Thread: President Donald Trump

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And the Trumpie for Best Actor in a Misleading Role goes to . . .
By Dana Milbank Opinion writer (WaPo)

Of all the scandalous revelations in the Michael Wolff book, the most revealing may be the one about the apricot swirl atop the president’s head.
For years, Donald Trump has labored to convince us that “I actually don’t have a bad hairline,” that “it’s not really a comb-over,” that “it’s my real hair.” His personal physician attested that Trump “has all his hair.”
Whom were we to believe: Trump or our own eyes?

Now, via Wolff, comes a plausible explanation from Ivanka Trump of her father’s bouffant: “She often described the mechanics behind it to friends: an absolutely clean pate — a contained island after scalp-reduction [at]surgery — surrounded by a furry circle of hair around the sides and front, from which all ends are drawn up to meet in the center and then swept back and secured by a stiffening spray.” And the color “was from a product called Just for Men — the longer it was left on, the darker it got. Impatience resulted in Trump’s orange-blond hair color.”
There it is, in orange and white: Everything about the man is deceptive, even the style of his hair — and the size of his button.

After Trump boasted about the largeness and functionality of his “nuclear button” this week, a few reporters pointed out that the only button on his desk in the Oval Office is for him to order a Diet Coke. Maybe Trump thinks he is ordering a nuclear strike each time he presses that button and that he is then being rewarded with a Diet Coke?

There are valid questions about the validity of some anecdotes in the book, “Fire and Fury,” but former top Trump strategist Stephen K. Bannon, whose quotes are the most damning, hasn’t disputed their accuracy. It’s as if Trump has a force field of falsehood around him: The further people get from him, the more they succumb to reality.
In September, when Bannon had just left the White House and was still in Trump’s force field, he proclaimed to “60 Minutes” that “there’s nothing to the Russia investigation. It’s a waste of time.” In the book, Bannon is quoted as saying that the Trump campaign meeting with Russians was “treasonous” and “unpatriotic,” that there is “zero” chance Donald Trump Jr. didn’t introduce the Russians to his father, and that investigators are “going to crack Don Junior like an egg.”
It’s no small irony that book excerpts showing Trump’s perfidy appeared the day after Trump announced that he would host “THE MOST DISHONEST & CORRUPT MEDIA AWARDS,” featuring “Bad Reporting in various categories.” Call it the Trumpies?

For once in his life, Trump is being modest. In the field of dishonesty, it is he who deserves the Cecil B. DeMille Award for Lifetime Achievement: Obama wiretapped him. He had the largest inauguration audience ever. The Russia story is fake news. Muslims celebrated in New Jersey on 9/11. He only got a small loan from dad. Hillary Clinton started the “birther” movement. The tax cut will cost him a fortune.
Glenn Kessler and his Fact Checker team at The Post report that Trump has made 1,950 false or misleading claims in office.
I would nominate Trump in the “Best Original Story” category for his recent claims that President Barack Obama’s plane “never got to land” in the Philippines: “The plane came close but it didn’t land.” This is pure fabrication.

In the “Best Adapted Fact” category, I would nominate Trump for his claim this week via Twitter: “Since taking office I have been very strict on Commercial Aviation. Good news — it was just reported that there were Zero deaths in 2017, the best and safest year on record!” There hasn’t been a fatal passenger crash by a U.S. airline in America since 2009.

In the “Best Actor in a Misleading Role” category, I again nominate Trump, this time for boasting, some 85 times by Kessler’s count, about stock market records — contradicting his claim that the same bull market under Obama was “artificial” and “a bubble.”
And, in the “Best Made-up” category, I nominate Trump’s claim Thursday that Wolff had “zero access to the White House.” Reporters saw Wolff at the White House many times.
Maybe Trump and his few still-loyal aides are telling the truth: Former Trump aide Katie Walsh didn’t say working with Trump was “like trying to figure out what a child wants,” Melania Trump didn’t weep with sorrow when her husband won, and various aides and pals didn’t describe Trump as an “idiot,” “dumb,” “stupid,” “crazy,” a “dope” and semiliterate.
But on the “Today” show Friday, Wolff had a compelling retort: “My credibility is being questioned by a man who has less credibility than perhaps anyone who has walked the earth.”
Give a Trumpie to that scalp-reduced guy with the $7 dye job!

As soon as the campaign team had stepped into the White House, Walsh saw, it had gone from managing Trump to the expectation of being managed by him. Yet the president, while proposing the most radical departure from governing and policy norms in several generations, had few specific ideas about how to turn his themes and vitriol into policy. And making suggestions to him was deeply complicated. Here, arguably, was the central issue of the Trump presidency, informing every aspect of Trumpian policy and leadership: 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-[at]literate. He trusted his own expertise [at]— no matter how paltry or irrelevant — more than anyone else’s. He was often confident, but he was just as often paralyzed, less a savant than a figure of sputtering and dangerous insecurities, whose instinctive response was to lash out and behave as if his gut, however confused, was in fact in some clear and forceful way telling him what to do. It was, said Walsh, “like trying to figure out what a child wants.”
By the end of the second week following the immigration EO, the three advisers were in open conflict with one another. For Walsh, it was a daily process of managing an impossible task: Almost as soon as she received direction from one of the three men, it would be countermanded by one or another of them.
“I take a conversation at face value and move forward with it,” she said. “I put what was decided on the schedule and bring in comms and build a press plan around it … And then Jared says, ‘Why did you do that?’ And I say, ‘Because we had a meeting three days ago with you and Reince and Steve where you agreed to do this.’ And he says, ‘But that didn’t mean I wanted it on the schedule …’ It almost doesn’t matter what anyone says: Jared will agree, and then it will get sabotaged, and then Jared goes to the president and says, see, that was Reince’s idea or Steve’s idea.”
If Bannon, Priebus, and Kushner were now fighting a daily war with one another, it was exacerbated by the running disinformation campaign about them that was being prosecuted by the president himself. When he got on the phone after dinner, he’d speculate on the flaws and weaknesses of each member of his staff. Bannon was disloyal (not to mention he always looks like shit). Priebus was weak (not to mention he was short — a midget). Kushner was a suck-up. Sean Spicer was stupid (and looks terrible too). Conway was a crybaby. Jared and Ivanka should never have come to Washington.

During that first month, Walsh’s disbelief and even fear about what was happening in the White House moved her to think about quitting. Every day after that became a countdown toward the moment she knew she wouldn’t be able to take it anymore. To Walsh, the proud political pro, the chaos, the rivalries, and the president’s own lack of focus were simply incomprehensible. In early March, not long before she left, she confronted Kushner with a simple request. “Just give me the three things the president wants to focus on,” she demanded. “What are the three priorities of this White House?”
It was the most basic question imaginable — one that any qualified presidential candidate would have answered long before he took up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Six weeks into Trump’s presidency, Kushner was wholly without an answer.
“Yes,” he said to Walsh. “We should probably have that conversation.”