Trump, flush with power, starts hiring people off TV
Maureen Dowd
This 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 he was ever going to do the job in any normal sense. 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.
We’ve always known Trump makes stuff up.
But now he has stopped bothering to pretend he doesn’t. Truthful hyperbole is out. Outlandish fabrication is in. Trump began bragging to Republicans at a private fundraiser in St. Louis on Wednesday: Oh, get a load of this trade stuff I made up to outfox that fox, Justin Trudeau. I felt bad doing it to such a nice, good-looking guy. But it’s hilarious!
The president thinks he’s navigating to his true north while the rest of the world thinks he’s headed due south.
Trump & Friends presented this dizzying White House purge as a twisted version of him growing into the job, even as everyone else felt he was going in the opposite direction, behaving disgracefully by 86-ing Rex Tillerson in a tweet and tormenting other staffers he finds annoying or uppity.
Trump got his next moment of gross exaltation when Jeff Sessions, frantically trying to save his own job, fired Andrew McCabe hours before he would have become eligible for his government pension and on his birthday weekend. John Brennan, the former director of the CIA, tweeted that Trump will take his “rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history.” Then the president’s lawyer, John Dowd, said he will “pray” that Rod Rosenstein “will follow the brilliant example” of Sessions and end the Russia investigation.
Trump is giddy about all the CHAOS (he capitalized it on Twitter), feeling he’s ridding himself of idiots who called him a moron or dumb as a rock and any economists who don’t understand what a dealmaker he is.
Except the one thing his presidency has definitively proved is that he doesn’t have the foggiest idea how to negotiate.
As if Omarosa filling a top White House job between reality shows was not weird enough, The Times’ Michael Grynbaum described a “hall-of-mirrors moment” on Wednesday: Larry Kudlow, a chatterer plucked from CNBC to replace Gary Cohn as Trump’s chief economic adviser, went on TV to describe the president telling Kudlow how “very handsome” he looks on TV.
Trump spends all his time watching Fox News, basing his opinions and tweets on it, and now he’s becoming one with it.
Far from the A-team he promised, he’s hired a bunch of pathetic swamp schnorrers who can’t stop using taxpayer money to fund their office furniture or luxury plane trips.
While the president may appear unconstrained, he is getting ever more enmeshed in another net — Robert Mueller’s.
“I think Trump is
(upset) about the subpoena of the Trump Organization records,” Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio says “He fears the nakedness of his true business activities far more than ‘Access Hollywood’ or Stormy Daniels.”
President Trump is doing it his way now. But soon, he’ll be doing it Mueller’s way.