Nightmare at 20,000 Feet Over DC
I’ve laughed at this article a few times now, might as well record some of the jollies for your pleasure as well. With the caveat that since the report is based on “ interviews with dozens of government officials, congressional aides, former staff members and other observers of the new administration, many of whom requested anonymity.”, some of the revelations might be more truthy than fact…
Anyway, imagine, if you will, Lord Emperor Tiny Hands wandering around an empty White House in his robe, partially sashed, as his daily drug cocktail of Propecia, tetracycline and whatever else wears off…
Aides confer in the dark because they cannot figure out how to operate the light switches in the cabinet room. Visitors conclude their meetings and then wander around, testing doorknobs until finding one that leads to an exit. In a darkened, mostly empty West Wing, Mr. Trump’s provocative chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, finishes another 16-hour day planning new lines of attack.
Usually around 6:30 p.m., or sometimes later, Mr. Trump retires upstairs to the residence to recharge, vent and intermittently use Twitter. With his wife, Melania, and young son, Barron, staying in New York, he is almost always by himself, sometimes in the protective presence of his imposing longtime aide and former security chief, Keith Schiller. When Mr. Trump is not watching television in his bathrobe or on his phone reaching out to old campaign hands and advisers, he will sometimes set off to explore the unfamiliar surroundings of his new home.
…
All this is happening as Mr. Trump, a man of flexible ideology but fixed habits, adjusts to a new job, life and city.
Cloistered in the White House, he now has little access to his fans and supporters — an important source of feedback and validation — and feels increasingly pinched by the pressures of the job and the constant presence of protests, one of the reasons he was forced to scrap a planned trip to Milwaukee last week. For a sense of what is happening outside, he watches cable, both at night and during the day — too much in the eyes of some aides — often offering a bitter play-by-play of critics like CNN’s Don Lemon.
…
Before he was ousted in November as transition chief, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, the Trump adviser with the most government experience, helped prepare a detailed staffing and implementation plan in line with the kickoff strategies of previous Republican presidents.
It was discarded — a senior Trump aide made a show of tossing it into a garbage can — for a strategy that prioritized the daily release of dramatic executive orders to put opponents on the defensive.
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Visitors to the Oval Office say Mr. Trump is obsessed with the décor — it is both a totem of a victory that validates him as a serious person and an image-burnishing backdrop — so he has told his staff to schedule as many televised events in the room as possible.
To pass the time between meetings, Mr. Trump gives quick tours to visitors, highlighting little tweaks he has made after initially expecting he would have to pay for them himself.
Flanking his desk are portraits of Presidents Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. He will linger on the opulence of the newly hung golden drapes, which he told a recent visitor were once used by Franklin D. Roosevelt but in fact were patterned for Bill Clinton. For a man who sometimes has trouble concentrating on policy memos, Mr. Trump was delighted to page through a book that offered him 17 window covering options.
(click here to continue reading Trump and Staff Rethink Tactics After Stumbles – The New York Times.)
Paging through books of interior design options is fun for Donald, policy memos, not so much.
and my favorite paragraph:
But for the moment, Mr. Bannon remains the president’s dominant adviser, despite Mr. Trump’s anger that he was not fully briefed on details of the executive order he signed giving his chief strategist a seat on the National Security Council, a greater source of frustration to the president than the fallout from the travel ban.
Yes, Donald is mad because the Executive Order he signed and showed off wasn’t explained to him. Most people when they sign such documents read them first, especially short documents, but Donald is too busy padding around the White House in his robe to be bothered with such minutia. Perhaps in the future, staffers should make a mock television news show where they read the text of important Executive Orders aloud so that Lord Emperor Tiny Fists can grasp the “details”.
Maybe Samantha Bee is correct, and Donald is functionally illiterate?