Meltdown in CRAZYTOWN
Random assassination demands. Watching golf instead of fighting terror. An 11-year-old’s grasp of world affairs. A bombshell new book by the man who brought down Nixon claims to lay bare the surreal truth about Trump’s presidency
Former White House economic adviser Gary Cohn tried to pull up Trump – who is currently threatening trade wars across the globe – about his aggressive stance on international commerce. ‘Several times Cohn just asked the president, “Why do you have these views [on trade]?”, writes Woodward.
‘I just do,’ Trump replied. ‘I’ve had these views for 30 years.’
‘That doesn’t mean they’re right,’ Cohn said bluntly.
It was Cohn who ‘stole a letter off Trump’s desk’ that the president was intending to sign to formally withdraw the US from a trade deal with close ally South Korea.
He told a colleague he did it to protect national security, adding that the president hadn’t even noticed. Cohn – who repeatedly stole or hid papers with former staff secretary Rob Porter – reportedly offered to pull off the same outrageous stunt again when Trump ordered the drafting of a letter withdrawing the US from its trade agreement with Canada and Mexico. ‘I can stop this,’ Cohn told fretting colleagues: ‘I’ll just take the paper off his desk.’
Woodward writes damningly of the significance of all this tomfoolery: ‘Members of his staff had joined [together] to purposefully block some of what they believed were the president’s most dangerous impulses. It was a nervous
eakdown of the executive power the most powerful country in the rld.’ Despite Trump’s best efforts hich apparently don’t stack up to uch) and repeated threats, the portant US trade deals with both uth Korea and its North American neighbours remain intact.
According to the book, Trump is as brutally dismissive of his team as they are of him, the latter happily swapping notes on their experience of his stupidity, duplicity and stubbornness.
It seems some staff have tried to hint to him about their reservations, with former personal lawyer John Dowd warning him that if he spoke to the investigation into possible election collusion with Russia being run by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, he risked compromising himself.
‘Don’t testify. It’s either that or an orange [prison] jumpsuit,’ Dowd reportedly told the president. Dowd decided Trump shouldn’t speak to the Mueller investigation because – after running through a mock interview – he became convinced the president couldn’t do it without lying, says Woodward. The lawyer saw the ‘full nightmare’ of an interview, and felt Trump acted like an ‘aggrieved Shakespearean king’, says Woodward. Dowd rejected the claims. Trump is said to have told Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross point blank: ‘I don’t trust you... you’re past your prime.’ He’s reportedly been cruellest about his Attorney General Jeff Sessions, saying: ‘This guy is mentally retarded. He’s this dumb Southerner.’
Trump denies he said this, and both chief-of-staff Kelly (who reportedly described him as an ‘idiot’ who’s ‘gone off the rails’) and defence secretary Mattis have rejected the book’s claims about how they have derided Trump. There was speculation last night that Trump may sack Mattis.
If he doesn’t have time for his generals, intelligence experts and business leaders, who does have the ear of the president?
Yesterday, reality TV star Kim Kardashian – who successfully pushed Trump to pardon a drug offender earlier this year – was welcomed back to the White House for another meeting about prison reform with senior aides including the president’s daughter Ivanka.
For a president who has two obsessions – TV and his celebrity image – this will have been an appointment worth clearing the diary for.