Trump And Colbert-- Thinking Of Snakes

Trump confers with advisor Roger Stone by Nancy Ohanian

Do Snakes seeth? Trump sure does, and is. On Thursday morning, Jonathan Swan and Mike Allen were all over the seething. Señor T is "deeply suspicious of much of the government he oversees-- from the hordes of folks inside agencies, right up to some of the senior-most political appointees and even some handpicked aides inside his own White House," according to their sources. And they're almost sympathetic. "He should be paranoid." That NY Times anonymous OpEd was devastating. They wrote that "In the hours after the New York Times published the anonymous Op-Ed from "a senior official in the Trump administration" trashing the president ('I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration'), two senior administration officials reached out to Axios to say the author stole the words right out of their mouths. 'A lot of us [were] wishing we’d been the writer, I suspect ... I hope he [Trump] knows-- maybe he does?-- that there are dozens and dozens of us.' Several senior White House officials have described their roles to us as saving America and the world from this president. A good number of current White House officials have privately admitted to us they consider Trump unstable, and at times dangerously slow. But the really deep concern and contempt, from our experience, has been at the agencies-- and particularly in the foreign policy arena.

For some time last year, Trump even carried with him a handwritten list of people suspected to be leakers undermining his agenda.

• "He would basically be like, 'We’ve gotta get rid of them. The snakes are everywhere but we’re getting rid of them,'" said a source close to Trump.
• Trump would often ask staff whom they thought could be trusted. He often asks the people who work for him what they think about their colleagues, which can be not only be uncomfortable but confusing to Trump: Rival staffers shoot at each other and Trump is left not knowing who to believe.

Officials describe an increasingly conspiracy-minded president:

• "When he was super frustrated about the leaks, he would rail about the 'snakes' in the White House," said a source who has discussed administration leakers with the president.
• "Especially early on, when we would be in Roosevelt Room meetings, he would sit down at the table, and get to talking, then turn around to see who was sitting along the walls behind him."
• "One day, after one of those meetings, he said, 'Everything that just happened is going to leak. I don’t know any of those people in the room.' ... He was very paranoid about this."

"People talk about the loyalists leaving," the source close to Trump tells us. "What it really means is [that there'll be] fewer and fewer people who Trump knows who they really are. So imagine how paranoid you must be if that is your view of the world.

At the same time, Politico's headline was Trump Alone. Their top excerpts from the Anonymous OpEd: "The dilemma-- which he does not fully grasp-- is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations… The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making. Although he was elected as a Republican, the president shows little affinity for ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets and free people. At best, he has invoked these ideals in scripted settings. At worst, he has attacked them outright… Successes have come despite-- not because of-- the president's leadership style, which is impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective."

"Trump," they wrote, "couldn't be blamed for thinking all of official Washington is closing in on him. The Justice Department is investigating him, and it refuses to take what he sees as obvious action against his political enemies. The nation's most prominent newspaper took the rare step of granting an aide anonymity to deliver a broadside about him. Administration officials have granted hundreds of hours of interviews to Woodward-- the most prominent non-fiction writer in the nation-- to blast him. Senate committee chairmen like Bob Corker of Tennessee say they agree with the outlines of the criticism of the president... The Washington Post's Phil Rucker, Ashley Parker and Josh Dawsey said the combination of the Woodward book and the Times op-ed 'landed like a thunder clap, portraying Trump as a danger to the country that elected him and feeding the president’s paranoia about whom around him he can trust... According to one Trump friend, he fretted after Wednesday’s op-ed that he could trust only his children.'"

But not everyone was as sympathetic to Trump's plight as Politico Gabriel Sherman at Vanity Fair pointed out something that can't be overlooked in this dysfunctional , chaotic mess of his own making Everybody on the inside knows it's true: Woodward's reality bomb is blowing up the West Wing. "Pandemonium, he wrote, "reigns as Trump cancels meetings." He may have given up on closing down the government but he's certainly closed down the West Wing. Nothing's going on there-- Sherman called it a "virtual standstill"-- but a hunt for Judas... He literally isn’t talking to anyone. He’s canceled meetings and is on the phone calling up his friends,” one source said. Current and former staffers, meanwhile, pointed fingers in all directions as they sought to deflect blame for the damaging leaks."

What Would Freud Do? by Nancy Ohanian

The traumatic triggers for him were all the stuff that hit too close to hime: John Kelly calling him "an idiot," Jim Mattis comparing him to a "fifth-or-sixth grader," and John Dowd calling him a "fucking liar" and predicting he would end up in "an orange jumpsuit" if he testified under oath.

Trump is also outraged that the book portrays aides as believing they are the grown-ups protecting the country from his dangerous impulses. Two sources said Trump is particularly angry with former economic adviser Gary Cohn, who is revealed in the book to have snatched a letter off Trump’s desk to protect “national security.” “He hates that people are leaking. They think they can take things off the Resolute desk because of this idea they’re ‘saving’ the country,” one senior West Wing official said. “I mean, who does that?” One source said Cohn called up his former colleagues to ask them how he came off in the book. “Gary wanted to make sure he didn’t compromise himself that much,” a source who spoke with Cohn said.

Former CIA director, John Brennan was on Today saying that "the depth of concern within the administration… about what is happening and the extraordinary steps that individuals are willing to take… to prevent disasters... is active insubordination… born out of loyalty to the country, not to Donald Trump. This is not sustainable to have an executive branch, where individuals are not following the orders of the chief executive. [He said he thinks] things will get worse before they get better. I don’t know how Donald Trump is going to react to this. A wounded lion is a very dangerous animal and I think Donald Trump is wounded."

Russ Douthat wrote that Trump has lost control of his White House and that he’s an exceptionally weak president. Sounds about right-- and something sane people had figured out long, long ago.