It’s Not ‘Unleashed’, It’s ‘Unhinged’: Advisers, Aides Describe An Isolated Trump

“While we’re on the subject“, Donald Trump.

As you’re acutely aware, the President has summarily dismissed everyone who was any semblance of sane from his inner circle, putting us all in the decidedly weird scenario of having to come to terms with the fact that the least crazy person at The White House is called “Mad Dog.” Of course how much of their sanity those recently fired folks retained after working in the Trump administration for a year is an open question, but it’s safe to say they were all (Gary Cohn, Rex Tillerson, etc.) still generally in possession of their faculties, very much unlike the person who fired them and very much unlike some the people who are running the show now, including Peter Navarro (he has of course been around from the beginning, but Cohn’s ouster made him ascendant), John Bolton, and John Bolton’s mustache, which I’m told is even more of a foreign policy hawk than the man it’s attached to.

Meanwhile, Trump’s legal team can no longer really be described as a “team”. John Dowd is gone, Don McGahn wishes he were gone, Ty Cobb will probably be gone eventually, and everyone Trump tries to hire to represent him in the Mueller probe turns him down citing “conflicts.”

So if you don’t mind us (and by “us” I mean “America” as a body politic) asking, what the fuck is going on in this administration, President Dennison?

Well, according to the Washington Post, Trump’s life is basically a series of steak dinners with some (very bad) president-ing in between. Check out how he started and finished this week:

President Trump began the past workweek cutting into steaks at the White House residence on Monday night with his political soldiers, including former advisers Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie, strategist Brad Parscale, and son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner.

He ended it dining on the gilded patio of his Mar-a-Lago estate with eccentric boxing promoter Don King, who said he vented to the president about the Stormy Daniels saga. “It’s just utterly ridiculous,” King said he told a nodding Trump on Thursday evening as the president began his holiday weekend in Palm Beach.

So he started this week sawing at tough, overcooked NY strips with his soon-to-be-indicted son-in-law and that fucking moron Lewandowski and then he wrapped things up Friday night (I guess), hanging out on a Mar-a-Lago patio with Don fucking King complaining about a porn star he’s suing.

Is this something we should be worried about? That is, is it safe to leave Trump to his own devices when it comes to directing economic and foreign policy with no direction whatsoever from people who know what they’re talking about? Of course it isn’t. Which is why he crashed the stock market a little over a week ago with his trade boondoggle. And which is why he woke up the very next morning and threatened to veto the spending bill on Twitter only to change his mind four hours later at a press conference where he talked about building nuclear submarines and fighter jets with Predator cloaking abilities (“total stealllltthh“). And which is why, without telling anyone at all ahead of time, he announced that the U.S. is pulling completely out of Syria at a rally in Ohio.

The Washington Post is calling this “an inflection point”. To wit, from the same article linked above:

The [steak dinners] neatly illustrated an inflection point for the Trump presidency. Fourteen months into the job, Trump is increasingly defiant and singularly directing his administration with the same rapid and brutal style he honed leading his real estate and branding empire.

Trump is making hasty decisions that jolt markets and shock leaders and experts – including those on his own staff. Some confidants are concerned about the situation, while others, unworried, characterize him as unleashed.

As far as those “confidants” who aren’t worried, I guess what I would ask them is whether they can honestly say it makes sense to use the words “Trump”, “unleashed” and “unworried” in the same sentence where”unworried” is supposed to apply to anyone but Trump.

“The president is in an action mood and doesn’t want to slow-roll things, from trade to the border to staffing changes,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders recently said, adding that “he wants to make things that he’s been discussing for a while happen. He’s tired of the wait game.”

Yes, he’s “tired of the wait game” and just generally “tired” of listening to other people because after all, every single last one of those people tells him he’s crazy no matter what it is he’s talking about. I’ll give it to him: that probably does get “tiring” after a while.

Here’s what Theodore Olson – the Republican former solicitor general who declined to join the President’s legal team – told MSNBC:

I think everybody would agree this is turmoil, it’s chaos, it’s confusion, it’s not good for anything. We always believe that there should be an orderly process, and of course government is not clean or orderly – ever. But this seems to be beyond normal.

Not so, according to Gary Cohn’s replacement Larry Kudlow, who – and this is a quote, so don’t shoot the messenger – thinks maybe the media needs to go and see some of the therapists that helped him get off drugs and alcohol:

I don’t see anything under siege; I see it as the Big Red Machine. The only people under siege are reporters who don’t like President Trump – and those guys need some significant therapy. I could recommend some awful good people in New York.

Let’s just be clear: the only thing Larry “sees” is an opportunity to extricate himself from CNBC purgatory and close out his at times tumultuous career doing something that might matter. And after all, this is a can’t-lose scenario for Larry. I mean barring some kind of truly epic fuck up on his part, no one is going to blame him for whatever happens.

Anyway, you can read the rest of the WaPo article for yourself, but the following quote from another Trump confidant sums it up – it’s not “Trump unleashed”, it’s “Trump unhinged”:

This is now a president a little bit alone, isolated and without any moderating influences – and, if anything, a president who is being encouraged and goaded on by people around him. It really is a president unhinged.