It’s hard to take Omarosa Manigault Newman’s word for anything. But Lordy, she has tapes, and they offer vivid proof that Donald Trump’s White House is part clown show, part nest of vipers.
.. she performed with Shakespearean villainy —
- lying,
- cheating,
- backstabbing,
- viciously advancing her own interests and
- sabotaging her rivals.
Trump evidently found all of this admirable, because he insisted on bringing her into his administration as a top-level adviser despite her utter lack of experience and qualifications. They deserve each other.
.. Omarosa’s recording of part of that meeting was aired Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” In it, Kelly is heard making what sounds very much like a threat:
“I think it’s important to understand that if we make this a friendly departure, we can all be, you know, we can look at your time here in the White House as a year of service to the nation. And then you can go on without any type of difficulty in the future relative to your reputation.”
If that wasn’t clear enough, Omarosa subsequently received a generous offer. She could receive $15,000 a month to perform vaguely defined duties for Trump’s reelection campaign. But she would have to sign a nondisclosure and nondisparagement agreement pledging not to say detrimental things about President Trump, Vice President Pence or their family members.
.. She declined the offer but kept the documents she was asked to sign — and showed them to The Post last week.
.. She never made it, never will. She begged me for a job, tears in her eyes, I said Ok. People in the White House hated her. She was vicious, but not smart. I would rarely see her but heard really bad things. Nasty to people & would constantly miss meetings & work. When Gen. Kelly came on board he told me she was a loser & nothing but problems. I told him to try working it out, if possible, because she only said GREAT things about me — until she got fired!”
.. Trump went on to complain that “the Fake News Media will be working overtime” to make Omarosa seem credible now that she is one of his critics. But that’s certainly not my intent. She strikes me as a rank opportunist whose only allegiance is to herself.
She claims to have realized only recently that Trump is a “racist, misogynist and bigot.” Yet she heard his bigoted attacks on Latino immigrants and still went to work for his campaign. She heard his misogynistic rant about how he sexually assaulted women and still took a job in his administration. She heard his many appeals to white racial grievance and still vigorously defended him, even after Charlottesville.
.. So no, I’m not inclined to believe anything she claims without documentary evidence to back it up. But the tapes and the documents have not been disputed. Omarosa may not have obtained them honorably, but the old saying is true: There is no honor among thieves.
.. We don’t know what else might be in the conversations with Trump that lawyer Michael Cohen taped. We don’t know how many other recordings Omarosa might have made. We don’t know who else in the White House might have been keeping their own unauthorized records of conversations and events.
What we do know is why people in Trump’s orbit feel they need such insurance: Dishonor and disloyalty start at the top.
More Chaos as Trump Suggests the North Korea Summit May Be Back On
On Friday, after a North Korean official said that Kim was ready to meet Trump “at any time,” Donald Trump, Jr., linked to an Axios story about this statement and crowed, “The Art of The Deal baby!!!”—as if Trump’s decision to cancel the summit had elicited important new concessions from the North Koreans. But that wasn’t the case.
.. Of course, Kim is willing to meet anytime. It was he who requested the summit in the first place.
To sit down one on one with an American President has for decades been a goal of North Korea’s leaders.
.. At the very least, some detailed preparatory work would make it easier to manage expectations in both Washington and Pyongyang.
.. The evidence suggests Trump acted as he did because he didn’t like the tone of North Korea’s statements, particularly those directed at John Bolton, the national-security adviser, and Mike Pence, the Vice-President, after they both suggested that Libya’s disarmament under Muammar Qaddafi would be a good model for the North Koreans to follow.
.. This language suggests the North Koreans have learned the lesson that Pence and many other people around Trump learned a long time ago: the most reliable way to get him to do something you want is to praise him expansively and publicly.
.. the idea that Trump is some sort of master negotiator, or ace business tactician, is a fallacy propagated by himself. Trump’s actual record in doing business deals is one of overpaying, struggling to make them work, and shuffling some of his companies in and out of bankruptcy.
.. The only art he has perfected is promoting himself as a great dealmaker on the basis of such a checkered past.
.. Trump has displayed virtually no regard for the consequences of his actions on American allies, including South Korea and Japan.
.. without giving any advance notice to South Korea, which had worked for months to set up the summit, was shocking even by his standards.
.. To many people who live in Korea or in nearby countries, it seemed like an American President was behaving erratically on a matter of existential importance.
.. Trump looks impetuous and unreliable.”
.. the Trump Administration is demanding that Kim’s regime agree to scrap its entire nuclear arsenal—which it spent thirty years developing—rapidly and unilaterally.
The North Koreans, in talking about “denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula,” appear to be envisaging a much more gradual process that would involve reciprocal measures on the U.S. side.
.. China, which is also a key player, has proposed an initial “freeze for freeze” deal, in which North Korea freezes its nuclear program and the United States suspends its military exercises with South Korea.
A Higher Sanctimony
Comey’s memoir shows he is more like Trump than he cares to admit.
But Mr. Trump told an interviewer that he had fired Mr. Comey because the FBI chief wouldn’t say publicly that the FBI wasn’t investigating Mr. Trump. The President also threatened Mr. Comey with a false claim about Oval Office “tapes.” Mr. Comey responded by leaking documents that caused Mr. Rosenstein to name a special counsel, which has put Mr. Trump’s Presidency in mortal peril.
.. The main lesson from Mr. Comey’s book is that Mr. Trump’s abuse of political norms has driven his enemies to violate norms themselves.
.. The most notable fact in the book is how little we learn that is new about Mr. Trump.
.. Mr. Trump is preoccupied with his critics and the validation of his presidential victory. He is clueless that his bullying and flattery would repel Mr. Comey
.. The book mainly adds Mr. Comey’s moral and aesthetic contempt for Mr. Trump.
.. Mr. Comey’s comparison of Mr. Trump to a “mafia” boss is hilariously overstated. Don’t they call it “organized” crime? And what about that code of silence known as omerta? The Trump White House can’t keep anything secret.
.. Mr. Comey reveals in his excessive self-regard that he is more like Mr. Trump than he cares to admit. Mr. Trump’s narcissism is crude and focused on his personal “winning.” Mr. Comey’s is about vindicating his own higher morality and righteous belief.
.. He accuses Mr. Rosenstein of acting “dishonorably” by writing the memo describing how Mr. Comey mishandled the Clinton probe. Yet he barely engages Mr. Rosenstein’s arguments, which quoted from former Justice officials of both parties. Mr. Rosenstein wrote that Mr. Comey was “wrong to usurp” the authority of Attorney General Loretta Lynch and wrong to “hold press conferences to release derogatory information” about Mrs. Clinton.
That mistake made Mr. Comey feel obliged to intervene again in late October—this time to announce the reopening of the probe in a way that helped Mr. Trump. Had Mr. Comey followed Justice protocol in July, he would not have had to make himself the issue in October, damaging the reputation of the FBI and Justice in the bargain.
.. This has been the habit across Mr. Comey’s career, though you’ll find no mention in his memoir of Steven Hatfill, the government scientist he wrongly pursued for years as the anthrax terrorist; or Frank Quattrone, the Wall Street financier he prosecuted twice for obstruction of justice only to be rebuked by an appeals court; or Judith Miller’s recantation of her testimony against Scooter Libby.
Mr. Comey has also had little to say so far about the controversy over the Steele dossier and his handling of the Russian investigation of Mr. Trump. Did he know that the dossier was commissioned by Democrats for the Clinton campaign? He also has nothing to say about the dismissal of his former FBI deputy, Andrew McCabe, for “lack of candor.”
Mr. Comey is getting his moment of revenge as much of the press revels in the attacks on Mr. Trump. Yet his career, reinforced by his memoir, is a case study in the perils of the righteous prosecutor. It also shows why Mr. Comey’s view of the FBI as “independent” of supervisory authority is wrong and dangerous. A presidential bully who abuses power needs to be checked, but so does an FBI director who turns righteousness into zealotry.
Journalist: As U.S. Retreats From World Stage, China Moves To Fill The Void
OSNOS: Yeah, it’s quite dramatic. I mean, actually, when Donald Trump was elected the Chinese government was really worried. They were shocked, and for exactly the reasons that you just described. They had listened to all of the rhetoric from the campaign trail about how China was taking advantage of the United States and how he was going to really finally impose harsh punishments on China. So they didn’t exactly know what to make of him. But they worried that he was, as one former U.S. official put it, their mortal enemy. And so their response was that they sent out a bunch of Chinese researchers, think tanks, who came to Washington. I remember meeting with some of them, in fact.
They would call up reporters. They’d call up analysts. And they’d say, you know, what do we make of this? What should we make of Trump? And what they concluded was that actually he could be managed. He could be handled. They concluded that Donald Trump’s rhetoric on the campaign trail was exactly that – it was rhetoric on the campaign trail. And they discovered something important, which was that he was highly responsive to gracious treatment, to flattery.
And this is actually an old Chinese playbook. If you go back to the 19th century, the imperial government at the time laid down in writing some of its techniques, really, for dealing with foreigners. And one of them was, as they put it, barbarians like receptions and entertainment. That’s the term they used – barbarians. They said that foreigners respond to that kind of treatment with great appreciation. Before Donald Trump went to China this fall, Chinese officials had said to some Americans, people with high-placed sources in the Chinese government, that they intended to wow him with thousands of years of Chinese imperial history. They thought that he was, as one person put it to me, uniquely susceptible to that.
And they laid it on. They laid it on thick, frankly. I mean, they gave him a personal tour of the Forbidden City by Xi Jinping. They gave him military bands. There were kids with pompoms who were shouting uncle Trump in Chinese. And he responded to it gloriously. The first thing he said when he got to the podium standing next to Xi Jinping was how grateful he was for that magnificent military band. He was willing to not allow questions from the press, which of course is something that China would want. But traditionally, an American president insists on questions from the press. So from China’s perspective, that summit could not have gone better.
GROSS: So do you think that this means that President Xi sees President Trump as weak and easy to manipulate?
OSNOS: He sees him as very manageable. He sees him as somebody who is responsive to the techniques that China uses to handle foreigners. What he sees him as – well, to use the Chinese term, the one that they have used, is that they see him as a paper tiger, which is to say that he’s somebody who makes larger threats than he’s willing to back up, that he promises things that he can’t deliver.
As they say, look; he has not been able to build a wall on the border with Mexico. He has not succeeded in doing some of the things that he said he was going to do. But even more important than that is that they see him as somebody who is unaware of the details of foreign affairs. He frankly just doesn’t know enough about complicated issues like Tibet, Taiwan, North Korea.
And so as a result, what they’ve found in their interactions with him – and they said as much in private conversations to former U.S. officials – is that they expected him to push back when the Chinese would lay out their positions on things, and instead he wouldn’t push back. He just simply didn’t know enough to be able to challenge some of their assertions. And from China’s perspective, that’s a tremendous blessing because it makes it much easier for them to get their way in negotiations.
.. But the truth is that China has indicated in a variety of ways that they are trying to manage Trump, meaning that they’re trying to do as little as possible for as long as possible while continuing to hold him at bay. They don’t want him to attack North Korea because that could have negative implications for China, but they are also – they are simply unwilling to put the kind of pressure on North Korea that he wants because they worry that that would lead to the end of the North Korean government and then that would also be bad for China.
So just recently – and this really didn’t get much attention in the news but it’s an important fact – China sent an envoy to Washington at the end of December. And that envoy was there to talk with senior administration officials about North Korea and oil. And the administration said to the Chinese official, look, you need to cut off oil or we’re going to do – we’re going to take these very drastic steps where we’re going to try to punish you in a variety of ways. And China called their bluff. And the Chinese envoy said, we are simply not going to do it. And the United States backed away and said, well, in that case, let’s continue to work this problem together and so on and so on.
And those kinds of little minor interactions which really never make the press, or at least never get very much attention, that’s the marrow of the relationship. That’s the center of it. And bit by bit, China is coming to the conclusion that the Trump administration is both inexperienced and simply just doesn’t have the staff or the know-how to be able to make the kinds of actions and – that support what the president’s language sometimes promises.
.. But now, the United States, through Donald Trump’s Twitter feed, has taken this really radical step towards confrontation. I mean, just to state the obvious here, that this is nothing that we’ve ever seen in 44 previous presidencies. This is not how presidents of the United States conduct themselves. And so it’s – it forces a country like China, which is stuck in the middle, to try to hedge and really to hedge against unpredictable behavior, which means that they have to be more conservative. They can’t put their trust in a Donald Trump figure.
And, you know, Terry, I think that there are sort of – those are the short-term consequences. But the long-term consequences are quite distinct. And that is that this contributes to an erosion of American credibility in a way that is really hard for people to see at the time but becomes very obvious in retrospect, that other countries just look at us differently when the words of our president don’t carry the full faith and credit of the United States, when he says something that is inspired by – who knows what? – if it’s inspired by a headline on television or it’s inspired by his mood. In effect, it forces other countries to treat his words as if they don’t matter quite the same way. And that’s a very strange new way of people looking at the United States.
.. If you want to understand how the damage to American credibility is felt, it’s useful to remember this – there was a moment during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 when John F. Kennedy sent an envoy to Paris to meet the French president, Charles de Gaulle. And what he said was, look; we the United States – we’ve found Soviet missiles in Cuba, and we’re going to impose a blockade on Cuba. And we have CIA photos that show that and demonstrate why it is that we’re justified in doing so.
And de Gaulle famously said, I don’t need to see the photos. The word of the American president is good enough for me. And among diplomats that’s sort of considered this – really a sort of foundational concept, that the word of the American president is good enough for our allies to depend on. But today that’s not the case. And it’s not just our allies who are unsure. It’s also these other countries like China, which occupy a space between being an ally and an opponent. But it makes them even less likely to trust us than before.