Several current and former aides described Trump’s weekend Twitter episode as borne out of idle hands. Limited staff around, few obligations, no golf, 48 hours looking at the walls… “it never works out well,” one former senior aide said. Averaged more than a tweet an hour.
— Josh Dawsey (@jdawsey1) March 19, 2019
We are. The president is bored; catastrophe is sure to follow.
— André Lambelet (@andrelambelet) March 19, 2019
Someone use my tax dollars and subscribe the WH to Netflix
— anne (@anne3477) March 19, 2019
He can’t stand to be alone with his memories — or his lack of them. Professional (character) assassin Olivia Nuzzi, for NYMag, “Trump’s Phone Friends May Be More Important Than His Staff. So Who’s He Calling?”:
… Trump abides by what I call the “Groucho Marx Law of Fraternization,” meaning anyone choosing to be near him is suspect while everyone else gets points simply for existing elsewhere. “He always kind of wants what he doesn’t completely have,” the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman once said. “You are never more valuable to Donald Trump than when you’re walking away from him.”
What explains this social idiosyncrasy? Obvious answers, like self-loathing, don’t quite feel complete. But whatever the psychological cause, the effect is manifest in at least one thing: his compulsive phone habits. His Rolodex is a Greatest Hits and Deep Cuts composed of mostly friends, associates, media figures, and tycoons. Although Trump is known to call senior members of his staff at all hours, his informal advisers share a common attribute: They’re not there and, therefore, they can’t be blamed when things are falling apart. Their praise sounds less sycophantic and, therefore, more compelling; the president seems to grant the calls coming from outside the White House an inherent credibility. They are also a welcome distraction, a link to his old life in Trump Tower, when concepts such as “executive time,” a term used by aides to make it seem like the president is doing something productive when he’s fucking around and calling TV-show hosts to gossip about ratings (a subject of intense interest for him, even now), were irrelevant…
One person who has received late-night calls from the president told me this: “If you’re Trump, the last thing you want is a moment of self-reflection. That’s why he’s constantly on the phone at night. Everybody’s afraid of themselves. People fear silence because they don’t want to hear voices. But Trump really fears that.”
If golfing keeps Trump off Twitter it's a bargain at twice the price. https://t.co/NgwvX8Zu6X
— Mig Greengard (@chessninja) March 19, 2019
Trembling on the Verge Open Thread: Preznit Idle HandsPost + Comments (72)