W*****B
发帖数: 4796 | 1 最让床铺愤怒的还是女婿遭受的屈辱。过去一周所有媒体万炮齐轰对准库什纳。床铺感
觉万分悲哀，自己身为一国之君，居然不能为女婿挡箭。现在床铺估计后悔当选了这个
总统，每天被架在火上烤。想想以前地产大亨的日子和真人秀节目时候，多悠哉啊。
Inside the White House, aides over the past week have described an air of
anxiety and volatility — with an uncontrollable commander in chief at its
center.
These are the darkest days in at least half a year, they say, and they worry
just how much farther President Trump and his administration may plunge
into unrest and malaise before they start to recover. As one official put it
Trump is now a president in transition, at times angry and increasingly
isolated. He fumes in private that just about every time he looks up at a
television screen, the cable news headlines are trumpeting yet another
scandal. He voices frustration that son-in-law Jared Kushner has few on-air
defenders. He revives old grudges. And he confides to friends that he is
uncertain about whom to trust.
Trump’s closest West Wing confidante, Hope Hicks — the communications
director who often acted as a de facto Oval Office therapist — announced
her resignation last week, leaving behind a team the president views more as
paid staff than surrogate family. So concerned are those around Trump that
some of the president’s oldest friends have been urging one another to be
in touch — the sort of familiar contacts that often lift his spirits.
In an unorthodox presidency in which emotion, impulse and ego often drive
events, Trump’s ominous moods manifested themselves last week in his
zigzagging positions on gun control; his shock trade war that jolted markets
and was opposed by Republican leaders and many in his own administration;
and his roiling feud of playground insults with Attorney General Jeff
Sessions.
Some of Trump’s advisers say the president is not all doom and gloom,
however. He has been pleased with the news coverage of his role in the gun
debate and lighthearted moments have leavened his days, such as a recent
huddle with staff to prepare his comedic routine for the Gridiron, a
Saturday night dinner with Washington officials and journalists.
Still, Trump’s friends are increasingly concerned about his well-being,
worried that the president’s obsession with cable commentary and perceived
slights is taking a toll on the 71-year-old. “Pure madness,” lamented one
exasperated ally.
Retired four-star Army general Barry McCaffrey said the American people —
and Congress especially — should be alarmed.
“I think the president is starting to wobble in his emotional stability and
this is not going to end well,” McCaffrey said. “Trump’s judgment is
fundamentally flawed, and the more pressure put on him and the more isolated
he becomes, I think, his ability to do harm is going to increase.”
This portrait of Trump at a moment of crisis just over a year after taking
office is based on interviews with 22 White House officials, friends and
advisers to the president and other administration allies, most of whom
spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly discuss Trump’s state of
mind.
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The tumult comes as special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation
of Russia’s 2016 election interference and the president’s possible
obstruction of justice has intensified. Meanwhile, Kushner, a White House
senior adviser, was stripped last week of his access to the nation’s top
secrets amid increasing public scrutiny of his foreign contacts and of his
mixing of business and government work.
Trump has been asking people close to him whether they think Kushner or his
company has done anything wrong, according to a senior administration
official. Two advisers said the president repeatedly tells aides that the
Russia investigation will not ensnare him — even as it ensnares others
around him — and that he thinks the American people are finally starting to
conclude that the Democrats, as opposed to his campaign, colluded with the
Russians.
Still, the developments have delivered one negative headline after another,
leading Trump to lose his cool — especially in the evenings and early
mornings, when he often is most isolated, according to advisers.
For instance, aides said, Trump seethed with anger last Wednesday night over
cable news coverage of a photo, obtained by Axios, showing Sessions at
dinner with Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, who oversees the
Russia investigation, and another top Justice Department prosecutor. The
outing was described in news reports as amounting to an act of solidarity
after Trump had attacked Sessions in a tweet that morning.
The next morning, Trump was still raging about the photo, venting to friends
and allies about a dinner he viewed as an intentional show of disloyalty.
Trump has long been furious with Sessions for recusing himself from
oversight of the Russia probe, and privately mocks him as “Mr. Magoo,” an
elderly and bumbling cartoon character. But this past week the president was
irate that his attorney general had asked the Justice Department’s
inspector general — as opposed to criminal prosecutors — to investigate
alleged misdeeds by the FBI in obtaining surveillance warrants.
On Friday morning, Trump targeted his ire elsewhere. About an hour after Fox
News Channel aired a segment about comedian Alec Baldwin saying he had
tired of impersonating Trump on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” Trump lit
into Baldwin on Twitter, initially misspelling his first name. “It was
agony for those who were forced to watch,” the president wrote at 5:42 a.m.
“Trump’s fundamentally distorted personality — which at its core is
chaotic, volatile and transgressive — when combined with the powers of the
presidency had to end poorly,” said Peter Wehner, a veteran of the three
previous Republican administrations and a senior fellow at the Ethics and
Public Policy Center. “What we’re now seeing is the radiating effects of
that, and it’s enveloped him, his White House, his family and his friends.”
Trump jetted Friday to his favorite refuge, his private Mar-a-Lago Club in
South Florida, where he dined on the gilded patio with old friends — former
New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani and wife Judith and Blackstone Group
chairman Stephen A. Schwarzman, among others. Trump tried to convince his
companions that trade tariffs were more popular than they think, according
to someone with knowledge of their conversation.
Shortly after 8 a.m. Saturday, he rolled up to the Trump International Golf
Course for a sunny, 70-degree morning on the greens. Rather than firing off
a flurry of angry messages as on other recent weekend mornings, the
president tweeted only, “Happy National Anthem Day!” But then shortly
after noon, once he returned to Mar-a-Lago from the golf course, Trump
tweeted that the mainstream media has “gone CRAZY!”
Christopher Ruddy, the chief executive of Newsmax and a Trump friend, said,
“I’m bewildered when I see these reports that he’s in turmoil. Every time
I speak to him he seems more relaxed and in control than ever. He seems
pretty optimistic about how things are shaping up.”
Trump is testing the patience of his own staff, some of whom think he is not
listening to their advice. White House counsel Donald McGahn and national
economic council director Gary Cohn have been especially frustrated,
according to other advisers.
The situation seems to be grating as well on White House chief of staff John
F. Kelly, who had been on the ropes over his handling of domestic-abuse
allegations against former staff secretary Rob Porter but who now appears on
firmer footing. Talking last week about his move from being homeland
security secretary to the West Wing, Kelly quipped, “God punished me.”
Last Friday, Kelly tried to explain anew the timeline of Porter’s dismissal
with a group of reporters — an unprompted move that annoyed and confused
some White House staffers, who thought they were finally moving past the
controversy that had consumed much of February.
“Morale is the worst it’s ever been,” said a Republican strategist in
frequent contact with White House staff. “Nobody knows what to expect.”
Since Trump entered presidential politics three years ago, Hicks has been
his stabilizing constant, tending his moods and whims in addition to
managing his image. Within the president’s orbit, many wonder whether Trump
has fully absorbed the impact of Hicks’s upcoming departure.
Trump told one friend that Hicks was a great young woman, who, after three
intense years, was ready to do her own thing. He told this friend that he
recognized the White House was full of “tough hombres,” according to
someone briefed on the conversation.
But other confidants said the president feels abandoned and alone — not
angry with Hicks, but frustrated by the circumstance. Coupled with last fall
’s departure of longtime bodyguard Keith Schiller, Trump will have few pure
loyalists remaining.
“Losing people is too much of a story for the president,” said oil
investor Dan K. Eberhart, a Trump supporter and a Republican National
Committee fundraiser. “It just seems like it’s imploding . . . Trump had
momentum with tax reform, the State of the Union speech. He should try to
keep that going.”
On Capitol Hill, lawmakers were left in varying states of consternation by
Trump’s whipsaw on guns. He suggested publicly last Wednesday that he
favored tougher background checks and would forgo due process in taking away
guns from the mentally ill, but then sent opposite signals after huddling
with National Rifle Association lobbyists the next night.
Trump’s aides said his vacillation was a function of the controlled chaos
the president likes to sow. Trump recently has come to favor opening his
meetings to the media — “It’s like his own TV show,” said one adviser —
where he often chews over outlandish ideas, plays to the assembled press
and talks up bipartisan consensus, even if it never leads to actual policy.
Trump doesn’t see guns through the traditional prism of left vs. right, but
rather as a Manhattan business developer, said one senior administration
official, adding that he has told staff that he doesn’t understand why
people need assault rifles.
The president’s decision last Thursday to announce steep new tariffs on
aluminum and steel — and gleefully tout a possible trade war — caught
almost his entire team, including some of his top trade advisers, by
surprise.
Earlier in the week, Cohn was telling people he was going to continue
stalling Trump on tariffs. He described the tariffs as “obviously stupid,”
in the recollection of one person who spoke to him.
“Gary said to him, you can’t do this, you can’t do that,” a senior
administration official said. “The more you tell him that, the more he is
going to do what he wants to do.”
Trump’s allies say that in his past ventures he has thrived in chaotic
environments, and he has replicated that atmosphere in the White House. Rep.
Peter T. King (R-N.Y.) recalled visiting Trump in the Oval Office for a
bill-signing photo opportunity a few weeks into his presidency that was
scheduled to last just a few minutes.
“We were in there over an hour, and every White House character was in
there at one point or another. . . . It was like Grand Central station,”
King said. “He has a way of getting things done. He had the worst campaign
ever. On election night, he was the guy smiling and had won.”
Philip Rucker is the White House bureau chief for The Washington Post. He
previously has covered Congress, the Obama White House, and the 2012 and
2016 presidential campaigns. He joined The Post in 2005 as a local news
reporter.
Ashley Parker is a White House reporter for The Washington Post. She joined
The Post in 2017, after 11 years at the New York Times, where she covered
the 2012 and 2016 presidential campaigns and Congress, among other things.
Josh Dawsey is a White House reporter for The Washington Post. He joined the
paper in 2017. He previously covered the White House for Politico, and New
York City Hall and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie for the Wall Street
Journal.
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