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.”

Trump Stripped Bare

Reading Philip Rucker's preview of Cliff Sims' new book, Team of Vipers yesterday-- a stark contrast to Lincoln's team of rivals-- you absolutely know Sims is going to get a movie contract. There will be plenty of movies made about the tragic (and comic) Trump regime. I'm betting Team of Vipers will be one of the first. "Perhaps the book’s most cinematic chapter of chaos," wrote Rucker, "is 'The Mooch Is Loose,' a reconstruction of Anthony Scaramucci’s 11 days as White House communications director. Sims was Scaramucci’s right-hand man and describes the flamboyant aide’s hunt for 'leakers,' which began with his own staff. Scaramucci assembled the 40-odd media aides and threatened to fire them all, Sims writes, as if he were a 'fire-breathing dragon that had just returned from laying waste to the unsuspecting peasants in the village.' Sims writes that Scaramucci ordered them to reply to anyone in the White House instructing them to leak information to a reporter, including then-Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, by saying: 'I cannot do that. I only report to Anthony Scaramucci and he reports directly to the president of the United States.' Even Trump was amused. 'Can you believe this guy?' the president told Sims. 'He’s completely out of his mind-- like, on drugs or something-- totally out of his mind. We’ll figure it out, but the guy is crazy.'"

I put together the sound track for the first platinum record for a TV show: Friends. I'd do Team of Vipers and donate all the money to an elect Bernie fund. Cue: Green Day...



Rucker has the first scene of the film all laid out already. Señor Trumpanzee was shoveling junk food into his porcine face, watching TV, "increasingly angry as House Speaker Paul Ryan criticized his handling of the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. He held the remote control 'like a pistol' and yelled for an assistant to get the Republican leader on the phone. 'Paul, do you know why Democrats have been kicking your ass for decades? Because they know a little word called "loyalty,"' Trump told Ryan, then a Wisconsin congressman. 'Why do you think Nancy (Pelosi) has held on this long? Have you seen her? She’s a disaster. Every time she opens her mouth another Republican gets elected. But they stick with her... Why can’t you be loyal to your president, Paul?' The tormenting continued. Trump recalled Ryan distancing himself from Trump in October 2016, in the days after the Access Hollywood video in which he bragged of groping women first surfaced in the Washington Post. 'I remember being in Wisconsin and your own people were booing you,' Trump told him, according to former West Wing communications aide Cliff Sims. 'You were out there dying like a dog, Paul. Like a dog! And what’d I do? I saved your ass.'"

The browbeating of the top Republican on Capitol Hill was one of the vivid snapshots of life inside the Trump White House told by one of its original inhabitants, Cliff Sims, in his 384-page book Team of Vipers, which goes on sale next week and was obtained in advance by The Post. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Sims, who enjoyed uncommon personal access to Trump, recounts expletive-filled scenes of chaos, dysfunction and duplicity among the president, his family members and administration officials. Unlike memoirs of other Trump officials, Sims’ book is neither a sycophantic portrayal of the president nor a blistering account written to settle scores. The author presents himself as a true believer in Trump and his agenda, and even writes whimsically of the president, but he still is critical of him, especially his morality. Sims also finds fault in himself, a rarity in Trump World, writing that at times he was “selfish,” “nakedly ambitious” and “a coward.”

The author reconstructs in comic detail the Trump team’s first day at work, when the president sat in the residence, raging about news coverage of the relatively small size of his inauguration crowds, and White House press secretary Sean Spicer scrambled to address it.



Spicer had worked the team “into a frenzy,” and it fell to Sims to write the script for his first statement to the media. Nervously chewing gum, Spicer dictated “a torrent of expletives with a few salient points scattered in between.” At one point, Sims’ computer crashed and he lost the draft, so it had to be rewritten. And in their rush to satisfy the impatient president, nobody checked the facts. Spicer, he writes, was “walking into his own execution.”

“It’s impossible to deny how absolutely out of control the White House staff-- again, myself included-- was at times,” Sims writes. The book’s scenes are consistent with news reporting at the time from inside the White House.

Sims depicts Trump as deeply suspicious of his own staff. He recalls a private huddle in which he and Keith Schiller, the president’s longtime bodyguard and confidant, helped Trump draw up an enemies list with a Sharpie on White House stationery. “We’re going to get rid of all the snakes, even the bottom-feeders,” Trump told them.

Then-White House Chief of Staff John Kelly told the staff that he viewed his job as serving the “country first, POTUS second,” which Sims interpreted as potentially hostile to Trump’s agenda.

Sims recounts that Kelly once confided to him in a moment of exasperation: “This is the worst fucking job I’ve ever had. People apparently think that I care when they write that I might be fired. If that ever happened, it would be the best day I’ve had since I walked into this place.”

A conservative media figure in Alabama, Sims came to work on Trump’s 2016 campaign and cultivated a personal relationship with the candidate-turned-president. Sims writes rich, extended dialogue from his conversations with Trump and others in the administration.

As White House director of message strategy, Sims regularly met Trump at the private elevator of the residence and accompanied him to video tapings-- carrying a can of Tresemme Tres Two hair spray, extra hold, for the boss. At one such taping, about an hour after Trump had tweeted that he saw MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski “bleeding badly from a facelift,” the president sought feedback from Sims and Spicer.

“They’re going to say it’s not presidential,” Trump said, referring to the media. “But you know what? It’s modern-day presidential.” The president then raged about the Morning Joe program on which Brzezinski appears and instructed Spicer, “Don’t you dare say I watch that show.”

Sims also recounts a meeting with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a longtime friend, and former chief strategist Stephen Bannon at which Sessions suggested a polygraph test of national security officials to root out “leakers” after The Post reported the transcripts of Trump’s phone calls with the Mexican president and Australian prime minister.

At times, Trump evinced less rage than a lack of interest. Sims recounts one time when Ryan was in the Oval Office explaining the ins and outs of the Republican health care bill to the president. As Ryan droned on for 15 minutes, Trump sipped on a glass of Diet Coke, peered out at the Rose Garden, stared aimlessly at the walls and, finally, walked out.

Ryan kept talking as the president wandered down the hall to his private dining room, where he flicked on his giant flat-screen TV. Apparently, he had had enough of Ryan’s talk. It fell to Vice President Mike Pence to retrieve Trump and convince him to return to the Oval Office so they could continue their strategy session.

Sims reconstructs moments of crisis for the West Wing communications team in play-by-play detail, including the domestic abuse allegations against former staff secretary Rob Porter and the firing of James Comey as FBI director.

He paints Spicer, counselor Kellyanne Conway and commun-ications adviser Mercedes Schlapp in an especially negative light, calling Conway “the American Sniper of West Wing marksmen” and describing her agenda as “survival over all others, including the president.”

Sims writes that former aide Omarosa Manigault cursed members of the Congressional Black Caucus when they asked for a moment of privacy in the West Wing after meeting with Trump and before addressing the media.

“Privacy?!” Manigault said. “You think you can come up in our house and demand fucking privacy? Hell, no! You must be outta your... mind.”

The day Trump met black people

Everyone's Sorry-- Except Trump, Who Isn't Sorry For Anything

Did you watch Jake Tapper's CNN show Sunday? Is this what the primary is going to be about-- a parade of unaccomplished candidates apologizing for their unsavory pasts? Then it all becomes a test of who you believe and who you think is just an opportunist faking it. (Gillibrand is the worst so far-- refusing to apologize for destroying Al Franken's career, while making up the crappiest excuses for why she espoused xenophobic, racist, gun-loving policies as a House member-- basically blaming her constituents and demonstrating how she was/is a complete sociopath.) Tulsi was on the show too, but she sounded more credible and authentic in her apologies to the LGBTQ community for "offensive and hurtful statements" in the distant past.

I wonder if interviewers will spend much time speaking with Joe Biden about his slavish devotion to banksters? His handling of the Anita Hill testimony? His "hands on" behavior towards women? The 1994 crime bill? His grotesque anti-integration agenda back in Delaware? His crusade for mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes. Here he is in 1989 attacking Bush from the right for being soft on crime. [And he's OFF!] Yeah... ultimately it will be Biden who's the sorriest of all.

And Biden's not the only candidate with a weak criminal justice record. I haven't heard anyone-- at least not on TV-- take on Kamala Harris for her wobbly record as California Attorney General, particularly in regard to letting Mnuchin off scott free. Lara Bazelon, former director of Loyola Law School Project for the Innocent, in the NY Times last week: "Time after time, when progressives urged her to embrace criminal justice reforms as district attorney and then the state's attorney general, Ms. Harris opposed them or stayed silent. Most troubling, Ms. Harris fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that been secured through official misconduct that included evidence tampering, false testimony and the suppression of crucial information by prosecutors."

Christopher Cadelago wrote a piece for Politico about The I'm Sorry Democratic Primary:

Gabbard issued her apology this week in a video after the past remarks resurfaced with her presidential ambitions. CNN published statements and reports from earlier in her career, including a 2002 quote in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin where she spoke about working against same-sex marriage with her father’s anti-LGBT organization. Also included was a Gabbard quote from her time as a state legislator, when she advocated that “as Democrats, we should be representing the views of the people, not a small number of homosexual extremists.”

“In my past, I said and believed things that were wrong, and worse, they were very hurtful to the people in the LGBTQ community and to their loved ones,” Gabbard said in the apology video.



For Gillibrand, who announced her plans to seek the White House Tuesday on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, the questions she now faces trace back to her political rise in 2006. That year, she won an underdog challenge to Republican then-Rep. John Sweeney in a GOP-heavy, overwhelmingly white New York district.

In the House, Gillibrand earned an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association; opposed driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants; and, according to a CNN report, opposed “amnesty for illegal immigrants” and voted to increase funding for U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement to work with local law enforcement on deportations. Those and other past Gillibrand positions, including wanting to make English the official language of the U.S., were recounted in painstaking detail by Maddow.

The liberal host didn’t hold back in her introduction, referring to Gillibrand’s political “transformation.”

“She has been on her own party’s right,” the popular MSNBC host said. “She has been on her own party’s left.”

Gillibrand, for her part, said she came to realize the errors of her ways when she became a senator and met with the Brooklyn family of a slain teenager-- a story she often cites to explain her shift on gun control. “And now, I’ve been a leader on these issues,” the senator added, noting her support for universal background checks and bans on assault rifles and large magazines.

Later, Maddow said she was struck to hear Gillibrand tell CBS’ “60 Minutes” that she was essentially embarrassed by her previous positions on immigrants.

“Well, I don't think it was driven from my heart. I was callous to the suffering of families who want to be with their loved ones, people who want to be reunited with their families,” Gillibrand said.

Looking back, she added, “I really regretted that I didn’t look beyond my district and talk about why this is an important part of the United States story, and why it’s an important part of our strength.”

And there's Cory Booker. Is he going to start apologizing for his coziness with Wall Street? How about his charter school support, which he was up to again over the weekend.

Wouldn't you rather hear candidates saying something like this instead of whining about being sorry about their miserable records? Guess who said this: "When so many others have abdicated their responsibility, it's on all of us to breathe fire."

One of the many things Trump is never sorry about is the swampiest administration in American history. The worst and most ignorant "executive" always surrounds himself with people even stupider than he is. In his new book, Let me Finish, Chris Christie wasn't complementary about most Trump staffers or the staff in general. Nothing we didn't already know, but...

Donald so urgently needed the right people around him and a solid structure in place... Far too often, he’s found himself saddled with the riffraff.

Instead of high-quality, vetted appointees for key administration posts, he got the Russian lackey and future federal felon Michael Flynn as national security adviser. He got the greedy and inexperienced Scott Pruitt as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.

He got the high-flying Tom Price as health and human services secretary. He got the not-ready-for-prime-time Jeff Sessions as attorney general, promptly recusing himself from the Justice Department’s Russian-collusion probe. He got a stranger named Rex Tillerson as secretary of state…

He got the Apprentice show loser Omarosa Manigault in whatever Omarosa’s job purported to be. (I never could figure that one out.)… Too few Kellyanne Conways. A boatload of Sebastian Gorkas. Too few Steven Mnuchins.

One Kellyanne is way more than enough. Ditto for Mnuchin, who should actually be in prison. But the rest of the assessments all seem right on. But don't mix up the Chris Christie book with the Cliff Sims White House tell-all, Team of Vipers. Who's sorry now? Former Trump chief of staff John Kelly? "This is the worst fucking job I’ve ever had. People apparently think that I care when they write that I might be fired. If that ever happened, it would be the best day I’ve had since I walked into this place."

Did Kirsten Gillibrand's Interview With Jake Tapper Yesterday End Any Chance She May Have Had For A Place On A National Ticket?

I'm not the only one who's noticed that Trump would have probably been happier as a TV critics than as a failed, illegitimate fake-president. And, sure enough, former White House aide Cliff Sims' new book, Team of Vipers described Trump as he watched TV in his private dining room off the Oval Office: "He consumed TV like the late Roger Ebert must have watched movies... He commented on the sets, the graphics, the wardrobe choices, the lighting, and just about every other visual component of a broadcast. Sure, he liked to hear pundits saying nice things about him or White House officials defending him from attacks, but everything came back to how does it look? With that in mind, the most Trumpian tactic the comms team employed was arguing with TV networks about the 'chyrons,' the words displayed at the bottom of the screen that act as headlines for whatever the commentators are discussing. 'People watch TV on mute,' the President told me, 'so it’s those words, those sometimes beautiful, sometimes nasty little words that matter.' ... When the President would deliver a speech somewhere outside of D.C., the research team would take screenshots of all the chyrons that aired while he was speaking. Then, adding those images to headlines and tweets from influential reporters and pundits, they would race to print out a packet before Trump made it back to the White House. The goal was for Sarah or Hope or me-- or whoever hadn’t traveled with him-- to meet him on the ground floor of the residence and hand him the packet to review mere moments after Marine One landed on the South Lawn."

(By the way, since we're quoting from the not-yet-available Team of Vipers, I noticed that the NY Times previewed it this morning as describing "a nest of back-stabbing and duplicity within the West Wing, a narrative by now familiar from other books and news media reports. But Mr. Sims, who left last year after clashing with Mr. Kelly, is one of the few people to attach his name to descriptions of goings-on at the White House that are not always flattering to Mr. Trump, and many of the scenes are not particularly flattering to anyone, including himself.)

Jake Tapper's State of the Union yesterday was smokin' hot-- between the 2 "I'm sorr" candidates, Tulsi and Kirsten and the sorry excuse for a lawyer, Rudy. The clip above is the interview with Kirsten Gillibrand, someone I've been writing about since 2006 when she first ran for Congress with help from Blue America. The chyrons on Tapper's show look pretty neutral. I even tried to do what Trump think people do-- I watched it with the sound off. The Chyrons didn't change the content or the context of the interview, they just left the meaning less clear, which might actually explain why so many otherwise rational people-- not the racists-- voted for Trump. Let's come back to that interview in a second.

Earlier Sunday, Elise Viebeck, reporting for the Washington Post, wrote that "Gillibrand overhauled her political identity during this period, abandoning the conservative positions that made her popular upstate and embracing or even moving further left than the liberal consensus on guns, immigration, Wall Street and same-sex marriage. As the Democratic Party itself moved left, she staked out positions popular with the party’s swelling base of liberals, a posture most evident when she called for abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. She has voted against President Trump’s agenda more than any other senator. Gillibrand’s evolution seemed to reach its apex last week when she introduced herself as a candidate for president and a fighter for liberal values. But her shift in views from a decade ago is already raising questions among Democrats and provoking attacks from Republicans eager to define her as a flip-flopper. Experts who have followed Gillibrand’s rise said the impression that she has hair-trigger judgment and an overriding instinct to capi­tal­ize on the political moment could prove more problematic than any one shift on policy." I did my best to explain just that-- and answer the question about what Gillibrand really stands for-- in Chapter II of The Worst Democraps Who Want To Be President. Yesterday I tried it in tweet-form:

I started the clip at almost 3 minutes in so we'd get right to Gillibrand's well-practiced "I'm sorry" shtik. Tapper asks her if-- since she describes Trump's immigration positions as "racist"-- her immigration positions (identical to Trump's until political opportunism encouraged her to do a 180 on them) were also racist. It's a horrifying segment and I almost feel sorry for Gillibrand. Almost. If she didn't want all this ugliness to come up again, she probably shouldn't have run for president. "I know you have very different positions today," said Tapper, after laying out the hideous mess she ran on during her 2008 reelection campaign, which sounded like a campaign from Mississippi, not New York, "let me ask me, if Trump's immigration positions are 'racist,' were they racist when you held some of those positions as well?" She knew what was coming, of course, but she seemed kicked in the stomach by how Tapper phrased it. Brutal!

"They certainly weren't empathetic and they were not kind," she said, trying to soften the enormity, before admitting she is-- or at least was-- a classic sociopath: "and I did not think about suffering in other people's lives." And one thing I did 10 years ago when I became senator and was going to represent twenty million people across our state, I recognized that a lot of places in my state were different and I needed to understand what those constituents needed too."

Pure fucking evil! If she were to be elected president-- God forbid-- would she feel compelled to find out what her new constituents in Alabama and Mississippi and Idaho needed to and then start advocating for lynchings? She's the most horrible candidate running in the primary and there are some really bad candidates in this primary.

"So I went down," patting herself on the back. "I went down to Brooklyn; I met with Nydia Velázquez, who's been a leader in fighting for families for a long time, and I listened. And I realized that things I had said were wrong. I was not caring about others; I was not fighting for other people's kids the way I was fighting for my own and I was wrong to feel that way. And so I just said I'm not going to stand by and do nothing for families that are suffering in my state and in my communities." She shouldn't be running for president. She shouldn't be a U.S. Senator. She should be getting mental health therapy-- perhaps in a group session with Trump and Steve King. Watch the rest of the clip. This is a really sick, unself-aware person, completely messed up with confusion. She said he values haven't changed. What does that even mean in the context of her bullshit story about changing?