting with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower last year, to the White House claiming that Trump helped “as any father would.”