The Most Dysfunctional Chaotic White House In History Is A National Security Threat

Probably everyone has read about Cliff Sim's new book, Team of Vipers by now, thanks in great part to the villain of the book screaming about it so loudly. Trump is sure to help lift Sims' first book into the annals of #1 best-sellerdom. I'm betting it will be made into a film or TV series as well. I wonder how many book sales a Trumpanzee Tweet is worth.

I'm sure a law suit is worth many more book sales. And the Washington Examiner reported that Trump is about to sue over the violation of one of Trump's laughable nondisclosure agreements, reverting to a pre-presidential business model. Trump almost never follows through on these moronic threats but everyone-- especially Sims-- sure hopes he does.

Who will play Stephen Miller-- aka, President Miller-- in the movie version? He's the evil shadow behind all of Trump's vile, anti-immigrant pandering. Sims revealed that Miller once told him he'd "be happy if not a single refugee foot ever again touched America’s soil." (Miller-- who worked for fascist politicians Michele Bachmann, John Shadegg and Jeff Sessions before being scooped up by Trump-- comes from a penniless family of Russian-Jewish refugees fleeing a pogram. Rejected by his classmates, Miller became a dedicated, hate-driven Nazi and virulent racist while in high school in liberal Santa Monica. Working with Texas Republican Michael McCaul, he came up with Trump's child separation policies.

Sims credits Miller will knifing Steve Bannon, who brought him into Trumpworld, in the back undercutting him by whispering Trump's ear that "Your polling numbers are actually very strong considering Steve won’t stop leaking to the press and trying to undermine Jared. If Steve wasn’t doing that, I bet you’d be ten points higher."

Sims, then 32 years old, was brought into the White House after his successful run coordinating messaging on the campaign. There, he learned many of Trump’s quirks: how he preferred filming against dark backdrops because he didn’t like the way his hair looked against white ones. How it was best to always have a travel-size bottle of Tresemmé Tres Two hair spray on hand, just in case. And, perhaps most important, how Trump craved “normal” conversation. “I always tried to interact with him like a normal person,” Sims told me. “In between whatever work we were doing, I would look for opportunities to talk about what was in the news, or tell him about the latest gossip from entertainment or politics, or whatever.”

A level of ease and familiarity developed between the two, such that Trump wanted Sims in the room for meetings on a wide range of issues. He was present one afternoon in January 2018, for instance, when Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, was pushing Trump to sign off on a campaign to raise awareness of the opioid crisis. As Sims tells it, Conway wanted to film a video of Trump encouraging people to send stories of how the crisis had affected them personally.

Trump, though, had a different strategy in mind. “We need to scare kids so much that they will never touch a single drug in their entire life,” he told Conway, according to Sims. “Just give this to Cliff and let him make the most horrifying ads you’ve ever seen. Could you do that?”

Sims “just nodded.” “No, I mean it,” Trump continued. “We need people dying in a ditch. I want bodies stacked on top of bodies … Do it like they did cigarettes. They had body bags piled all over the streets and ugly people with giant holes in their faces and necks.

“Next thing you know,” he concluded, “the kids don’t want to be cool and smoke anymore.”

At times, Sims witnessed fellow staffers-- Conway chief among them-- take swipes at each other behind their backs. He calls Conway a “cartoon villain brought to life” who bad-mouthed colleagues to multiple reporters by the hour. He credits Stephen Miller’s survival to the speechwriter’s ability to play both sides of the “globalist/nationalist” divide in the White House. While then–chief strategist Steve Bannon viewed Miller as his “right-wing protege,” his ideological ally against the so-called globalists, Miller was cultivating a close relationship with perhaps the globalist in chief, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner. Sims writes of listening in on Miller “plung[ing] the knife” into Bannon’s back and “twisting it with relish” during a conversation with the president. “Your polling numbers are actually very strong considering Steve won’t stop leaking to the press and trying to undermine Jared,” Miller said, according to Sims. “If Steve wasn’t doing that, I bet you’d be ten points higher.”

He also watched as senior officials privately laughed off many of the president’s stranger requests. In his first few days as director of the National Economic Council, Sims writes, Larry Kudlow emerged from a meeting with the president looking flustered. He told Gary Cohn, his predecessor, that Trump ordered him to “stop” a “special deal” that he believed Amazon was getting from the U.S. Postal Service. “Gary laughed loudly,” Sims writes. “‘Welcome to the White House,’ [Cohn] said, shaking Larry’s hand … ‘It’s total bullshit.’” Cohn explained that Amazon was not, in fact, getting “some special deal.” “He’s just mad at [Jeff] Bezos for owning the Washington Post.”