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September 28 - October 3, 2022
He would savor one last favorite in-flight breakfast of grilled sirloin on a bed of cheesy grits with two over-easy eggs oozed over a buttermilk biscuit.
No one pushed around a tough-guy governor from Jersey—except, apparently, a whining, spray-tanned drama queen with dyed orange hair from Queens.
I’m guessing Trump would have been welcomed and maybe appreciated in Washington, if only he had stayed in his hospitality lane.
After a while, my meetings with Priebus took on the feel of therapy sessions. He played
Participation in the joke took many forms. The most common—especially among Republican elected officials—was avoidance.
The conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt warned that Republicans’ accepting Trump as their nominee was “like ignoring Stage IV cancer.”
Clinton told me at one point that she felt more and more alienated from the political and media ecosystem she was now forced to operate in.
“Sometimes the point isn’t to make people believe a lie,” Applebaum said. “It’s to make people fear the liar.”
Conway explained that Spicer was merely offering “alternative facts” to the American viewing public, which became its own epitaph for Conway’s credibility.
savvy career move to nourish the boss’s bottom line. “People who wanted to suck up to Trump were not exactly shy about wanting the president to know they were at the hotel and giving him their money,” Everson said.
Kellyanne had a special knack for Hatch Act violations, which she accumulated like parking tickets.
“Meetings with him veer off topic and off the rails,” he reported. “He engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions.”
Ryan told me he preferred to tell Trump how he felt about things in private.
I asked Flake, who did not seek reelection in 2018, if his fellow Republican senators even tried to defend
so terrified of getting on the wrong side of the president,” McCain said. “They don’t want to get the shit kicked out of them by Limbaugh, Hannity, the tweets, all that. It’s no fun. I get it. Trump can cost them their jobs, and they like their jobs. I get that, too. Every elected official makes certain calculations.” Again, McCain understood the Calculation as well as anyone. Senators can’t be effective if voters fire them, right?
Ivanka looked self-conscious, as if she felt people staring at her (they were).
could also make a case that Trump’s pariah status at an event like this was precisely why his base loved him so much.
“He just watched it all, and kept getting more and more mad,” one White House aide told me. He described the president’s state of mind as “a jealous rage.” But at least he offered “hearts and prayers.”
Where to begin with Lindsey?
But then Trump became president and deemed Graham fit to play golf with him. And suddenly Graham was getting described in the press as a “presidential confidant.” How thrilling was that?
If Graham wanted Trump to do something, especially on foreign policy, he would just tell him Obama would do the opposite. “That could be very effective,” Graham said. “Obama drives him nuts.”
Trump was a familiar type to Graham, as someone who grew up in the hospitality business.
Graham said they themselves were parasites, for they derived lucrative media profiles from their own cultivated hatreds of Trump. In that sense, Trump kept them fed and employed, too.
Reid spoke of Trump as a textbook sociopath.
Trump also dispatched Graham to Pakistan. “When I talked to the people in Pakistan, they know I’m close to the president, and that I’m going to be able to report back to him.” His head shook up and down. “I’ve never had that kind of influence before. To me, it’s exciting.”
Graham’s tone with me reflected a mixture of amazement and amusement, with a dash of giddiness. “It’s weird, and it’s flattering,” Graham told me of the attention he received from Trump. “It creates some opportunity. It also creates some pressure.”
this way. It is important to pause and note this, too, because after a few years people had come to view these exchanges as normal, or “normalized,” to use the Trump-era parlance.
He was alternately “bristling,” “emboldened,” and “embittered”; “lashing out,” “exploding in rage,” and “increasingly isolated.”
“Should Trump’s Mood Swings Be a Top Story?” was the subject of its own meta-segment on CNN’s Reliable Sources.
The exchange proceeded from there as you’d expect. “Disgusting fake news,” Trump protested. He reassured Wallace that his mood was in fact “light” and that he was “extremely upbeat.”
and they figure it can work for them, too.”
He went on to be elected governor of Montana in 2020.
DeSantis was known within the House Republican caucus as a socially awkward weirdo who had minimal profile outside his district.
Instead, they just become quick celebrities and entertainers.”
McCarthy acknowledged that the truck stop could get a bit scary. He added, though, that he still preferred eating at a truck stop, “a freewheeling microcosm of society,” where
Still, Trump couldn’t help remaining an inescapable point of tension around the funeral.
just so long as he could keep his MAGA army entertained and stirred up.
Barr essentially turned himself into a Yo-Yo Ma of White House toadyism, with Trump as his cello.
People lost their will to engage with it, Dent said. They created their own boundaries for self-protection.
now fewer and fewer former critics even bothered to summon disgust.
Initial reports suggested that Trump had tried to strong-arm Zelensky into helping him and Giuliani find dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden as a condition of Ukraine’s receiving its congressionally authorized military aid.
At the dinner, Parnas shared the rumor with Trump that the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, had been bad-mouthing him. She had also not been helpful to the efforts to destroy Biden via Kyiv. “Get rid of her,” Trump replied in a video captured on Fruman’s phone and provided to ABC News. “Get her out tomorrow,” he continued, addressing his words to an aide. “Take her out. Okay? Do it.”
“Now he could use the full power of the office to browbeat the leader of another nation into helping him cheat in an election,” Schiff said.
And everyone knew exactly what consequences
The president’s protectors cobbled together their “defense” almost entirely from grievance and debunked conspiracies. Again, they learned from the best. Trump was both their martyr and their teacher.
It would be that inescapably gruesome video of the officer, Derek Chauvin, pressing his knee down on Floyd’s neck for nine minutes that effectively ended the Trump presidency as a TV show.
The usual fusspot concerns about ethics were raised, if not legal ones: the use of federal property and employees for such a blatantly political event would be frowned upon in any previous, norm-abiding administration.
“She’s somebody that gets a little more publicity than I do,” Trump said of Greene, bestowing his highest form
And thank you for your servitude, Marco! I heard a clip of this on the radio and couldn’t help contemplating Rubio’s sad slide into slavish devotion to someone he’d previously called “the most vulgar person to ever aspire to the presidency.”
Once a celebration of our tranquil democratic traditions, Election Day was now being dreaded as a hazard on par with a potential terrorist attack or natural disaster.
