In his speech, Trump encouraged police brutality and said he was “the big, big believer and admirer of the people in law enforcement, O.K.?” He said that he’s protecting the backs of law enforcement “100 percent.” Except for Sessions, Sally Yates, Preet Bharara and Robert Mueller.
As two people close to Trump told The Times’s Maggie Haberman when asked why he was tormenting Sessions instead of firing him: Because he can.
.. And in his paranoid, aggrieved isolation, he’s even thinking about nixing Steve Bannon, nemesis of the Mooch, and mulling firing the one who could get him fired, Mueller, and pardoning himself for possible charges.
.. Trump learned his technique of publicly criticizing and freely firing from George Steinbrenner, one of the ruthless, towering characters he modeled himself on when he started hanging out at Yankee Stadium in the ’70s.
.. Trump had always resented Priebus for advising him to get out of the race after the Billy Bush “Access Hollywood” tape story broke — known as Priebus’s “scarlet A.H.,” according to The Washington Post — and for not understanding that Trump is not a mere Republican; he’s the head of his own “beautiful,” us-against-them movement, “the likes of which the world has never seen.”
.. As The Post reports, Trump’s delighted demeaning of Priebus included this incident: “At one point, during a meeting in the Oval Office, a fly began buzzing overhead, distracting the president. As the fly continued to circle, Trump summoned his chief of staff and tasked him with killing the insect.”
.. After torturing Reince for months, Trump happily gave him the final humiliating shove. As the tweets hit the White House cellphones, Priebus’s colleagues Stephen Miller and Dan Scavino jumped out of the Suburban they were sharing with Priebus, leaving the jobless man in a driving rain on the tarmac at Andrews Air Force Base, the weakest link tossed off the sled for the press wolves.
.. You’re a killer and a king or a loser, as Fred Trump liked to say. And anyone who doesn’t understand that Trump is more important than the G.O.P. or the institution of the presidency is, in his mind, a loser. Anyone who doesn’t get that the loyalty should be for him personally, rather than the country, is, to Trump, a loser.
.. With Priebus, The Post reported, the president obsessed on impotence. “The word was ‘weak’ – ‘weak,’ ‘weak,’ ‘weak,’ ‘Can’t get it done,’” an official told the paper.
.. But after all his bragging about being a great negotiator and closer, it is President Trump who can’t get it done. He couldn’t even close the deal on a pathetic, bare-bones health care bill, ineffectually bullying Lisa Murkowski, a Republican senator from Alaska, and failing to win over John McCain, who gleefully had his revenge for Trump’s mockery of him as being a loser because he was captured in war.
.. Trump can’t get it done for his pal, Putin, either. In fact, the biggest legislative accomplishment before Congress leaves for August will have been passing new sanctions on Russia because lawmakers don’t trust their own president. Talk about weak.
.. Congressional Republicans are losing their fear of Trump, making ever more snarky comments about him. North Korea is shooting off missiles and the White House is flustered. The generals are resisting Trump’s tweet edicts. The mortified leader of the Boy Scouts had to apologize for the president’s suggestive and partisan speech.
And what could be weaker than that?
Game of Trump
So far in life, Donald Trump has survived and thrived on the same philosophy espoused by Littlefinger in “Game of Thrones”: “Chaos isn’t a pit. Chaos is a ladder.”
.. First we learned there were six, not four, people in the meeting, including a lobbyist who just happened to be a former member of the Soviet unit dealing in counterintelligence. Then we found out there were eight. Next, we’ll find out Putin was FaceTiming from Moscow.
.. Jared Kushner has had to amend his list of foreign contacts three times, adding more than 100 names that had somehow eluded him. “His lawyers have said this was inadvertent and that a member of his staff had prematurely hit the ‘send’ button for the form before it was completed,”
.. The Daily Beast recalled that back in the ’80s, when Goldstone represented John Denver and Michael Jackson, he went to Ethiopia for Band Aid, a rock concert to help famine victims, and managed to gain seven pounds.
As he explained to The Sydney Morning Herald, “I mean, what else is there to do in a country like Ethiopia but eat?”
.. According to ProPublica, after a man watching Rachel Maddow emailed Kasowitz Wednesday telling him to “Resign Now,” the lawyer shot back with a bunch of nasty messages, such as “Watch your back, bitch” and “I already know where you live, I’m on you. … You will see me. I promise. Bro.”
.. Kasowitz, ProPublica reports, has a drinking problem that could hamper him getting a security clearance. He has grown increasingly frustrated by Trump’s lack of discipline as the president sulks and rages in his tent
.. He bragged about his cunning when he brought up the hacks with Putin. After citing it once, Trump said, “I then said to him again, in a totally different way.”
Wow. That must have really outfoxed the lethal former K.G.B. agent. You know nothing, Donald Trump.
Cruella de Trump
It is a more sensitive matter for women because for centuries, they relied on their looks for economic security, and they continue to be judged more on physical traits and clothing choices.
.. When Trump called the House health care bill mean, he knows whereof he speaks. He’s the King of Mean. Pathetically, Trump mistakes cruelty for strength.
.. The 71-year-old president’s pathological inability to let go of slights; his strongman reflex to be the aggressor and bite back like a cornered animal, without regard for societal norms; his lack of self-awareness about the power he commands and the proportionality of his responses; his grotesque hunger for flattery and taste for Tony Soprano tactics;
his Pravda partnership with David Pecker, the head honcho at The National Enquirer, which has been giving Trump the Il Duce treatment while sliming his political opponents, the “Morning Joe” anchors and Megyn Kelly — these are all matters that should alarm men and women equally.
.. Trump is isolated in the White House, out of his milieu, unable to shape the story, forced to interact with people he doesn’t own.
.. Before he got to D.C., Trump was used to media that could be bought, sold and bartered with. He is not built for this hostile environment and it shows in his deteriorating psychological state.
.. Trump has always been obsessed with looks — his own, men’s and women’s. One of his favorite phrases is “Here’s the beauty of me.”
.. back in the ’90s Donald would hand out tubes of Rogaine to male executives and say the worst thing in the world is for a male executive to go bald.”
.. I gave Trump the benefit of the doubt after his comment on Megyn Kelly about “blood coming out of her wherever” when he claimed he meant her nose. But later, a longtime Trump associate told me that Trump had practiced that line before he said it on CNN and that it was meant to evoke an image of Kelly as hormonal.
.. you can never be sure of anything that comes out of this White House.
Except the cruelty.
Charlie Rose: Maureen Down on 2016 Election
Columnist Maureen Down introduces her new book, “The Year of Voting Dangerously: The Derangement of American Politics.”
6 min: Trump doesn’t believe what he says. He’s a salesman.
.. So, I said to him, why do you think voters would vote for you? And he said because I get good ratings on Larry King, or more precisely, because I get the best ratings on Larry King. So, even then it was ratings. And then he said, you know, because a lot of men hit on Melania. So, he was saying he had that ego arithmetic that he uses. The numbers are sentinels of his success. And that has not changed. He still, you know, even on TV this week, he was giving the number, the high number of his testosterone count as an example.
.. he’s completely changed. Because he was this sort of bling king, white rapper, greed is good, kind of New York liberal. So you have these two New York Democrats running against each other. But now, he is either pretending to be or has morphed into an all-right, you know, anti-abortion
—06:13Charlie Rose: And you think that is genuine.
06:15Maureen Dowd: — anti-gun control. No. I don’t think any of it is genuine. I think he is a salesman trying to make the sale at any given moment. So, he will say what he needs to do to make that sale, like any good real estate salesman.
.. On that, how is she different from her husband?
08:30 Maureen Dowd: I don’t think he, in all of these cases for the last quarter century, he is not the one who wants to hunker down and demonize opponents and fight the press. You know, he goes along with that if she insists. But George Stephanopoulos, you know, said that if he could get a genie out of a bottle and change one thing it would just be to give “The Washington Post” the Whitewater papers, and it would have been over in a week. You know, but instead, it led to like seven independentcounsels and the taxpayers paid $80 million that led to impeachment.
.. People who come here and talk about this all thetime, you know, talk about — this election will be decided bywhether it is a referendum on him or a referendum on her.
.. Yes, and so, then, she loyally waits her turnand works for Barack Obama. And then, you know, this time comes and she is again almost usurped, but this time by this cranky 74-year-old socialist. I mean, what are the odds? Who got —
.. Because he thinks, he said to me, I can go find — give me two weeks and I can go find out what it is with the working men and women in America, what it is with the people on the assembly lines who tend to want to support Trump, what it’s about. And can reason with them and explain my wife to them.
18:34Maureen Dowd: Right.
18:34Charlie Rose: And I believe he believes that because he had todo that for Barack Obama at the convention in 2012.
18:39Maureen Dowd: Yes, amazingly, right. Because Barack Obama, as it turned out, doesn’t like politics.
.. I start out kind of totally in the tulip craze of Barack Obama in 2008. But I do think that he wanted to be a transformational president.And I think he wasn’t because as James Carville said, it’s like Peyton Manning not liking football. Or Neera Tanden said, it’s like Bill Gates not liking computers.
29:25Charlie Rose: Technology.
29:26 Maureen Dowd: Yeah, I mean he’s the president but somehow.
29:29 Charlie Rose: But he doesn’t — it’s not that he — I don’t think it is that he doesn’t like it. I think he likes it. I just don’t think he likes some of the aspects of it.
29:36 Maureen Dowd: He doesn’t like being a salesman and that’s why he let Bill Clinton who likes being a salesman —
29:41 Charlie Rose: Explain.
29:42 Maureen Dowd: Yes, his health care.
29:43 Charlie Rose: But I do — I mean, I asked him about this,President Obama, and he said, that’s not true, I do like politics.He just doesn’t like what some people think is essential to be in politics. He doesn’t like the stroking. He doesn’t like the inane conversation. He doesn’t like those kind of things.
29:58 Maureen Dowd: But that’s what helps you pass your gun control bill.
.. But do you think he understands Americanvalues, is the question?
33:15 Maureen Dowd: I don’t think he understands what he is doing.All he’s doing is trying to make the deal in the moment. And in his head, he thinks, he said to me, you know, I asked him about this. He said Maureen, you know I’m not racist, but you arewhat you say at the microphone. He is responsible for that.
33:33 Charlie Rose: But does he acknowledge that? He is saying to you, look, ignore what I say.