Watch as The Washington Post’s White House Bureau Chief Philip Rucker and National Investigative Reporter Carol Leonnig discuss their new book, “A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America.” Subscribe to The Washington Post on YouTube: https://wapo.st/2QOdcqK
He consciously storms in an tells a lie. And the result of telling that lie: he won the moment. He won the day. As much as we may say ..
Are they actually out of control or is all this strategic planning from a president who may be completely shameless, but a president none the less.
I wouldn’t use the phrase “strategic planning”
.. or by design.
It’s very much by design in that moment. And Trump is reacting in that moment to try to win the day without thinking about the long-term ramifications or without following following a plan that has been carefully crafted.
But are there long term ramifications? He may live there another 4 years.
He might because what he is doing, day to day, is winning as he defines winning, which is galvanizing his supporters, making them even more loyal, more fierce in their adoration of him and mobilizing them for the election. And he does this largely by gut.
His lawyers can put together a 10 month plan about how to deal with the Mueller Investigation but he’s going to act every 24-hours how he thinks is in his best interests in that moment given the news cycle and what he’s hearing on Fox News and what Sean Hannity or whoever else is telling him at night.
Then what has actually been the cost of this circus or all these lies?
I’ve been literally sitting here thinking about what that is for so long. Here’s what I think is most worrying to as a professional journalist and Phil and I talked about it a lot.
The falsehoods that he’s injected into our bloodstream are repeated again and again on Fox News and amplified and believed. People are absorbing them and thinking that that is true:
That Robert Mueller was out to get him.
That FBI agents have an insurance policy to make sure he wasn’t elected. That’s not actually what the texts are about.
There were people really worried at the FBI that President was .. forgive me .. very worried about Donald Trump the candidate.
There were people at the FBI who were very concerned about the Russian contacts from the Kremlin to sort of minions in the campaign. Super anxious about that.
But he’s been able to inject into our either and into a lot of the country the assumption that the FBI had a tainted investigation to try, not only unmoore him and keep him from being elected, but to surveille which .. you know.. nobody wiretapped Donald Trump. But I literally meet people who say: “You know they wiretapped Donald Trump”
And I’m like “No they didn’t.”
It’s just amazing and that is..
We’re no longer in Walter Cronkite days. The consequence is people don’t agree on facts. And Phil and I have an extra job in addition to bringing you facts and that extra job is something the Post also takes really seriously with is now we got to show you how we made the cake. We’ve got to show you how we did the reporting or else you’re not going to believe us. And that’s our new chore.
The truth matters, but only if you hear it.
I want to talk more about the show that he puts on.
You talk in the book about a phone call the president had with Anthony Scaramucci, who was press secretary for famously 11 days.
Anthony, “The Mooch”, goes on Bill Mahr one night and says “I’ve known Donald Trump for 20 years. This is all an act. This is a show he’s putting on.”
And afterwards the President calls him on the phone and says: “Why did you do this. I can’t believe you did this.” And Anthony says “It’s the truth. You know it.”
And Trump says “You’re right. It’s all an act. I can’t believe they believe it.”
Yeah, you know, Trump is, first foremost, a showman and he learned this in real estate cause he wasn’t just a real estate developer he was a tabloid sensation because he made himself a tabloid sensation. He posed as his own publicist to leak gossip about himself into page 6.
So much of his energy and time and time and resources in New York as he was rising through the business ranks was built around the show — built around creating a Trump persona, the Trump brand, “The Apprentice”– and becoming president I think in Trump’s view is the capstone of that. He acutally lays out that career are in a tween in which ..