He was damned the moment he was cast as a puppeteer. That means there’s a puppet in the equation, and no politician is going to accept that designation
.. Trump went so far as to suggest that he was barely acquainted with Bannon before August 2016, when Bannon joined his presidential campaign. Wrong. Trump had been a guest on the radio show that Bannon used to host nine times.
.. He didn’t grapple with who Trump really is. Trump’s allegiances are fickle. His attention flits. His compass is popularity, not any fixed philosophy, certainly not the divisive brand of populism and nationalism that Bannon was trying to enforce.
Bannon insisted on an ideology when Trump cares more about applause
.. He has means for revenge. He also has a history of it.
.. Bannon’s deputy, Stephen Miller, who has been cozying up to Kushner
.. if you want to be the Svengali, you have to play the sycophant. That was a performance beyond Bannon’s ken.
Donald Trump: Press Lying About Inauguration Crowd Size
“And the reason you’re my first stop is that, as you know, I have a running war with the media. They are among the most dishonest human beings on earth,” Trump said.
The approximately 400 CIA employees broke out into applause after Trump said this.
.. “We had a massive field of people. You saw that, packed,” Trump said. He then noted that when he woke up Saturday morning, he turned on the TV and noticed, “I get up this morning, I turn on one of the networks and they show an empty field. I said, wait a minute. I made a speech. I looked out. The field was, it looked like a million — a million and a half people. They showed a field where there were practically nobody standing there. And they said, ‘Donald Trump did not draw well.’”
He added, “We have something that’s amazing because we had it looked — honestly, it looked like a million and a half people. Whatever it was, it was. But it went all the way back to the Washington Monument. And I turn on [the tv], and by mistake I get this network, and it showed an empty field.”
“So, we caught them,” he said. “And we caught them in a beauty, and I think they’re going to pay a big price.”
.. So Zeke, Zeke from Time Magazine” wrote a fake news story, Trump said. “I would never do that. I have great respect for Dr. Martin Luther King. And it was right there. But this is how dishonest the media is.”
Trump can’t stop talking about how he won
From Mar-a-Lago to Trump Tower, the president-elect is telling anyone who will listen about his come-from-behind victory.
One person close to Trump says “he talks about how he won in almost every meeting I’ve been in. I think he’s still trying to absorb it.”
.. The mention that he lost the popular vote seems to particularly enrage him. “He said he could have gone to California more,” Quinn said.
.. “They don’t like saying more counties than anybody, you look at a map of the counties in this country that we won and it’s literally entirely, it just looks like it’s entirely red.”
.. He hasn’t changed a bit since the first time I met him in 1979.”
.. “His insight was that working stiffs felt like the country deserted them and that he ran against both parties even though he ran as a Republican,” Pitta said. “He might be fighting with the Republicans more than the Democrats.”
Sean Spicer’s Worst Week in Washington
On Saturday night, White House press secretary Sean Spicer delivered his first news conference in the James S. Brady press briefing room at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Except that he used the occasion to yell at the media and take no questions from them.
It was the most inauspicious of beginnings to what was already a deeply fraught relationship between the Trump administration and the journalists assigned to cover him. And it was a telling sign of just how much Spicer — and the rest of the White House staff — will be required to publicly address perceived grudges and slights against the sitting president of the United States.
.. He then offered explanations for the crowd size — each of which was incorrect:
1) This was the first time in history white plastic had been laid on the Mall to protect the grass. Nope!
2) This was the first time magnetometers had been used in the inauguration proceedings. Nope!
3) More people had used the Metro — D.C.’s subway — at the Trump inauguration than had used it for President Obama’s second inaugural. Nope!
.. But Spicer wasn’t done! He went on to note that “no one had numbers” about the crowd size just before offering up a detailed assessment of just how many people can fit into each section of the Mall and, therefore, why there were far more people in attendance than the media reported.