MAUREEN DOWD: Trump, Flush With Power
Sunday, March 18, 2018 -- President Donald Trump finds it's clever to be a fabulist, concocting phony facts about the trade deficit when talking to the Canadian prime minister -- one of our closest allies -- or inventing a story for donors about how Japanese officials test U.S. cars by dropping a bowling ball on their hoods from 20 feet up to see which ones dent. The president thinks he's navigating to his true north while the rest of the world thinks he's headed due south.
Posted — UpdatedThis was the week Donald Trump became president.
Or at least the week he became the president we were always expecting. He ceased bothering to pretend that he was ever going to do the job in any normal sense of the word. He decided to totally own the whole, entire joke that he is.
He started hiring people right off TV. He extended his tiny fingers into his giant flat screen, “Purple Rose of Cairo"-style, and dragged cable conservatives directly into the administration.
He is no longer bothering to pretend that governing involves a learning curve. Now he finds it’s clever to be a fabulist, concocting phony facts about the trade deficit when talking to the Canadian prime minister — one of our closest allies — or inventing a story for donors about how Japanese officials test U.S. cars by dropping a bowling ball on their hoods from 20 feet up to see which ones dent.
The president thinks he’s navigating to his true north while the rest of the world thinks he’s headed due south.
Except the one thing his presidency has definitively proved is that he doesn’t have the foggiest idea how to prepare for a negotiation, let alone negotiate.
“So Trumpian!” Kudlow laughed.
It’s the final Foxification of politics. Trump spends all his time watching Fox News, basing his opinions and tweets on it, and now he’s simply becoming one with it. He is even willing to overlook his distaste for the yeti mustache of the warmongering John Bolton and consider the Fox News analyst as a replacement for McMaster.
Roger Ailes would be so proud, if he were still alive and harassing women.
Trump thinks he’s a fabulously devious manager creating “great energy,” with great ratings coming from his talent for theatrical twists and turns. But he’s really inhumane, playing people against one another and widely discussing successors for officials who haven’t even been officially informed that they’re walking the plank. And, far from the A-team he promised, he’s hired a bunch of pathetic, disgusting swamp schnorrers who can’t stop using taxpayer money to fund their office furniture or office redesign or luxury plane trips with their wives.
“I like conflict,” Trump said this month at a news conference with the Swedish prime minister, smacking his fists together and adding, “I like watching it, I like seeing it, and I think it’s the best way to go.”
Never mind that a lot of the country — and the world — craves stability.
While the president may appear unconstrained, intoxicated with escaping the net of those who displease him by telling him “No,” he is getting ever more enmeshed in another net — Robert Mueller’s.
“I think Trump is royally pissed about the Mueller subpoena of the Trump Organization records,” Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio says about the special counsel crossing the president’s red line. “He fears the nakedness of his true business activities being revealed far more than the shame of ‘Access Hollywood’ or Stormy Daniels. Unlike the show of blank paper in file folders conducted when he supposedly stepped away from his businesses, this will require real documents, and I doubt he can count on people lying for him.”
If you’ve ever had a narcissistic boss, you know that they hate to hear any criticism and love to whack the naysayers and replace them with more compliant types. The circle of sycophants, who do not care about the boss, often spurs the leader’s flameout.
President Trump is doing it his way now. But soon, he’ll be doing it Mueller’s way.
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