Should We Think Of Trump As An Illiterate Buffoon Or As Someone With A Disability?

One of the reasons why I don't like using RealClearPolitics' polling averages is because they include Rasmussen, a company known for delivering polling numbers their clients pay for. But even with a ridiculous Rasmussen poll included, the RealClearPolitics polling average for Trump's job approval shows that just 45.2% of the electorate approves of the job he's doing, as opposed to 52.3% who don't. A more accurate poll, by Morning Consult in mid-December, shows that just 41% of registered voters approve and 56% disapprove. That 41% approve of the job Trump is doing is mortifying, not about Trump but about our countrymen.

David Graham's essay in Monday's Atlantic, The President Who Doesn't Read, might confirm your decision to oppose Trump. The the ignoramuses who approve of the job Trump is doing-- whether 41% or 45.2%-- actually like him more precisely because he is allergic "to the written word" and to them his reliance on oral communication is anything but a liability in office. He's just like they are, just like the moron they used to watch on that TV sitcom he presided over that caused them too aspire to be just like him-- and to vote for him.

In Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff wrote that Trump’s indifference to the printed word has been apparent for some time. Wolf: "He didn't process information in any conventional sense. He didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-­literate." Wolff quoted Gary Cohen: "It’s worse than you can imagine... Trump won’t read anything-- not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers, nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored." Trump himself: "I like bullets or I like as little as possible. I don't need, you know, 200-page reports on something that can be handled on a page. That I can tell you."




Graham: "In March, Reuters reported that briefers had strategically placed the president’s name in as many paragraphs of briefing documents as possible so as to attract his fickle attention. In September, the Associated Press reported that top aides had decided the president needed a crash course on America’s role in the world and arranged a 90-minute, map-and-chart heavy lecture at the Pentagon." Trump prefers to absorb his information on TV-- especially on TV that talks admirably about him. Wolf painted an ugly picture: "If he was not having his 6:30 dinner with Steve Bannon, then, more to his liking, he was in bed by that time with a cheeseburger, watching his three screens and making phone calls-- the phone was his true contact point with the world-- to a small group of friends, who charted his rising and falling levels of agitation through the evening and then compared notes with one another."

Trump has always loved the telephone: Stories of him calling business associates and friends, or reporters, whether under his own name or pseudonyms, litter his business career. (There are limitations, Wolff suggests: Aides found that Trump “could not really converse, not in the sense of sharing information, or of a balanced back-and-forth conversation.”) His conversations with friends are a crucial source of information and pressure release. Shortly after taking office, per The Times Trump told a friend, “I can invite anyone for dinner, and they will come!” The ability to invite-- and one presumes call-- anyone and have them reply flatters Trump’s ego and seems to be one of the few parts of his position that he enjoys.

In view of this oral fixation, Trump’s affection for Twitter is not as paradoxical as it seems. It requires only 140, and now 280, characters at a time, is often fed by what he’s watching on TV, and it is only outgoing: The president need not read himself to tweet effectively. The conversationality of Twitter fits his M.O., too. While Trump is billed as the author of many books, it’s clear he didn’t actually write them. Art of the Deal ghostwriter Tony Schwartz savaged him during the campaign, while Trump has blamed errors in other books on mysterious speechwriter Meredith McIver. It’s not like these books are great literary achievements, anyway. What Trump imparts to them is his conversational shtick. Unlike past presidents, there’s little evidence of a written record of letters or other correspondence, either. The paradigmatic Trump epistle is a cease-and-desist letter from counsel.

Trump’s particular affection for television is notable. As a Baby Boomer, he is a member of a generation raised on television and still especially fond of it. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, people in Trump’s age cohort watch an average of four hours of television a day, meaning his reported four-to-eight-hour habit is only somewhat greater than the norm. But that demographic also spends the most leisure time reading-- almost an hour a day, per the BLS, by far the greatest of any age group.

There’s a reason so many 65-to-74-year-olds read a lot: Many of them are retired, and don’t have to do work. Trump, by contrast, has one of the most demanding jobs in the world. One reason that it’s demanding, however, is that the holder is expected to consume, digest, and absorb prodigious amounts of information via reading, and there’s little to suggest that Trump is doing that. Instead, he has taken that time up with phone conversations, television, and golf, another forum for oral communication. (Per Philip Bump, Trump played golf every 4.7 days in 2017, good for 10 full 24-hour days and far higher than Obama’s rate as president.)

Trump denies this, of course. “All my life I've heard that decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk in the Oval Office-- in other words, when you're president of the United States,” he said earlier this year. “So I studied Afghanistan in great detail and from every conceivable angle.”

The president's actions show little such sign of preparation and study, while displaying faulty understandings of many things. After visiting Saudi Arabia and hitting it off with the country’s leaders, he forcefully backed Riyadh in its dispute with Qatar and many other issues, over the objections of some of his staff-- even publicly contradicting Tillerson. In December, however, he suddenly became concerned about the humanitarian crisis in Yemen. The minimal thought put into several of Trump’s core views on China became clear when President Xi Jinping was able to change his entire view of the Korean incident in 10 minutes-- 10 minutes of oral conversation, of course.

Then there was his more recent decision to recognize Jerusalem as capital of Israel and move the U.S. Embassy there. That decision was controversial but not without defenders, and the U.S. insisted the move did not settle the final status of Jerusalem in peace talks with the Palestinians. Apparently Trump did not get (or perhaps did not read) the memo, because in a tweet earlier this week he said that the U.S. had “taken Jerusalem, the toughest part of the negotiation, off the table,” rattling both Israelis and Palestinians.

The refusal to read, and the resulting limits of Trump’s understanding of complicated issues, doesn’t mean that every decision he makes is bad. Indeed, it can be liberating-- allowing him to act on instinct, even in the face of expert reservations. My colleague Krishnadev Calamur, for example, writes that the anger that led the White House to freeze aid to Pakistan this week is understandable. But the shaky grasp of the underlying currents means Trump is more likely to blunder on any given case, and Trump’s misstatements and missteps earn him mockery and undermine his stature around the world.

Perhaps no single area better summarizes Trump’s strange tendency than his press shop. He was reportedly driven to distraction by Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s ill-fitting suits and bumbling demeanor, and eventually Spicer was pushed out in favor of Sarah Sanders, a calmer and more commanding force in the Brady Room. But in its written work, the White House press team continues to commit errors and gaffes and issue typo-flecked statements.

While most problems faced by presidential administrations are incredibly complex, the solution to problems caused by a president who does not read is fairly simple: He ought to start reading. Simple and easy are very different matters, though, and expecting a man who has always preferred chatting and watching television to the printed word to become a reader at 71 would be foolish. There’s no Trump pivot, especially not to the bookshelf.

Since we're talking about words, you can't imagine how excited I was the other day to see RJ Eskow did a Progressive's Guid To Corporate Dem-Speak. Unless is the first week you're reading DWT, you likely already know how insane it makes me to see people misuse words like "moderate" and "centrist." Eskow tackled the latter but not the former, presumably because it's the corporate media more than corporate Dems who are the culprits in the misuse of "moderate." Eskow introduced his piece by nothing that "Certain words and phrases are routinely used by 'centrist' political candidates. By design, these terms are imprecise, emotionally charged, and often self-contradicting. In fact, the word 'centrist' is just such a term, since polling shows that the economic viewpoint of these candidates-- especially regarding health care, Social Security, education and other social programs-- is often well to the right of the general public. In his guide to centrist terminology I had an initial impression that he was mostly thinking about Mayo Pete, until I read it a few times and realized it was primarily a critique of Status Quo Joe.

• Centrist: Someone who presents a corporate-friendly agenda with less fervor than the typical Republican, with a modest measure of regulation as demanded by circumstances and with a patina of social liberalism.

• Choice (when applied to a public good): A word used as an attempt to distract people from the flawed state of the American social contract by forcing them to choose from an array of semi-functional, overpriced private-sector products. This allows policymakers to subsidize private corporations at public expense, while at the same time providing the public with something that loosely resembles-- but is not-- a functioning social safety net.

• Compete (as in, “prepare workers of the future to compete”): A word used to describe what workers will be required to do to survive in the new, Randian economy. For example, to become competitive, workers are sometimes expected to run through a gauntlet of poorly conceived and insufficiently funded educational programs to re-train them for the “new economy” (defined below), often under the assumption that there is a secret app designer hiding inside every laid-off manufacturing employee. To “compete” after training, workers should be prepared to fight like crabs in a barrel for low-paying jobs that provide no employment security or benefits. (See also: “Jobs of the future,” defined below.)

• Free stuff: A term of contemptuous dismissal for public services that are commonly available in other developed countries, and which any decent society would make available to all human beings.

• Friend of mine (as in, “John McCain was a friend of mine”): A declaration of sentimental attachment not only to an individual across the aisle, but also to a long-passed era of comity between powerful individuals from both political parties. The term reflects an unwillingness to accept the cynicism and depravity of today’s GOP. It may also indicate a willingness to use “bipartisanship” as a cover for offering conservative policies by pretending they are needed to attract Republican votes (which they will not do).

• Health care consumers: People who are forced to choose from a bewildering array of inadequate private health options, based on future needs they can’t anticipate, as offered by private corporations that benefit financially by confusing them now and denying them medical care later. The word “consumers” allows policymakers to accuse individuals of not being “smart shoppers” when things go wrong, thereby deflecting blame away from both themselves and the corporations.

• “I don’t think anyone has a monopoly on bold ideas”: I don’t have any bold ideas.

• “I know how to get things done”: I intend to keep using a political approach that hasn’t gotten anything done for years.

• “I will not raise taxes one penny on the middle class”: I’ll let corporations keep ripping the nearly-vanished “middle class” off instead, charging people more than they’d pay in taxes while providing less in services-- and without public oversight or accountability.

• “I’m pragmatic”: I don’t believe that a country that won two world wars, rebuilt its economy with the New Deal after the Great Depression, created Medicare and Social Security, developed the internet at public expense, and sent several manned missions to the moon can do big things.

• “Ideology” (as in, “I don’t believe in rigid adherence to any political ideology”)" A pejorative term for principles and/or core values.

• “Jobs of the future”: Menial piecework tasks, parceled out through apps that force workers into 12-hour days in the hopes they can eke out a living through a lifetime of endless servility.

• “Managed competition”: Managed confusion. (See “Choice,” above.)

• “New economy”: Same as the old economy (circa 19th century), but the boss wears a turtleneck or a hoodie.

• “Our country needs to balance its budget like a family sitting around the kitchen table”:

Definition 1: I don’t understand how finance works.
Definition 2: I don’t want you to understand how finance works.

• “Pipe dream”: Any bold idea I don’t support.

• “Privatization”: Theft of public resources.

• “Public/private partnership”: See above; the exploitation of public resources for private profit.

• “Purity test”: Any belief or policy I won’t espouse because it would alienate my funders, but that I won’t openly oppose because it’s popular with voters. It implies that people who support it are rigid and unreasonable, rather than principled and thoughtful.

• “Reaching across the aisle”: A coded message to big-money donors that you will not fight for the policies you claim to believe in.

• “Realistic” (as in, “Your proposal (backed by a large majority of voters) isn’t realistic”): We don’t live in a functioning democracy and I don’t plan to do anything about it.

• “Rich kids/Trump’s kids” (as in, “I don’t want to give free college to Donald Trump’s kids”): 1) I believe that social program X is a commodity, not a public good; 2) if I really cared about economic inequality, I’d raise taxes on the Trumps of this world to pay for it, and 3) my logic could be applied to elementary schools, too, so I hope you don’t think about what I’m saying too much.

• “Something we can get done” (as in, “The public option is something we can get done”): A cautious proposal that can’t get passed as long as Republicans control the Senate, but will not inspire voters to turn the Senate Democratic. In other words, something that can’t get done.

• “Universal coverage”: The stated goal of providing every American with inadequate health insurance that ensures neither financial security nor decent medical care.

• “You can be progressive and practical at the same time”: I am neither progressive nor practical.

Yesterday the New York Times published their Of Course Bernie Can Win editorial-- and by Bret Stephens, no less. If you missed it, it's worth reading the whole thing. I'm sure the Biden and Trump campaigns did, carefully. It begins with a quote from Richard Feynman, an American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate, known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as in particle physics for which he proposed the parton model. What's he got to do with feeling the Bern? "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself-- and you are the easiest person to fool." The Times made that relevant to the 2020 election by revising it slightly: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself that Bernie Sanders can’t win-- not just the Democratic nomination, but also the presidency itself."

The warning applies to me as much as to anyone else who has spent the past months, or years, insisting that the senator from Vermont doesn’t have a chance. What it comes down to is this: We don’t want Sanders to be elected, so we tell ourselves he can’t.

According to the theory, Sanders’s support has a hard ceiling: It may be intense, but it’s also cultlike and off-putting. Too many Americans know enough about socialism to want a president who wears the term proudly (even if he insists it’s of a more benign variety). He embraces nearly all of the same policies, like Medicare for all, that raised Elizabeth Warren high in the polls but are now dragging her down.

And then there are those clips of him saying nice things about the Soviet Union, or defending the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, or finding the silver lining in the Castro dictatorship in Cuba. Didn’t Jeremy Corbyn, whose ideological affinities run in the same direction, just lead Britain’s Labour Party to disaster?

It all sounds superficially convincing-- and eerily familiar. It’s what many conservatives kept saying about Donald Trump around this time four years ago.

As with Sanders, Trump was seen as being way outside his party’s mainstream: a protectionist in a party of free traders; an isolationist in a party of interventionists; a libertine in a party of moralists. As with Sanders, Trump barely belonged to the party whose nomination he sought. As with Sanders, Trump’s message was that he was fighting a “rigged system.”

And as with Sanders, the ideological distaste for Trump among conservatives was matched to the conviction that he couldn’t possibly win. Let’s Elect Hillary Now, was the title of one conservative lament about the popularity of supposedly unelectable Republicans, written toward the end of 2015. I know the article well because I wrote it.

Trump won because he was willing to say loudly what his supporters believed deeply; because, in his disdain for what politicians are supposed to be and do, he exuded authenticity; because he was hated by the people his base found hateful; because he had an opponent who, in the minds of his supporters, epitomized corruption and self-dealing; and because he offered radical cures for a country he diagnosed as desperately ill. Despite being the oldest man ever elected president, he seemed (to his voters) fresh, true, bold, and sorely needed.

So it is, and would be, with Sanders. Depth of conviction? Check. Contempt for conventional norms? Check. Opposed by all the right people? Check. Running against a “crooked” opponent? Check. Commitment to drastic change? Check. Like Trump, too, he isn’t so much campaigning for office as he is leading a movement. People who join movements aren’t persuaded. They’re converted. Their depth of belief is motivating and infectious.

The strength of Sanders’s movement is reflected in his blowout fund-raising numbers-- nearly $100 million for 2019-- which only rose in the wake of his heart attack. If Sanders wins Iowa (where polls have him in a dead heat for first), and New Hampshire (where he has a slight lead), then the argument about his supposed non-electability will begin to crumble-- including among older black voters, who have so far been among Joe Biden’s most important pillars of support.

But even if Sanders won the nomination, how would he win the election? Perhaps more easily than people suspect.

Intensity among Democratic-leaning voters will never be greater. There will likely be no third-party challenger like Ralph Nader to shave his margin, or an influential “NeverSanders” wing among liberal pundits. He will find crossover support from former Trump voters in places like Ohio and Michigan, just as Trump found it from former Obama voters. To energize African-American support, he could choose Eric Holder or Stacey Abrams as his running mate.

Nor will scare tactics work any better against Sanders than they did against Trump. Overwrought comparisons with Hugo Chávez will wear thin, just as comparisons between Trump and Benito Mussolini did. The easiest move in American politics is to show yourself to be less scary than your caricature. Ronald Reagan’s devastating “There you go again” line against Jimmy Carter can be a Sanders quip, too.

Stephens concludes with some conservative nonsensical palaver but admits in the end, despite his own ideological preferences, that "To say Sanders is unelectable is indefensible." He's not quite ready-- nor will he ever be-- to agree that Bernie will be America's greatest leader-- only great leader-- since Franklin Roosevelt.

The NRA-Kremlin-Trump Triangle-- Will Mueller Sort That One Out?

Thursday, McClatchy ran a pretty eye-popping piece by Peter Stone and Greg Gordon, FBI investigating whether Russian money went to NRA to help Trump. The jist of it was that Alexander Torshin, the deputy governor of Russia’s central bank-- a Putin crony-- was illegally funneling cash to the Trump campaign via the NRA.

[T]he NRA reported spending a record $55 million on the 2016 elections, including $30 million to support Trump-- triple what the group devoted to backing Republican Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential race. Most of that was money was spent by an arm of the NRA that is not required to disclose its donors.

Two people with close connections to the powerful gun lobby said its total election spending actually approached or exceeded $70 million. The reporting gap could be explained by the fact that independent groups are not required to reveal how much they spend on Internet ads or field operations, including get-out-the-vote efforts.


...Torshin, a leading figure in Putin’s party, has been implicated in money laundering by judicial authorities in Spain, as Bloomberg News first revealed in 2016. Spanish investigators alleged in an almost 500-page internal report that Torshin, who was then a senator, capitalized on his government role to assist mobsters laundering funds through Spanish properties and banks, Bloomberg reported.

A summary obtained by McClatchy of the still-secret report links Torshin to Russian money laundering and describes him as a godfather in a major Russian criminal organization called Taganskaya.

Investigators for three congressional committees probing Russia’s 2016 operations also have shown interest in Torshin, a lifetime NRA member who has attended several of its annual conventions. At the group’s meeting in Kentucky in May 2016, Torshin spoke to Donald Trump Jr. during a gala event at the group’s national gathering in Kentucky in May 2016, when his father won an earlier-than-usual NRA presidential endorsement.

I bet Maddow wishes she could get Torshin for an interview on her show! Yesterday, Bob Bauer, reporting for JustSecurity.org wrote that "recent commentaries and press reports have tended to downgrade the prospects for a special counsel prosecution of campaign finance charges. Moving ahead of them in the Mueller speculation sweepstakes are obstruction of justice and, in some accounts, business crimes. No one knows, of course, what the special counsel, or the congressional investigating committees, have learned that has not appeared in the press. Steven Bannon’s outburst about the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting may have stoked fresh interest in the 'collusion' issues. But it is useful to ask, and to question, why-- knowing what we know and could reasonably expect to discover-- the campaign finance dimension has generally encountered skepticism."

He writes about why it is so difficult to prove that all the help Russia gave Trump-- other than the NRA money-laundering cash into Trump's campaign, which he didn't cover-- has Mueller's investigation probably looking in different directions. Obviously, the Torshin-NRA connection could change all that.

A former senior DOJ attorney recently offered me one theory for why the special counsel may hesitate to bring campaign finance charges. Mueller may fear that case is insufficiently concrete or direct to win over a jury. While the law bars contributions of any kind, including providing campaigns with “things of value,” a jury may struggle with the extraordinary circumstances of Russia’ support for the Trump campaign. Rather than make the more familiar cash contribution, the Russian government generated “things of value” in the form of hacked Clinton and DNC material that WikiLeaks then made public. There is no evidence that Trump or his campaign arranged in advance for the hacking, though they were plainly pleased and eager to have the support and conveyed their receptivity to the Russians.

This experienced attorney suggests that both factors-- the nature of the “things of value” as stolen goods and the absence of direct campaign complicity in illegally acquiring them-- will make prosecutors uneasy about bringing criminal charges. They may feel that the case is so “out there” that it lacks the look or feel of a campaign finance matter in any conventional sense of the term. It has not helped that the shorthand for the Trump-Russia connection has become “collusion,” which is not a legal term.

Prosecutors might well also worry that the recent history of high-profile criminal prosecutions under campaign finance laws is not encouraging. The aggressive case brought against John Edwards failed. In another more obscure prosecution, the government unsuccessfully sought to hold a fundraiser for the Clinton Senate campaign liable for lying about unreported “in-kind” payments for a campaign event. The jury in the Senator Bob Menendez prosecution deadlocked on multiple counts that included alleged corrupt pay-offs in the form of contributions to a Super PAC. Maybe juries, cynical about politics, nonetheless fear “criminalizing” it. Or this skepticism may cause them to distrust the prosecution more than the defense.

The question these considerations raise is whether there is any way to put clear boundaries around the term “things of value” and give it the heft it deserves, making it a firm basis on which to prosecute such a case. It is a fair question, to which there is a reasonably clear answer. It is not necessary to construct a theory that captures the notion behind “collusion” by making the case for illegal “’coordination.” One could, as there is a respectable case for coordination to be made. But there are two other clear grounds for federal campaign finance law liability: soliciting a “thing of value” from a foreign national, and “substantially assisting” the foreign national in spending to influence an election.

The law does not reach every “thing of value” a foreign national might provide to a campaign. However, the coverage of prohibited “things of value” is broad, subject to some specific exceptions. For example, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) has concluded that an individual foreign national may volunteer time or services to a campaign. The commission notably struggled with this question before resolving it, first deciding that foreign nationals did not have the benefit of the general exception from the definition of contribution for “uncompensated services.” It later concluded that they did.

What may have given the agency pause, driving the first negative judgment, was the legislative drafters’ intention to keep foreign influence entirely out of American elections. The lead sponsor of a key amendment to the foreign national ban, Senator Lloyd Bentsen, had declared that foreign nationals had “no business” in political campaigns.

After issuing inconsistent opinions, however the FEC ultimately came down on the side of reading the definition of “contribution,” along with the express exceptions, the same for foreign nationals as for U.S. donors. It relied on a specific exemption in the statute and rules. Absent that exemption, the term “thing of value” is comprehensive: whatever is not “money” but is donated or spent for the purpose of influencing an election. Items of opposition research are clearly “things of value.” It is odd that there should be any question about this in the Russia-Trump case, given the evident importance in the campaign of the WikiLeaks hacks.

As my interlocutor suggested, the sticking point for some commentators may be the illegality of these “things of value.” Some may believe that while there is clearly a legal problem here, it is not a campaign finance problem. Nothing in the rule supports this line of argument or justifies this hesitation. If a candidate’s supporter were to steal a fleet of cars and vans for a get-out-the-vote drive, he would be donating a “thing of value.” Whether an item is valuable depends on the use of the good or service, not its origin. As a matter of enforcement policy, it makes little sense to give a campaign a pass on a violation of the campaign finance laws because the contributor or spender trafficked in stolen goods.

This Bill Maher clip below (from last night) doesn't have much to do with the Kremlin coup but... it's hilarious and everyone really needs to watch it. So... take a minute and enjoy yourself:

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

-by Noah

Tonight's meme is extra special. It features, as a co-writer, none other than Donald Jackass Trump himself. And why not? Doesn't he always say he has the best words? He, himself, says he's a genius. Surely, it must take a special talent to fit all of those jumbled, chaotic thoughts into the tight format of a tweet! We know he's very proud of it too! I bet he says he's the best tweeter in the whole world and I bet he's very proud to have a post on DWT.

So here, you are, tonight's co-writer, along with dastardly "Liberal Hollywood" co-writer Mark Hamill, aka Luke Skywalker.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

-by Noah

Whatever will become of Steve Bannon? Too many people have focused excessive attention on just his role in Michael Wolfe's Fire & Fury book when he was, in fact, by far, not the only source of the information about Señor Trumpanzee and the dangerously massive insanity and dysfunction of Trump and the Trump administration confirmed by the book. But, people do focus on Steve Bannon and he likes that just fine. His ego feeds on attention much like his idol's ego does.

Once it appeared that the things Bannon is quoted as saying in the book would cost him his place as an influence in the political world, he panicked and issued a groveling apology to his former boss. He used the old cliched "out of context" and "didn't mean it" excuse. Too late? Probably not. Bannon knows what Trump likes like any top-paid whore would. Trump craves obsequious stoking and praise and Bannon knows the buttons, big and small, as well as well as any of Trump's wives or playgirls, call girls, or whatever, in his past.

Bannon is a pro of his own kind. It's not just the white supremacy aspect of Bannon that turns Trump on. How else does one explain how Trump, a man who obsessively demands a certain style of dress and grooming, put up with him? Bannon is an openly booze-breathed unkempt slob. Trump himself has called Bannon "Sloppy Steve." At the same time, he had no tolerance whatsoever for Sean Spicer's sartorial style the day after the inauguration. Yet, in Spicer's case, tailors were called in and the very next day, Spicer was suited up Trump-style. Bannon? Trump liked him just the way he was. We've all known couples like that. There's just a connection there, unseen or not. Call it chemistry. Call it need. Call it what you will.

Bannon probably thought Judge Roy Moore was going to win and that would make him a king maker and the apple of Trump's eye. Rumor has it, Bannon's ego was so out of control that he had begun seeing himself as presidential material. That thought may be understandable when you consider how much time he has spent with Trump. I mean, if you had political ambitions, wouldn't you look at Trump as proof that anyone, anyone at all, can be president

But then, Moore lost, and the book came out. Suddenly, the floor came out from under Bannon's feet. Will Señor Trumpanzee take back his ex? Should we be surprised if he does? Or, will Bannon be cast into the garbage can of history like the stinking, moldy, can of Spam that he is.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

-by Noah

When it comes to Fire And Fury, I guess Señor Trumpanzee can get the AudioBook version. But... maybe we should hold an immediate special election to select a designated reader or readers and rush them to the White House. Here's my list of candidates for the job. Maybe each one could read him a chapter. Please don't think I'm trying to induce a stroke of anything. I'm just a patriotic guy looking to help out. And, since he's not a man of letters, I've chosen a designated reader for each letter of the alphabet.

Wait, the more I think about it, the more I think that we should dispense with the special election and send all of these people, one by one. Each one would walk into the Oval Office and place one of those little wooden kids alphabet cubes on Trump's desk or in his playpen. The letter on the cube would, of course, be the letter next to their name on my list below.

A) Elizabeth Warren
B) Joe Biden
C) Lewis Black
D) Bernie Sanders
E) Ice T
F) Mr. T
G) Christopher Walken
H) Elmo
I) Rachel Maddow
J) Queen Latifah
K) Antifa (as a choir)
L) Hillary Clinton
M) Vicente Fox
N) Foxy Brown
O) Michelle Obama
P) Barrack Obama
Q) Alec Baldwin
R) Ellen
S) Stephen Colbert
T) Harvey Keitel
U) Oprah
V) The Central Park Five
W) Samantha Bee
X) Alan Grayson
Y) Chuck D
Z) Me

Worst White House Occupant Ever? What About His GOP Enablers?

Señor Trumpanzee is flipping out over Michael Wolff’s book-- completely deranged-- and claiming he’s “stable” and “a genius” and that Bannon has an 80 IQ. Trump is insane and should be impeached immediately under the terms of the 25th Amendment. The voters should deal with the Republicans who, knowing full well that Trump is a dangerous sociopath, enabled him anyway-- especially Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell. They’re more aware than most of Trump’s unfitness for office. But they don’t care, as long as he signs legislation that harms working families perceived as being supporters of Democrats-- their dream come true.

David Frum, writing for The Atlantic this morning was talking about Trump in terms of the Godfather character, Fredo, who has been used for years to denigrate the dumbest of the Trump children, Don, Jr. He began his essay about Trump’s mental unfitness with Fredo’s most memorable line: “I can handle things. I’m smart! Not like everybody says, like dumb. I’m smart and I want respect!” Fredo was soon swimming with the fishes.

This morning’s presidential Twitter outburst recalls those words of Fredo Corleone’s in one of the most famous scenes from The Godfather series. Trump tweeted that his “two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart,” and in a subsequent tweet called himself a “very stable genius.”

Trump may imagine that he’s Michael Corleone, the tough and canny rightful heir-- or even Sonny Corleone, the terrifyingly violent but at least powerful heir apparent-- but after today he is Fredo forever.

There’s a key difference between film and reality, though: The Corleone family had the awareness and vigilance to exclude Fredo from power. The American political system did not do so well.

Michael Wolff’s scathing new book about the Trump White House has sent President Trump spiraling into the most publicly visible meltdown of his presidency. Until now, Trump’s worst moments have occurred behind closed doors, and have become known to the public only second-hand, leaked by worried officials, aides, and advisers. Yesterday and today, we have seen a Trump temper-tantrum in real time on Twitter, extended over hours, punctuated only by stretch of fitful presidential sleep. Trump’s tweets yesterday focused largely on the blockbuster Wolff book, Fire and Fury.

It may not be the newsiest-- arguably it is the least newsy-- but the most important moment in Wolff’s book are words attributed at second or third-hand to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell at the time of Donald Trump’s election. “He will sign anything we put in front of him.”

Who and what Donald Trump is has been known to everyone and anyone who cared to know for years and decades. Before he was president, he was the country’s leading racist conspiracy theorist. Before he was the country’s leading racist conspiracy theorist, he was a celebrity gameshow host. Before he was a celebrity gameshow host, he was the multi-bankrupt least trusted name in real estate. Before he was the multi-bankrupt least trusted name in real estate, he was the protege of Roy Cohn’s repeatedly accused of ties to organized crime. From the start, Donald Trump was a man of many secrets, but no mysteries. Inscribed indelibly on the public record were the reasons for responsible people to do everything in their power to bar him from the presidency.

Instead, since he announced his candidacy in mid-2015, Donald Trump has been enabled and protected.

The enabling and protecting not only continues. It accelerates.

Before the Saturday morning tweets, what should have been the biggest story of the week was Trump’s success at mobilizing the Senate and the FBI to deploy criminal prosecution as a weapon against Trump critics. The Senate Judiciary committee-- the Senate Judiciary Committee! The committee that oversees the proper enforcement of the law!-- formally filed a criminal referral with the Department of Justice against Christopher Steele, the author of the infamous dossier about Trump’s Russia connections. The referral was signed by the committee’s chairman, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, without even notice to Democrats on the committee, Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein said; a startling abuse of majority status and a sharp departure from the norms of the Senate, especially a 51-49 Senate.

The Department of Justice can ignore such a referral. It’s ominous, however, that on the very same day, the FBI obeyed Trump’s repeated demands and reopened a long-closed criminal investigation into the Clinton Foundation. The FBI has come under relentless abuse from Trump, who complains about its refusal to do his will. Is it now yielding?

We also learned this week from the New York Times that aides to the Attorney General sought damaging information on Capitol Hill about FBI director Comey, indicating close cooperation between the White House and Main Justice to exert political control over the country’s chief law enforcement agency.

Michael Wolff has drawn the most indelible picture yet of Donald Trump, the man. But the important thing about Trump is not the man; it’s the system of power surrounding the man.

In 2016, there were voters who genuinely, in good faith, believed that Donald Trump was a capable business leader, moderate on social issues, who cared about the troubles of working class white America-- and would do something to help. There may well still be some people who believe this-- but nowhere near enough to sustain a presidency.

What sustains Trump now is the support of people who know what he is, but back him anyway. Republican political elites who know him for what he is, but who back him because they believe they can control and use him; conservative media elites who sense what he is, but who delight in the cultural wars he provokes; rank-and-file conservatives who care more about their grievances and hatreds than the governance of the country.

After the Trump pardon of Sheriff Arpaio for obstruction of justice, a popular conservative blogger tweeted this justification of the president’s shocking attack on the rule of law: “The main reason for President Trump to pardon Sheriff Joe was fuck you, leftists. The new rules, bitches.”

However crazy Trump may be, in one way he is indeed the “very stable genius” he claims to be: Trump understands how to mobilize hatred and resentment to his own advantage and profit. He has risen higher than Joe McCarthy or Charles Lindbergh or Theodore Bilbo-- and he has lasted already nearly a full year in office, holding the approval of one-third of the country, more than sufficient to keep him there for a full term.

Michael Wolff has done a crucial service, showing more intimately than any reporter yet the true nature of the man at the center of the American system. But without the complicity of other power-holders, Trump would drop from his central position like a tooth from a rotten gum. What we need to do now is widen the camera angle beyond Fredo Trump to the hard-faced men and women over his shoulders. Those are the people who put Trump where he is, and keep him there, corrupting the institutions of American democracy and troubling the peace and security of the world.

Have You Had Enough Of Fire And Fury Yet? Trump's Mental Health

Rick Wilson is a Republican strategist and Never-Trumper who has become something of a celebrity on MSNBC for his pithy denunciations of the Orange Orangutan and his supporters, once referring to Trump “alt-right” supporters as "childless single men who masturbate to anime.” His Daily Beast column Friday, Bannon Banished for Telling Truths About Trump as MAGA Monsters Turn on Each Other is the kind of schadenfreude that millions of Trump haters will enjoy. “Watching Bannon fall victim to the claws of the monster he helped create mostly invokes the response of ‘Alexa, order all the popcorn,’” he wrote. Even Trumpanzee might agree with some of Wilson’s analysis: “Bannon wasn’t just one of Trump’s most senior aides and an architect of the destruction of the Republican Party; he was the multi-shirted, red-eyed White House troll, leaking tales of his brilliance to a constellation of reporters in the ostensibly hated mainstream media. His house organ Breitbart and a host of Trump-right websites and news outlets sang praises to his dank genius. Bannon, they proclaimed, was Trumpism in its distilled essence: revanchist, ahistorical, racially inflected, and consumed with an imaginary war on the media and America’s broader society.” But not all of it.

Now, like two rats in a bag, Trump and Bannon are tearing at one another in a delicious public spat that has every possible bit of drama, except Bannon drunkenly bellowing for a round of fisticuffs with all comers and Trump offering to compare the length of their relative manhoods on live television. They deserve one another in so many ways.

Michael Wolff’s new book Fire and Fury (President Postliterate Bestwords is waiting on either the audio book or for Kellyanne to organize tableaux vivants of the various chapters) is blowing Washington apart today, and the biggest rift is between Trumpism and Bannonism. I’ve written before about the inevitable, tragic dynamic of this brokeback bromance; Trump needs a mindless cheering section screaming hosannas no matter how often he stumbles toward the nuclear and political precipice. Bannon needs an avatar for his Alt-Reich national socialist-- oh, sorry, I meant populist-- fantasies.

The bold new counter-establishment Bannon sought to create in the wake of Trump’s fluke victory was like most of Bannon’s hustles: contingent on a kind of balls-out bravado and a willingness to lie and scrap with equal intensity. It was easy to be a political arsonist when Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah were writing the checks, but the Mercer money train came to a halt when the Metternich of Alabama, after getting beaten like a cheap drum in the U.S. Senate race, was then quoted boasting to Wolff that the Mercers would be funding his 2020 presidential campaign.

Late Thursday, rumors swept the media world that Bannon was about to be booted from his role as Caudillo of the Breitbart empire. For Bannon, this would be a fate worse the death. His power derives almost entirely from a website that bears the name of a better man, and rebuilding a new version from scratch would be a costly and difficult process. Republican senators are breathing a deep sigh of relief. After watching Bannon hitch the GOP’s wagon to a pedo-curious Roy Moore in Alabama, the idea of Bannon mounting a slate of National Socialist-- dammit, there I go again, populist-- candidates seems more distant, particularly without Sugar Momma Mercer keeping that sweet bank rolling in and the lights on at advertiser-poison “news” outlet Breitbart.

The other day I was in a room with CNN being broadcast and a host asked his table of clueless guests if he though people would still be talking about Fire and Fury the next day. They all agreed, solemnly, that it would fade away quickly. The segment should have been titled “watch the morons on TV who don’t understand what a feeding frenzy is.” You can’t turn on TV news anywhere in the world without seeing or hearing about Michael Wolff and his book.

Friday NBC News was reporting that Wolff called Señor Trumpanzee, quote accurately, "a man who has less credibility than, perhaps, anyone who has ever walked on earth." Maybe “ever walked on earth” pushes the boundaries a little... but only a little.

Wolff, in an exclusive interview on NBC's "Today," said that everyone he spoke to for the book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, described the president the same way.

"I will tell you the one description that everyone gave, everyone has in common: They all say he is like a child," Wolff explained. "And what they mean by that is, he has a need for immediate gratification. It is all about him."

Wolff added that "100 percent of the people around" Trump, "senior advisers, family members, every single one of them, questions his intelligence and fitness for office."

…Wolff writes in the book, and explained during his Today interview, that top aides said at various points Trump that is “a moron, an idiot.”

“Actually there’s a competition to sort of get to the bottom line here of who this man is. Let’s remember, this man does not read, does not listen. So he’s like a pinball, just shooting off the sides,” Wolff said.

Wolff also revealed how people around the president noticed an apparent decline in his mental stamina.

“In the beginning, it was like every 25 or 30 minutes, you would get the same three stories repeated," Wolff said about Trump. "Now it’s the same three stories in every 10 minutes."

Wolff was then asked to elaborate on an anecdote he described in an article in the Hollywood Reporter this week in which he said Trump, at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida over the winter holiday break, didn't recognize old friends.

"I will quote Steve Bannon-- he’s lost it," Wolff said, referring to Trump's former strategist.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, appearing on Fox News Friday morning, said it was “outrageous to make these types of accusations" about Trump's mental health.

It's "sad that people are going and making these desperate attempts to attack the president," she added.

And, yes, Wolff has tapes and notes to back up his reporting. In the new issue of the New Yorker, David Remnick begins by suggesting we imagine what it would have been like if Nero had a Twitter account. “Chaotic, corrupt, incurious, infantile, grandiose, and obsessed with gaudy real estate, Donald Trump is of a Neronic temperament. He has always craved attention. Now the whole world is his audience. In earlier times, Trump cultivated, among others, the proprietors and editors of the New York tabloids, Fox News, TMZ, and the National Enquirer. Now Twitter is his principal outlet, with no mediation necessary… Future scholars will sift through Trump’s digital proclamations the way we now read the chroniclers of Nero’s Rome— to understand how an unhinged emperor can make a mockery of republican institutions, undo the collective nervous system of a country, and degrade the whole of public life… Trump’s tweets are most valuable as a record of his inner life: his obsessions, his rages, his guilty conscience. No bile goes unexpectorated. Trump, who does not care for government work, is more invested in his reputation as a creative writer, declaring more than once that “somebody said” that he is ‘the Hemingway of a hundred and forty characters.’”

A new book by Michael Wolff, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, amplifies, in lurid anecdote and quotation, what we have been learning elsewhere every day for the past year: Trump believed that he would lose the election, but would multiply his fame, his fortune, and his standing in American life. To near-universal shock, however, he won. And the consequences followed. Trump has no comprehension of policy and cares about it less. He surrounds himself with aides who are either wildly incompetent or utterly defeated in their attempts to domesticate the mulish and bizarre object of their attention. There are no lingering illusions about the President’s capacities: Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called Trump ‘a fucking moron’ and spared us a denial. Wolff’s book, which leans heavily on interviews with Steve Bannon, makes it plain that pretty much everyone in the President’s circle agrees that he is, in terms of character and intellect, fantastically limited. There is no loyalty or deliberation in the White House, only a savage Lord of the Flies sort of chaos. Each day is at once preposterous, poisonous, and dangerous.



…Scandal envelops the President. Obstruction of justice, money-laundering, untoward contacts with foreign governments—it is unclear where the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation will land and what might eventually rouse the attention of the U.S. Senate. Clearly, Trump senses the danger. A former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, has been indicted. A former national-security adviser, Michael Flynn, has admitted to lying to the F.B.I. and has become a coöperating witness. The President sees one West Wing satrap and Cabinet official after another finding a distance from him. “Where is my Roy Cohn?” he asked his aides angrily, according to the Times, when his Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, defied his wishes and recused himself from the Russia investigation.

In the meantime, there is little doubt about who Donald Trump is, the harm he has done already, and the greater harm he threatens. He is unfit to hold any public office, much less the highest in the land. This is not merely an orthodoxy of the opposition; his panicked courtiers have been leaking word of it from his first weeks in office. The President of the United States has become a leading security threat to the United States.

The Trump Mad House Goes After Bannon

The other day I suggested that there’s nothing left for Bannon on the public stage other than as a witness for the prosecution in the various Putin-Gate investigations and trials. With the Mercers having very publicly pulled the plug on him, there’s nothing left for another delusional figure in TrumpWorld who thought he could cast the wily-- albeit low IQ-- Trump aside. The lunatic neo-fascist Mercer daughter: "I support President Trump and the platform upon which he was elected. My family and I have not communicated with Steve Bannon in many months and have provided no financial support to his political agenda, nor do we support his recent actions and statements." She cut off the funding for Bannon’s bodyguards. And there’s a Breitbart discussion discussing-- encouraged by Trump who wants Bannon pulverized-- to get rid of Bannon. Janet Hook, writing for the Wall Street Journal and Drudge are both asserting that Breitbart CEO Larry Solov and Susie Breitbart are being pressured to dump Bannon. Even Rush Limbaugh piled on against Bannon. Dana Loesch too.

By Thursday night Trump’s lawyers were trying to prevent Henry Holt from publishing Michael Wolff’s Fire And Fury: Inside The Trump White House. Wolff’s story in Thursday’s Hollywood Reporter, You Can’t Make This Shit Up-- My Year Inside Trump’s White House, already blew the top off the whole scandal, book or no book. Trump seems to have accidentally given Wolff White House access for a year-- not understanding what he was doing-- which caused top Trumpanzee aides that they could talk with him on the record for his book. “The nature of the comedy,” he wrote, “it was soon clear, was that here was a group of ambitious men and women who had reached the pinnacle of power, a high-ranking White House appointment-- with the punchline that Donald Trump was president. Their estimable accomplishment of getting to the West Wing risked at any moment becoming farce.”

A new president typically surrounds himself with a small group of committed insiders and loyalists. But few on the Trump team knew him very well-- most of his advisors had been with him only since the fall. Even his family, now closely gathered around him, seemed nonplussed. "You know, we never saw that much of him until he got the nomination," Eric Trump's wife, Lara, told one senior staffer. If much of the country was incredulous, his staff, trying to cement their poker faces, were at least as confused.

Their initial response was to hawkishly defend him-- he demanded it-- and by defending him they seemed to be defending themselves. Politics is a game, of course, of determined role-playing, but the difficulties of staying in character in the Trump White House became evident almost from the first day.

"You can't make this shit up," Sean Spicer, soon to be portrayed as the most hapless man in America, muttered to himself after his tortured press briefing on the first day of the new administration, when he was called to justify the president's inaugural crowd numbers-- and soon enough, he adopted this as a personal mantra. Reince Priebus, the new chief of staff, had, shortly after the announcement of his appointment in November, started to think he would not last until the inauguration. Then, making it to the White House, he hoped he could last a respectable year, but he quickly scaled back his goal to six months. Kellyanne Conway, who would put a finger-gun to her head in private about Trump's public comments, continued to mount an implacable defense on cable television, until she was pulled off the air by others in the White House who, however much the president enjoyed her, found her militancy idiotic. (Even Ivanka and Jared regarded Conway's fulsome defenses as cringeworthy.)

Steve Bannon tried to gamely suggest that Trump was mere front man and that he, with plan and purpose and intellect, was, more reasonably, running the show-- commanding a whiteboard of policies and initiatives that he claimed to have assembled from Trump's off-the-cuff ramblings and utterances. His adoption of the Saturday Night Live sobriquet "President Bannon" was less than entirely humorous. Within the first few weeks, even rote conversations with senior staff trying to explain the new White House's policies and positions would turn into a body-language ballet of eye-rolling and shrugs and pantomime of jaws dropping. Leaking became the political manifestation of the don't-blame-me eye roll.

The surreal sense of the Trump presidency was being lived as intensely inside the White House as out. Trump was, for the people closest to him, the ultimate enigma. He had been elected president, that through-the-eye-of-the-needle feat, but obviously, he was yet … Trump. Indeed, he seemed as confused as anyone to find himself in the White House, even attempting to barricade himself into his bedroom with his own lock over the protests of the Secret Service.

There was some effort to ascribe to Trump magical powers. In an early conversation-- half comic, half desperate-- Bannon tried to explain him as having a particular kind of Jungian brilliance. Trump, obviously without having read Jung, somehow had access to the collective unconscious of the other half of the country, and, too, a gift for inventing archetypes: Little Marco … Low-Energy Jeb … the Failing New York Times. Everybody in the West Wing tried, with some panic, to explain him, and, sheepishly, their own reason for being here. He's intuitive, he gets it, he has a mind-meld with his base. But there was palpable relief, of an Emperor's New Clothes sort, when longtime Trump staffer Sam Nunberg-- fired by Trump during the campaign but credited with knowing him better than anyone else-- came back into the fold and said, widely, "He's just a fucking fool."

Part of that foolishness was his inability to deal with his own family. In a way, this gave him a human dimension. Even Donald Trump couldn't say no to his kids. "It's a littleee, littleee complicated …" he explained to Priebus about why he needed to give his daughter and son-in-law official jobs. But the effect of their leadership roles was to compound his own boundless inexperience in Washington, creating from the outset frustration and then disbelief and then rage on the part of the professionals in his employ.

The men and women of the West Wing, for all that the media was ridiculing them, actually felt they had a responsibility to the country. "Trump," said one senior Republican, "turned selfish careerists into patriots." Their job was to maintain the pretense of relative sanity, even as each individually came to the conclusion that, in generous terms, it was insane to think you could run a White House without experience, organizational structure or a real purpose.

On March 30, after the collapse of the health care bill, 32-year-old Katie Walsh, the deputy chief of staff, the effective administration chief of the West Wing, a stalwart political pro and stellar example of governing craft, walked out. Little more than two months in, she quit. Couldn't take it anymore. Nutso. To lose your deputy chief of staff at the get-go would be a sign of crisis in any other administration, but inside an obviously exploding one it was hardly noticed.

While there might be a scary national movement of Trumpers, the reality in the White House was stranger still: There was Jared and Ivanka, Democrats; there was Priebus, a mainstream Republican; and there was Bannon, whose reasonable claim to be the one person actually representing Trumpism so infuriated Trump that Bannon was hopelessly sidelined by April. "How much influence do you think Steve Bannon has over me? Zero! Zero!" Trump muttered and stormed. To say that no one was in charge, that there were no guiding principles, not even a working org chart, would again be an understatement. "What do these people do?" asked everyone pretty much of everyone else.

"Sloppy Steve?"

The competition to take charge, which, because each side represented an inimical position to the other, became not so much a struggle for leadership, but a near-violent factional war. Jared and Ivanka were against Priebus and Bannon, trying to push both men out. Bannon was against Jared and Ivanka and Priebus, practicing what everybody thought were dark arts against them. Priebus, everybody's punching bag, just tried to survive another day. By late spring, the larger political landscape seemed to become almost irrelevant, with everyone focused on the more lethal battles within the White House itself. This included screaming fights in the halls and in front of a bemused Trump in the Oval Office (when he was not the one screaming himself), together with leaks about what Russians your opponents might have been talking to.

Reigning over all of this was Trump, enigma, cipher and disruptor. How to get along with Trump-- who veered between a kind of blissed-out pleasure of being in the Oval Office and a deep, childish frustration that he couldn't have what he wanted? Here was a man singularly focused on his own needs for instant gratification, be that a hamburger, a segment on Fox & Friends or an Oval Office photo opp. "I want a win. I want a win. Where's my win?" he would regularly declaim. He was, in words used by almost every member of the senior staff on repeated occasions, "like a child." A chronic naysayer, Trump himself stoked constant discord with his daily after-dinner phone calls to his billionaire friends about the disloyalty and incompetence around him. His billionaire friends then shared this with their billionaire friends, creating the endless leaks which the president so furiously railed against.

One of these frequent callers was Rupert Murdoch, who before the election had only ever expressed contempt for Trump. Now Murdoch constantly sought him out, but to his own colleagues, friends and family, continued to derisively ridicule Trump: "What a fucking moron," said Murdoch after one call.

With the Comey firing, the Mueller appointment and murderous White House infighting, by early summer Bannon was engaged in an uninterrupted monologue directed to almost anyone who would listen. It was so caustic, so scabrous and so hilarious that it might form one of the great underground political treatises.

By July, Jared and Ivanka, who had, in less than six months, traversed from socialite couple to royal family to the most powerful people in the world, were now engaged in a desperate dance to save themselves, which mostly involved blaming Trump himself. It was all his idea to fire Comey! "The daughter," Bannon declared, "will bring down the father."

Priebus and Spicer were merely counting down to the day-- and every day seemed to promise it would be the next day-- when they would be out.

And, indeed, suddenly there were the 11 days of Anthony Scaramucci.

Scaramucci, a minor figure in the New York financial world, and quite a ridiculous one, had overnight become Jared and Ivanka's solution to all of the White House's management and messaging problems. After all, explained the couple, he was good on television and he was from New York-- he knew their world. In effect, the couple had hired Scaramucci-- as preposterous a hire in West Wing annals as any-- to replace Priebus and Bannon and take over running the White House.

There was, after the abrupt Scaramucci meltdown, hardly any effort inside the West Wing to disguise the sense of ludicrousness and anger felt by every member of the senior staff toward Trump's family and Trump himself. It became almost a kind of competition to demystify Trump. For Rex Tillerson, he was a moron. For Gary Cohn, he was dumb as shit. For H.R. McMaster, he was a hopeless idiot. For Steve Bannon, he had lost his mind.

Most succinctly, no one expected him to survive Mueller. Whatever the substance of the Russia "collusion," Trump, in the estimation of his senior staff, did not have the discipline to navigate a tough investigation, nor the credibility to attract the caliber of lawyers he would need to help him. (At least nine major law firms had turned down an invitation to represent the president.)

There was more: Everybody was painfully aware of the increasing pace of his repetitions. It used to be inside of 30 minutes he'd repeat, word-for-word and expression-for-expression, the same three stories-- now it was within 10 minutes. Indeed, many of his tweets were the product of his repetitions-- he just couldn't stop saying something.

By summer's end, in something of a historic sweep-- more usual for the end of a president's first term than the end of his first six months-- almost the entire senior staff, save Trump's family, had been washed out: Michael Flynn, Katie Walsh, Sean Spicer, Reince Priebus, Steve Bannon. Even Trump's loyal, longtime body guard Keith Schiller-- for reasons darkly whispered about in the West Wing-- was out. Gary Cohn, Dina Powell, Rick Dearborn, all on their way out. The president, on the spur of the moment, appointed John Kelly, a former Marine Corps general and head of homeland security, chief of staff-- without Kelly having been informed of his own appointment beforehand. Grim and stoic, accepting that he could not control the president, Kelly seemed compelled by a sense of duty to be, in case of disaster, the adult in the room who might, if needed, stand up to the president … if that is comfort.

As telling, with his daughter and son-in-law sidelined by their legal problems, Hope Hicks, Trump's 29-year-old personal aide and confidant, became, practically speaking, his most powerful White House advisor. (With Melania a nonpresence, the staff referred to Ivanka as the "real wife" and Hicks as the "real daughter.") Hicks' primary function was to tend to the Trump ego, to reassure him, to protect him, to buffer him, to soothe him. It was Hicks who, attentive to his lapses and repetitions, urged him to forgo an interview that was set to open the 60 Minutes fall season. Instead, the interview went to Fox News' Sean Hannity who, White House insiders happily explained, was willing to supply the questions beforehand. Indeed, the plan was to have all interviewers going forward provide the questions.

As the first year wound down, Trump finally got a bill to sign. The tax bill, his singular accomplishment, was, arguably, quite a reversal of his populist promises, and confirmation of what Mitch McConnell had seen early on as the silver Trump lining: "He'll sign anything we put in front of him." With new bravado, he was encouraging partisans like Fox News to pursue an anti-Mueller campaign on his behalf. Insiders believed that the only thing saving Mueller from being fired, and the government of the United States from unfathomable implosion, is Trump's inability to grasp how much Mueller had on him and his family.

Steve Bannon was openly handicapping a 33.3 percent chance of impeachment, a 33.3 percent chance of resignation in the shadow of the 25th amendment and a 33.3 percent chance that he might limp to the finish line on the strength of liberal arrogance and weakness.

Donald Trump's small staff of factotums, advisors and family began, on Jan. 20, 2017, an experience that none of them, by any right or logic, thought they would-- or, in many cases, should-- have, being part of a Trump presidency. Hoping for the best, with their personal futures as well as the country's future depending on it, my indelible impression of talking to them and observing them through much of the first year of his presidency, is that they all-- 100 percent-- came to believe he was incapable of functioning in his job.

At Mar-a-Lago, just before the new year, a heavily made-up Trump failed to recognize a succession of old friends.

Happy first anniversary of the Trump administration.

How some top Trumpists referred to Señor Trumpanzee when he wasn’t in the room, according to Wolff:

• Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin- “Idiot”
• Chief economic advisor Gary Cohn- “Dumb as shit”
• National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster- “a dope”
•Chief of Staff Reince Priebus- “Idiot”

Wolff himself wrote that “Trump didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. If it was print, it might as well not exist. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semiliterate. . . Some thought him dyslexic; certainly his comprehension was limited. Others concluded that he didn’t read because he didn’t have to, and that in fact this was one of his key attributes as a populist. He was postliterate-- total television. But not only didn’t he read, he didn’t listen. He preferred to be the person talking. And he trusted his own expertise-- no matter how paltry or irrelevant-- more than anyone else’s. What’s more, he had an extremely short attention span, even when he thought you were worthy of attention.”

And this... this thing... is widely-- and legally-- considered President of the United States. His placement in the White House is absolutely the biggest foreign policy success in the long history of Russia. It’s not part of Wolff’s book but, since we’re talking about the Mad House, Yale psychiatrist Dr. Bandy X. Lee, a nonpartisan who is not registered with either party, has told a dozen members of Congress who are concerned with Trump’s mental stability-- as are most Americans-- that Señor Trumpanzee “is showing signs of impairment that the average person could not see. He is becoming very unstable very quickly. There is a need for neuropsychiatric evaluation that would demonstrate his capacity to serve… As he is unraveling he seems to be losing his grip on reality and reverting to conspiracy theories. There are signs that he is going into attack mode when he is under stress. That means he has the potential to become impulsive and very volatile." Trump had that slob daughter of Huckabee’s go out an defend his mental condition and she called questions about the Trumpanzee’s state of mind "disgraceful… If he was unfit, he probably wouldn't be sitting there, wouldn't have defeated the most qualified group of candidates the Republican Party has ever seen.” She didn’t go into how Trump had evaluated his opponents during the campaign but she did insist that Señor T is saner than Kim Jong-un.