Trump 35: Still an Asshole to Everyone but Ivanka

[GreyhoundFan]

I've already pre-ordered this book, it sounds like a doozy: "Bob Woodward’s new book reveals a ‘nervous breakdown’ of Trump’s presidency"

Spoiler

John Dowd was convinced that President Trump would commit perjury if he talked to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. So, on Jan. 27, the president’s then-personal attorney staged a practice session to try to make his point.

In the White House residence, Dowd peppered Trump with questions about the Russia investigation, provoking stumbles, contradictions and lies until the president eventually lost his cool.

“This thing’s a goddamn hoax,” Trump erupted at the start of a 30-minute rant that finished with him saying, “I don’t really want to testify.”

The dramatic and previously untold scene is recounted in “Fear,” a forthcoming book by Bob Woodward that paints a harrowing portrait of the Trump presidency, based on in-depth interviews with administration officials and other principals.

Woodward writes that his book is drawn from hundreds of hours of interviews with firsthand participants and witnesses that were conducted on “deep background,” meaning the information could be used but he would not reveal who provided it. His account is also drawn from meeting notes, personal diaries and government documents.

Woodward depicts Trump’s anger and paranoia about the Russia inquiry as unrelenting, at times paralyzing the West Wing for entire days. Learning of the appointment of Mueller in May 2017, Trump groused, “Everybody’s trying to get me”— part of a venting period that shellshocked aides compared to Richard Nixon’s final days as president.

The 448-page book was obtained by The Washington Post. Woodward, an associate editor at The Post, sought an interview with Trump through several intermediaries to no avail. The president called Woodward in early August, after the manuscript had been completed, to say he wanted to participate. The president complained that it would be a “bad book,” according to an audio recording of the conversation. Woodward replied that his work would be “tough,” but factual and based on his reporting.

A central theme of the book is the stealthy machinations used by those in Trump’s inner sanctum to try to control his impulses and prevent disasters, both for the president personally and for the nation he was elected to lead.

Woodward describes “an administrative coup d’etat” and a “nervous breakdown” of the executive branch, with senior aides conspiring to pluck official papers from the president’s desk so he couldn’t see or sign them.

Again and again, Woodward recounts at length how Trump’s national security team was shaken by his lack of curiosity and knowledge about world affairs and his contempt for the mainstream perspectives of military and intelligence leaders.

At a National Security Council meeting on Jan. 19, Trump disregarded the significance of the massive U.S. military presence on the Korean Peninsula, including a special intelligence operation that allows the United States to detect a North Korean missile launch in seven seconds vs. 15 minutes from Alaska, according to Woodward. Trump questioned why the government was spending resources in the region at all.

“We’re doing this in order to prevent World War III,” Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told him.

After Trump left the meeting, Woodward recounts, “Mattis was particularly exasperated and alarmed, telling close associates that the president acted like — and had the understanding of — ‘a fifth- or sixth-grader.’ ”

In Woodward’s telling, many top advisers were repeatedly unnerved by Trump’s actions and expressed dim views of him. “Secretaries of defense don’t always get to choose the president they work for,” Mattis told friends at one point, prompting laughter as he explained Trump’s tendency to go off on tangents about subjects such as immigration and the news media.

Inside the White House, Woodward portrays an unsteady executive detached from the conventions of governing and prone to snapping at high-ranking staff members, whom he unsettled and belittled on a daily basis.

White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly frequently lost his temper and told colleagues that he thought the president was “unhinged,” Woodward writes. In one small group meeting, Kelly said of Trump: “He’s an idiot. It’s pointless to try to convince him of anything. He’s gone off the rails. We’re in Crazytown. I don’t even know why any of us are here. This is the worst job I’ve ever had.”

Reince Priebus, Kelly’s predecessor, fretted that he could do little to constrain Trump from sparking chaos. Woodward writes that Priebus dubbed the presidential bedroom, where Trump obsessively watched cable news and tweeted, “the devil’s workshop,” and said early mornings and Sunday evenings, when the president often set off tweetstorms, were “the witching hour.”

Trump apparently had little regard for Priebus. He once instructed then-staff secretary Rob Porter to ignore Priebus, even though Porter reported to the chief of staff, saying that Priebus was “‘like a little rat. He just scurries around.’”

Few in Trump’s orbit were protected from the president’s insults. He often mocked former national security adviser H.R. McMaster behind his back, puffing up his chest and exaggerating his breathing as he impersonated the retired Army general, and once said McMaster dresses in cheap suits, “like a beer salesman.”

Trump told Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, a wealthy investor eight years his senior: “I don’t trust you. I don’t want you doing any more negotiations. … You’re past your prime.”

A near-constant subject of withering presidential attacks was Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Trump told Porter that Sessions was a “traitor” for recusing himself from overseeing the Russia investigation, Woodward writes. Mocking Sessions’s accent, Trump added, “This guy is mentally retarded. He’s this dumb Southerner. … He couldn’t even be a one-person country lawyer down in Alabama.”

At a dinner with Mattis and Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, among others, Trump lashed out at a vocal critic, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). He falsely suggested that the former Navy pilot had been a coward for taking early release from a prisoner-of-war camp in Vietnam because of his father’s military rank and leaving others behind.

Mattis swiftly corrected his boss: “No, Mr. President, I think you’ve got it reversed.” The defense secretary explained that McCain, who died Aug. 25, had in fact turned down early release and was brutally tortured during his five years at the Hanoi Hilton.

“Oh, okay,” Trump replied, according to Woodward’s account.

With Trump’s rage and defiance impossible to contain, Cabinet members and other senior officials learned to act discreetly. Woodward describes an alliance among Trump’s traditionalists — including Mattis and Gary Cohn, the president’s former top economic adviser — to stymie what they considered dangerous acts.

“It felt like we were walking along the edge of the cliff perpetually,” Porter is quoted as saying. “Other times, we would fall over the edge, and an action would be taken.”

After Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad launched a chemical attack on civilians in April 2017, Trump called Mattis and said he wanted to assassinate the dictator. “Let’s fucking kill him! Let’s go in. Let’s kill the fucking lot of them,” Trump said, according to Woodward.

Mattis told the president that he would get right on it. But after hanging up the phone, he told a senior aide: “We’re not going to do any of that. We’re going to be much more measured.” The national security team developed options for the more conventional airstrike that Trump ultimately ordered.

Cohn, a Wall Street veteran, tried to tamp down Trump’s strident nationalism regarding trade. According to Woodward, Cohn “stole a letter off Trump’s desk” that the president was intending to sign to formally withdraw the United States from a trade agreement with South Korea. Cohn later told an associate that he removed the letter to protect national security and that Trump did not notice that it was missing.

Cohn made a similar play to prevent Trump from pulling the United States out of the North American Free Trade Agreement, something the president has long threatened to do. In spring 2017, Trump was eager to withdraw from NAFTA and told Porter: “Why aren’t we getting this done? Do your job. It’s tap, tap, tap. You’re just tapping me along. I want to do this.”

Under orders from the president, Porter drafted a notification letter withdrawing from NAFTA. But he and other advisers worried that it could trigger an economic and foreign relations crisis. So Porter consulted Cohn, who told him, according to Woodward: “I can stop this. I’ll just take the paper off his desk.”

Despite repeated threats by Trump, the United States has remained in both pacts. The administration continues to negotiate new terms with South Korea as well as with its NAFTA partners, Canada and Mexico.

Cohn came to regard the president as “a professional liar” and threatened to resign in August 2017 over Trump’s handling of a deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville. Cohn, who is Jewish, was especially shaken when one of his daughters found a swastika on her college dorm room.

Trump was sharply criticized for initially saying that “both sides” were to blame. At the urging of advisers, he then condemned white supremacists and neo-Nazis, but almost immediately told aides, “That was the biggest fucking mistake I’ve made” and the “worst speech I’ve ever given,” according to Woodward’s account.

When Cohn met with Trump to deliver his resignation letter after Charlottesville, the president told him, “This is treason,” and persuaded his economic adviser to stay on. Kelly then confided to Cohn that he shared Cohn’s horror at Trump’s handling of the tragedy — and shared Cohn’s fury with Trump.

“I would have taken that resignation letter and shoved it up his ass six different times,” Kelly told Cohn, according to Woodward. Kelly himself has threatened to quit several times, but has not done so.

Woodward illustrates how the dread in Trump’s orbit became all-encompassing over the course of Trump’s first year in office, leaving some staff members and Cabinet members confounded by the president’s lack of understanding about how government functions and his inability and unwillingness to learn.

At one point, Porter, who departed in February amid domestic abuse allegations, is quoted as saying, “This was no longer a presidency. This is no longer a White House. This is a man being who he is.”

Such moments of panic are a routine feature, but not the thrust of Woodward’s book, which mostly focuses on substantive decisions and internal disagreements, including tensions with North Korea as well as the future of U.S. policy in Afghanistan.

Woodward recounts repeated episodes of anxiety inside the government over Trump’s handling of the North Korean nuclear threat. One month into his presidency, Trump asked Dunford for a plan for a preemptive military strike on North Korea, which rattled the combat veteran.

In the fall of 2017, as Trump intensified a war of words with Kim Jong Un, nicknaming North Korea’s dictator “Little Rocket Man” in a speech at the United Nations, aides worried the president might be provoking Kim. But, Woodward writes, Trump told Porter that he saw the situation as a contest of wills: “This is all about leader versus leader. Man versus man. Me versus Kim.”

The book also details Trump’s impatience with the war in Afghanistan, which had become America’s longest conflict. At a July 2017 National Security Council meeting, Trump dressed down his generals and other advisers for 25 minutes, complaining that the United States was losing, according to Woodward.

“The soldiers on the ground could run things much better than you,” Trump told them. “They could do a much better job. I don’t know what the hell we’re doing.” He went on to ask, “How many more deaths? How many more lost limbs? How much longer are we going to be there?”

The president’s family members, while sometimes touted as his key advisers by other Trump chroniclers, are minor players in Woodward’s account, popping up occasionally in the West Wing and vexing adversaries.

Woodward recounts an expletive-laden altercation between Ivanka Trump, the president’s eldest daughter and senior adviser, and Stephen K. Bannon, the former chief White House strategist.

“You’re a goddamn staffer!” Bannon screamed at her, telling her that she had to work through Priebus like other aides. “You walk around this place and act like you’re in charge, and you’re not. You’re on staff!”

Ivanka Trump, who had special access to the president and worked around Priebus, replied: “I’m not a staffer! I’ll never be a staffer. I’m the first daughter.”

Such tensions boiled among many of Trump’s core advisers. Priebus is quoted as describing Trump officials not as rivals but as “natural predators.”

“When you put a snake and a rat and a falcon and a rabbit and a shark and a seal in a zoo without walls, things start getting nasty and bloody,” Priebus says.

Hovering over the White House was Mueller’s inquiry, which deeply embarrassed the president. Woodward describes Trump calling his Egyptian counterpart to secure the release of an imprisoned charity worker and President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi saying: “Donald, I’m worried about this investigation. Are you going to be around?”

Trump relayed the conversation to Dowd and said it was “like a kick in the nuts,” according to Woodward.

The book vividly recounts the ongoing debate between Trump and his lawyers about whether the president would sit for an interview with Mueller. On March 5, Dowd and Trump attorney Jay Sekulow met in Mueller’s office with the special counsel and his deputy, James Quarles, where Dowd and Sekulow reenacted Trump’s January practice session.

Dowd then explained to Mueller and Quarles why he was trying to keep the president from testifying: “I’m not going to sit there and let him look like an idiot. And you publish that transcript, because everything leaks in Washington, and the guys overseas are going to say, ‘I told you he was an idiot. I told you he was a goddamn dumbbell. What are we dealing with this idiot for?’ ”

“John, I understand,” Mueller replied, according to Woodward.

Later that month, Dowd told Trump: “Don’t testify. It’s either that or an orange jumpsuit.”

But Trump, concerned about the optics of a president refusing to testify and convinced that he could handle Mueller’s questions, had by then decided otherwise.

“I’ll be a real good witness,” Trump told Dowd, according to Woodward.

“You are not a good witness,” Dowd replied. “Mr. President, I’m afraid I just can’t help you.”

The next morning, Dowd resigned.

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[candygirl200413]

Wasn't fitness of health a similar issue with Regan which people didn't really care because a certain side just needs to remove rights from anyone that isn't he majority?

[Drala]

Even Andy Borowitz lost his cool and got serious on this one.

[Drala]

Even for Faux News' Brit Hume it was a bridge too far.  Of all the stupid shit that flows from Der Trumpster's little twitter fingers, don't know why this irks me so much.

 

[AmazonGrace]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/09/04/transcript-phone-call-between-president-trump-journalist-bob-woodward/?utm_term=.3039da4af0d5

This man is supposed to rule a country and he can't even get his staffers to fix him an interview he says he wanted to do.

Also now we know why Raj Shah's press briefings are useless. He doesn't have access to Trump.

[AmazonGrace]

I can't get past this bit
 

Quote

 

The book vividly recounts the ongoing debate between Trump and his lawyers about whether the president would sit for an interview with Mueller. On March 5, Dowd and Trump attorney Jay Sekulow met in Mueller’s office with the special counsel and his deputy, James Quarles, where Dowd and Sekulow reenacted Trump’s January practice session.

Dowd then explained to Mueller and Quarles why he was trying to keep the president from testifying: “I’m not going to sit there and let him look like an idiot. And you publish that transcript, because everything leaks in Washington, and the guys overseas are going to say, ‘I told you he was an idiot. I told you he was a goddamn dumbbell. What are we dealing with this idiot for?’ ”

“John, I understand,” Mueller replied, according to Woodward.

 

I think the guys overseas already know that he's a goddamn dumbbell but this is an awesome defense. "My client can't testify without making a fool of himself."

[GreyhoundFan]

From conservative columnist Max Boot: "President Trump is unfit for office. Bob Woodward’s ‘Fear’ confirms it."

Spoiler

If you take seriously the revelations in Bob Woodward’s book “Fear” — and how can you not, given Woodward’s nearly half-century of scoops about Washington’s elite? — then it’s time for President Trump to be removed from office via the 25th Amendment because he is clearly “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” That will never happen, because the Cabinet is packed with Trump toadies who compete with each other to deliver the most fawning praise of their supreme leader. But on the merits, it should happen.

Of course, it doesn’t take Woodward’s revelations to demonstrate Trump’s unfitness for office. Trump demonstrates it on a daily basis with his campaign-rally rants and Twitter tirades. Just in the past day, the president has demanded that the Justice Department drop criminal investigations against his supporters because it could cost Republicans House seats, and suggested that NBC lose its broadcast license because, in essence, he objects to the criticism he receives on MSNBC. A senior Justice Department official told Axios: “It shows how POTUS thinks DOJ should be used: As a weapon against enemies and a tool to win elections.” In a normal world — a world where Congress was not controlled by blind Republican partisans — the fact that Trump continues to make demands so at odds with the rule of law would be cause for his impeachment and removal.

But even if Woodward doesn’t break  ground in conceptual terms, he does provide damning new evidence to buttress what we already know — that after more than 18 months in office, Trump is just as unqualified as ever to be president. Even Republicans know it. They just choose to deny it, because it would be too dangerous to their political well-being to admit reality.

Some of what Woodward reports has long been rumored in Washington, but he appears to have nailed down with his reporting the evidence showing that Trump had to be talked out of pulling U.S. troops out of South Korea and Afghanistan, planning a preventive strike against North Korea, assassinating Bashar al-Assad of Syria, and tearing up the North American Free Trade Agreement and the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement. Aides had to resort to sleight of hand to prevent the worst from happening — including removing papers from Trump’s desk before he signed them.

Woodward also reveals a new example of Trump’s dim-wittedness: The president apparently thought that Sen. John McCain had “been a coward for taking early release from a prisoner-of-war camp in Vietnam because of his father’s military rank and leaving others behind.” Maybe Trump genuinely thought McCain wasn’t a hero because he had no understanding of what McCain had done? Defense Secretary Jim Mattis had to gently explain to Trump that “you’ve got it reversed.”

Little wonder that Woodward quotes Mattis telling associates “that the president acted like — and had the understanding of — ‘a fifth- or sixth-grader.’  ” Or that Chief of Staff John F. Kelly reportedly said of Trump: “He’s an idiot. It’s pointless to try to convince him of anything. He’s gone off the rails. We’re in Crazytown.” There is also ample evidence to buttress economic adviser Gary Cohn’s conclusion that Trump is a “professional liar.” Trump even lied in a telephone conversation with Woodward, denying any knowledge that the veteran reporter wanted to interview him before admitting that Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) had relayed the request.

Trump, in turn, belittles his senior aides in ways that would be shocking coming from anybody else. He made fun of retired Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, a war hero, for dressing in cheap suits “like a beer salesman.” If only McMaster had devoted his life to selling real estate rather than protecting our nation, he would presumably have more of a suit-buying budget. And, not surprisingly, Trump was even more scathing about Attorney General Jeff Sessions in private than he is public. Acting just like the coastal elites he so often denigrates (but actually envies), Trump mocked Sessions’s accent and said, “This guy is mentally retarded. He’s this dumb Southerner. … He couldn’t even be a one-person country lawyer down in Alabama.”

Imagine the outcry among Republicans if Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama had been caught making fun of Sessions’s accent and intelligence. But from Republicans all you hear is the sound of silence.

These revelations will be greeted among Republicans not as a sign of Trump’s unfitness for office — which they are — but as more evidence of a conspiracy among the “fake news media” against their electoral hero. That is the genius of Trump’s attacks on the press and on truth itself: He has largely inoculated his base against all of the damaging revelations that continue to emerge about the most corrupt and dysfunctional administration in U.S. history. And by keeping the support of his base (78 percent of Republicans approve of him in a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll), Trump protects himself from removal either via the 25th Amendment or the Article II impeachment process.

Kelly is right. We really are in Crazytown. But Trump is far from the craziest person in town. His defects are no secret — they were obvious before his election. The really crazy people are the Republicans who think we should continue to entrust a man manifestly unfit to be Queens Borough president with the presidency of the United States of America.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

[GreyhoundFan]

[Howl]

2 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

OK, this is one of the best things ever! 

[AmazonGrace]

White House attacks Bob Woodward. 

https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_58011198e4b0e8c198a7d5ad from Huff: Trump has a history of calling people retarded  

Here's Howard Stern with the receipts.

I mean, Trump lies about easily verifiable things all the time but Bob Woodward who has hundreds of hours of tapes is the liar 

 

 

[fraurosena]

Oh, for pity's sake! Now he's advocating abolishing the First Amendment.

 

[47of74]

Oh, for pity's sake! Now he's advocating abolishing the First Amendment.
 

Yeah the only Amendment fuck face and the GOP like is the 2nd. They want all the others to go away.

[GreyhoundFan]

50 minutes ago, 47of74 said:

Yeah the only Amendment fuck face and the GOP like is the 2nd. They want all the others to go away.

That's not exactly true. They like the 1st Amendment for Repugs. And Faux News.

[47of74]

That's not exactly true. They like the 1st Amendment for Repugs. And Faux News.

True. And they like the 1A part that they think gives them permission to use Gawd and Jeeeeezus to oppress others.

[fraurosena]

I can't wait for the 'Those tapes are FAKE!!!' tweets....

 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Because of course: "Trump suggests libel laws should be changed after uproar over Woodward book"

Spoiler

President Trump suggested Wednesday that Congress should change libel laws so that he would be better positioned to seek “retribution” against Bob Woodward, the author of an explosive new book that portrays a presidency careening toward a “nervous breakdown.”

“Isn’t it a shame that someone can write an article or book, totally make up stories and form a picture of a person that is literally the exact opposite of the fact, and get away with it without retribution or cost,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “Don’t know why Washington politicians don’t change libel laws?”

The tweet was part an aggressive effort by the White House to discredit Woodward’s forthcoming book, “Fear,” which paints a harrowing portrait of the Trump presidency, based on in-depth interviews with administration officials and others.

Woodward, an associate editor at The Washington Post, has said he stands by his reporting.

During an appearance on Fox News Channel shortly after Trump’s tweet, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said she hasn’t “had the conversation” with Trump about any legal action he might pursue against Woodward. Trump has frequently threatened legal action against others he says have wronged him without following through.

In January, Trump called for a change in libel laws — most of which are crafted at the state level — after the publication of “Fire & Fury,” a tell-all book about the White House by Michael Wolff. At the time, Trump said current libel laws are a sham and a disgrace and do not represent American values or American fairness.”

Hours after The Post first reported several key incidents from Woodward’s book Tuesday, the administration issued a string of public denials, with statements from top advisers — White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Sanders — as well as from Trump’s former personal attorney John Dowd.

Mattis called the book “fiction,” and Sanders denounced it in a statement as “nothing more than fabricated stories, many by former disgruntled employees” without disputing any of the specifics that have been reported in excerpts.

Sanders appeared on several Wednesday morning television shows to reinforce that message.

“Everything I’ve seen so far out of this book doesn’t depict what’s going on in this building behind me,” Sanders, appearing from the White House lawn, said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “You can’t have the type of success that this president has had if what that book says is true. . . . What I see coming out of this building is pure and total success. He’s had the most successful two years of any president in modern history.”

Sanders also cited the past military service of Mattis and Kelly and called them “two American heroes” who consider the book “pure fiction.”

“I would certainly rather take the word of those two individuals than a couple of disgruntled former employees who are anonymously attacking this president, trying to make him look bad,” she said.

A central theme of the book is the stealthy machinations used by those in Trump’s inner sanctum to try to control his impulses and prevent disasters, both for him personally and for the nation.

Woodward describes “an administrative coup d’etat” and a “nervous breakdown” of the executive branch, with senior aides conspiring to remove official papers from the president’s desk so he couldn’t see or sign them.

Again and again, Woodward recounts at length how Trump’s national security team was shaken by his lack of curiosity and knowledge about world affairs and his contempt for the mainstream perspectives of military and intelligence leaders.

Trump tweeted the denial statements Tuesday evening and then, without providing evidence, suggested that the book’s Sept. 11 release was timed to affect the midterm elections in November.

 

[Rachel333]

55 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

I can't wait for the 'Those tapes are FAKE!!!' tweets....

 

 

He retweeted both of those this morning with "Thank you General Mattis, book is boring & untrue!" and "Thank you General Kelly, book is total fiction!" as well as tweeting articles about both those statements last night.

That's 10 tweets about the book just in the last day. You can tell the book is really getting to him.

[AmazonGrace]

Neither Kelly nor Mattis deny that Trump is an idiot, they're just denying they said so

 

[fraurosena]

18 minutes ago, AmazonGrace said:

Neither Kelly nor Mattis deny that Trump is an idiot, they're just denying they said so

 

According to the presidunce, all unnamed sources are FAKE, so.... yeah.

[47of74]

And of course Fuck Face probably didn't mean his very fine people Nazi friends or the reich to life folks when he said protesting should be illegal.  In his addled apricot brain the fuck probably thinks his Nazi/KKK buddies should be able to engage in all the protests and Kristilnachts they want.  Same with the reich to life folks. 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[fraurosena]

Presidunce sticking to rehearsed talking points. Book is a work of fiction. Look at how many things this administration has done, more than anyone.