So, we just heard from President Obama, who dropped some truth bombs at the University of Illinois a short while ago. He spoke in complete sentences and full paragraphs.
His successor made some remarks on Air Force One during roughly the same time period, while on his way to one of the hinterland hellholes* where he can still show his face without getting pelted with rotting produce.
The most newsworthy nugget is that Trump wants Sessions to add another item on his “Abuse Law Enforcement Powers to Appease Trump” to-do list: force the NYT to out the anonymous op-ed writer.
Poor Sessions. He thought he’d be living the dream, spending his days interpreting DoJ policy to maximize misery for brown people, women and gays. But Trump just won’t stop publicly demanding that he do flagrantly illegal things!
Anyhoo, a few excerpts from the AF1 gaggle, via The Post:
Asked if he trusts his White House staffers, Trump said, “I do, but what I do now is I look around the room. I say, ‘Hey, if I don’t know somebody . . . ’ ” He added, “We have a really well-run, smooth-running White House. It’s a well-oiled machine. It is running beautifully.”
“Gary Cohn, if he ever took a memo off my desk, I would have fired him in two seconds,” Trump said. “He would have been fired so fast. He would have been fired within the first second that it took place.” [An image of the memo in question appears in the book.]
Trump went on to characterize Woodward’s tome as a “big, fat ugly book with all the misquotes and all the lies.”
Trump defended his intelligence and fitness for office, which critics have questioned this week because of Woodward’s revelations and the anonymous Times column.
“I can’t get up and talk in front of a crowd, many times without notes, for an hour and 25 minutes and get the biggest crowds in the history of politics. . .you don’t get up and do that because you don’t know how to think or talk,” Trump said. “You can only do that if you’re at a very, very high level. I’m highly educated and always did well — always did well — no matter what I did.”
The “biggest crowds in the history of politics,” I tell you! Also, here’s Trump trying to pronounce “anonymous” last night (trust me and click):
Anomynous. pic.twitter.com/sJ36OGPgOy
— Levi Gibian (@LeviGibian) September 7, 2018
Also, Trump is looking forward to a letter from an admirer:
“A letter is being delivered to me, a personal letter from Kim Jong Un to me, that was handed at the border” on Thursday, Trump said. “It’s an elegant way, the way it used to be many years ago before we had all the of new contraptions that we all use. I think it’s going to be a positive letter.”
Who among us doesn’t pine for the days when letters were elegantly handed through a fence that traps 25 million people in a dystopian horror-state?
In all the palace intrigue speculation around Woodward’s book and the anonymous op-ed, the effect on foreign policy hasn’t been discussed enough, IMO, now that the worst suspicions about the Trump administration have been confirmed.
If Kim is a crafty homicidal maniac — and I think he is — he’ll use Trump’s pathetic neediness to his advantage. Trump will probably offer to ship OUR nukes to Pyongyang next week in exchange for a challenge coin and a signing ceremony.
Open thread.
*Save the hate; I choose to live in one of those places myself, as do many good people (not including me).