Everyone in Trumpworld Knows He’s an Idiot
Opinion |NYT
President Trump is furious about a new book set for release Friday. CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times
“For most of the day, almost no one would know that he had decided to take matters into his own hands,” Wolff writes. “In presidential annals, the firing of F.B.I. director James Comey may be the most consequential move ever made by a modern president acting entirely on his own.” Now imagine Trump taking the same approach toward ordering the bombing of North Korea.
Wolff’s scabrous book comes out on Friday — the publication date was moved up amid a media furor — but I was able to get an advance copy. It’s already a consequential work, having precipitated a furious rift between the president and his former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, who told Wolff that the meeting Donald Trump Jr. brokered with Russians in the hope of getting dirt on Hillary Clinton was “treasonous” and “unpatriotic.” On Thursday the president’s lawyers sent a cease-and-desist letter to Wolff’s publisher, Henry Holt, demanding that it stop publication, claiming, among other things, defamation and invasion of privacy. This move would be fascistic if it weren’t so farcical. (While some have raised questions about Wolff’s methods, Axios reports that he has many hours of interviews recorded.)
There are lots of arresting details in the book. We learn that the administration holds special animus for what it calls “D.O.J. women,” or women who work in the Justice Department. Wolff writes that after the white supremacist mayhem in Charlottesville, Va., Trump privately rationalized “why someone would be a member of the K.K.K.” The book recounts that after the political purge in Saudi Arabia, Trump boasted that he and Kushner engineered a coup: “We’ve put our man on top!”
But most of all, the book confirms what is already widely understood — not just that Trump is entirely unfit for the presidency, but that everyone around him knows it. One thread running through “Fire and Fury” is the way relatives, opportunists and officials try to manipulate and manage the president, and how they often fail. As Wolff wrote in a Hollywood Reporter essay based on the book, over the past year, the people around Trump, “all — 100 percent — came to believe he was incapable of functioning in his job.”
According to Wolff, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Reince Priebus, the former chief of staff, called Trump an “idiot.” (So did the media mogul Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News, though he used an obscenity first.) Trump’s chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, compares his boss’s intelligence to excrement. The national security adviser, H. R. McMaster, thinks he’s a “dope.” It has already been reported that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called Trump a “moron,” which he has pointedly refused to deny.
And yet these people continue to either prop up or defend this sick travesty of a presidency. Wolff takes a few stabs at the motives of Trump insiders. Ivanka Trump apparently nurtured the ghastly dream of following her father into the presidency. Others, Wolff writes, told themselves that they could help protect America from the president they serve: The “mess that might do serious damage to the nation, and, by association, to your own brand, might be transcended if you were seen as the person, by dint of competence and professional behavior, taking control of it.”
This is a delusion as wild, in its own way, as Trump’s claim that the “Access Hollywood” tape was faked. Some of the military men trying to steady American foreign policy amid Trump’s whims and tantrums might be doing something quietly decent, sacrificing their reputations for the greater good. But most members of Trump’s campaign and administration are simply traitors. They are willing, out of some complex mix of ambition, resentment, cynicism and rationalization, to endanger all of our lives — all of our children’s lives — by refusing to tell the country what they know about the senescent fool who boasts of the size of his “nuclear button” on Twitter.
Maybe, at the moment, people in the Trump orbit feel complacent because a year has passed without any epic disaster, unless you count an estimated 1,000 or so deaths in Puerto Rico, which they probably don’t. There’s an old joke, recently cited by Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, that describes where we are right now: A guy falls from a 50-story building. As he flies by the 25th floor, someone asks how it’s going. “So far, so good!” he says.
Eventually, we’ll hit the ground, and assuming America survives, there should be a reckoning to dwarf the defenestration of Harvey Weinstein and his fellow ogres. Trump, Wolff’s reporting shows, has no executive function, no ability to process information or weigh consequences. Expecting him to act in the country’s interest is like demanding that your cat do the dishes. His enablers have no such excuse.
Obama’s popularity is rising even as Trump is president （1/7）Boston Globe
SAUL LOEB/AFP/GETTY IMAGES/FILE 2017
Analysts, backed by loads of anecdotal evidence, say President Trump’s unconventional conduct has deepened the connection to Barack Obama for some.
WASHINGTON — One American politician is currently dominating the cultural landscape, from social media to late-night television. His poll numbers look great, his Twitter posts are often among the most read in the world, and with every utterance, his impassioned base of supporters reacts with a fervor more typical for celebrities than former civil servants.
The former president left office last January with favorable approval ratings, but historians, former staffers, and political observers now say his societal standing has reached a new echelon — and it’s partly due to his successor.
“Obama’s legacy is being bolstered by Trump,” said Michael Days, author of an Obama biography called “Obama’s Legacy: What He Accomplished as President.”
“People are waking up every morning to tweets that some find upsetting and frightening. And they’re realizing whether they liked or didn’t like Obama, people know they were rarely embarrassed by him,” Days said.
The former president’s enhanced public profile could, however, be a double-edged sword for Democrats. While Obama provides them a ready counterpoint to Trump’s chaotic presidency, he also represents the past, not the still-forming future of the party.
Douglas Heye, a GOP strategist and former spokesman at the Republican National Committee, said Democrats are now seeing Obama through “rose colored glasses.”
“It’s as if Democrats are turning the 1992 Clinton slogan on its head and are singing ‘Don’t stop thinking about yesterday,’ ” Heye said. “But while it may be a nostalgic diversion from today’s reality, it won’t help Democrats address why they lost to Trump and how they can beat him in 2020.”
On Twitter, Obama’s growth in popularity can be quantified. When he wished the country a Merry Christmas in his last year as president, the message was retweeted about 100,000 times. But when Private Citizen Obama wrote an almost identical message in 2017, it was retweeted 250,000 times, dwarfing his previous total and the response to Trump’s holiday greeting.
The same is true for well-wishes for Senator John McCain, who has cancer, or posts about the new year. When Trump and Obama tweet about the same topic, it’s Obama — not Trump — whose messages resonate more. And it’s not just because he has almost twice as many Twitter followers — 98 million to 46 million — as Trump, whose presidential image has been shaped, as Obama’s never was, by his many, often scalding, tweets.
Polling shows Obama’s favorability rating has hit heights unseen since his first inauguration. The latest polling compiled by HuffPost had Obama’s favorability rating near 60 percent, up almost 15 points from when he entered his final year in office. A Gallup survey last month found Obama was the man that Americans admired most in the world, marking one of the few years the sitting president didn’t win (Trump came in second in the survey of American adults). He was recently serenaded on “Saturday Night Live” with a song titled “Come Back Barack,” which became so popular the network reportedly contemplated a commercial release. His end-of-the-year favorite songs list was the talk of music blogs, and he was just announced as the first guest for late-night TV host David Letterman’s highly anticipated return broadcast.
A part of this post-presidential bloom is the natural outgrowth of leaving the Oval Office and the role of national lightning rod. Most presidents experience a popularity jump after leaving the presidency, and June data from Gallup showed George W. Bush, who polled at near-record lows near the end of his second term, has also experienced a significant popularity boost in retirement. Even the last two one-term presidents — George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter — are now seen in a favorable light by the majority of Americans, polling shows.
Since bursting onto the political scene in 2004, Obama has long been reviled by Republicans — a backlash that helped energize Trump’s conservative base — but there are also some signs that even that opposition is growing softer. A survey done for Fox News in November found that among registered voters in Alabama — a state that Obama lost by more than 20 points in 2008 and 2012 — the former president had a higher favorability rating than Trump, 52 percent to 50 percent.
But in some ways, all the ex-presidents look better when measured against the current occupant of the White House, whose fervent base has remained steady but who has done little to try to appeal to the majority of Americans who did not vote for him.
David Blight, a Yale professor and presidential historian, called it a “surging nostalgia for a hopeful, more honest era of meaningfulness. . . . Trump breeds toxicity in all directions. Obama’s legacy can only grow while we have a president who does not read books.”
Like Blight, other historians also said they see the legacies of Obama and Trump as inextricably tied. There’s the race aspect, because Obama was the first African-American president and Trump has at times borrowed language from white nationalists and has often been accused of stoking racial resentment during his first year in office. But it’s also about personality, considering that the public images of the two men couldn’t be more different.
Obama ran a White House that was sometimes criticized for being too methodical and centralized, while Trump’s administration is the opposite.
In the past week alone, he has engaged in a public feud with former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, compared nuclear arsenals with North Korea over Twitter, and announced a “Fake News” awards show to be held Monday.
“While the Fake News loves to talk about my so-called low approval rating, @foxandfriendsjust showed that my rating on Dec. 28, 2017, was approximately the same as President Obama on Dec. 28, 2009, which was 47% . . . and this despite massive negative Trump coverage & Russia hoax!” Trump tweeted in late December 2017.
Except, of course, it wasn’t quite true. Or rather it was only true of one poll, and not of the flood of others. According to Gallup’s daily tracking poll, Obama’s approval rating was at 51 percent on Dec. 28, 2009. Eight years later, Trump was at a 38 percent approval rating, a full 13 points below his predecessor. Trump’s preferred polling service, Rasmussen, did have Trump and Obama about equal on that December date, but even it often has Trump lagging behind Obama’s approval numbers.
Favreau, the former Obama staffer, was not surprised by those numbers. He said Obama has always held more cultural significance than polls can capture.
“It’s partly due to the Trump backlash, and partly true because Obama’s personal popularity has always outpaced his job approval,” he said.
Beyond the nation’s shores, there are some places around the world, though not many, where Trump is more popular than Obama. A 2017 Pew Research Center survey polled 37 nations across the world about their opinions of the two presidents, and all but two countries rated Obama higher.
The ones that preferred Trump? Israel by 7 percentage points and Russia by 42.
Astead W. Herndon can be reached at astead.herndon@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @AsteadWesley.