Gnawing at Trump

One more Donnie bulletin, because it’s kind of funny, and because it’s about how miserable and furious he is.

He had a bad weekend. A bad bad weekend. Ivanka and Jared were with him but they couldn’t mellow him out.

Trump was mad — steaming, raging mad.

Trump’s young presidency has existed in a perpetual state of chaos. The issue of Russia has distracted from what was meant to be his most triumphant moment: his address last Tuesday to a joint session of Congress. And now his latest unfounded accusation — that Barack Obama tapped Trump’s phones during last fall’s campaign — had been denied by the former president and doubted by both allies and fellow Republicans.

Well if that made him mad, maybe he should have thought a little more before tweeting it.

Gnawing at Trump, according to one of his advisers, is the comparison between his early track record and that of Obama in 2009, when amid the Great Recession he enacted an economic stimulus bill and other big-ticket items.

Welllllll, Donnie, you’re not Obama, are you, and you haven’t been behaving the way Obama did. You didn’t prepare. You didn’t learn what you needed to know. You didn’t get good people to work for you. You didn’t do any of the things you needed to do to make your first weeks more like Obama’s first weeks. You appear to be not smart enough.

The mood at the White House on Tuesday night was different altogether — jubilant. Trump returned from the Capitol shortly before midnight to find his staff assembled in the residence cheering him. Finally, they all thought, they had seized control. The president had even laid off Twitter outbursts — a small victory for a staff often unable to drive a disciplined message.

“He nailed it, and he knew it,” said Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president.

He managed to deliver a speech someone else wrote without barfing or crying. Big deal. You can tell how low their expectations are, when they get excited about that.

But anyway then Sessions ruined everything.

Back at the White House on Friday morning, Trump summoned his senior aides into the Oval Office, where he simmered with rage, according to several White House officials. He upbraided them over Sessions’s decision to recuse himself, believing that Sessions had succumbed to pressure from the media and other critics instead of fighting with the full defenses of the White House.

In a huff, Trump departed for Mar-a-Lago, taking with him from his inner circle only his daughter and Kushner, who is a White House senior adviser. His top two aides, Chief of Staff ­Reince Priebus and Bannon, stayed behind in Washington.

They were on the naughty stool.

As reporters began to hear about the Oval Office meeting, Priebus interrupted his Friday afternoon schedule to dedicate more than an hour to calling reporters off the record to deny that the outburst had actually happened, according to a senior White House official.

“Every time there’s a palace intrigue story or negative story about Reince, the whole West Wing shuts down,” the official said.

Ultimately, Priebus was unable to kill the story. He simply delayed the bad news, as reports of Trump dressing down his staff were published by numerous outlets Saturday.

Poor Reince. I’m glad I’m not Reince.

Trump was brighter Sunday morning as he read several newspapers, pleased that his allegations against Obama were the dominant story, the official said.

But he found reason to be mad again: Few Republicans were defending him on the Sunday political talk shows. Some Trump advisers and allies were especially disappointed in Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), who two days earlier had hitched a ride down to Florida with Trump on Air Force One.

Pressed by NBC’s Chuck Todd to explain Trump’s wiretapping claim, Rubio demurred.

“Look, I didn’t make the allegation,” he said. “I’m not the person that went out there and said it.”

So that was Donnie’s very bad no good horrible weekend.

5 Responses to “Gnawing at Trump”