Lawrence O’Donnell’s brilliant commentary on the new book about the Trump dysfunctional White House on his MSNBC show.
Well the President of the United States is an enfeebled man with a weak mind, incapable of listening, incapable of controlled by vanity that compels him to create an elaborate hairdo that with the perimeter hairs of his surgically-reduced skull.
A hair-do whose mission is to cover the shining bald dome on the top of his head. He does not allow the White House house-keeping staff to change the sheets on his bed until he himself stripped the bed of the used sheets perhaps in fear of anyone working in the White House might discover that he might discover that he might suffer from what? Incontinence?
It is common for this president to be in bed eating hamburger at 6:30 PM then calling people whom he thinks are his friends and acquaintances to complain about his White House advisors including his son-in-law non of whom does the president think are as smart as he is himself. But in a briefing about the United States Constitution the briefer had to give up by the time of the Fourth Amendment because Donald Trump’s attention span was spent; unfortunately for the president it is the 5th Amendment that has now become the most important part of the Constitution to many of his staff under investigation by a Special Prosecutor such is the picture of the President of the United States delivered in a new book today by Michael Wolff called Fire and Fury Inside the Trump White House.
The President’s reaction today towards what Steve Bannon says about him in the book came down to this ‘He Lost His Mind.’ The president whose mental health has received a negative diagnoses from 26 mental psychiatrists and professionals in a book published last year is now defending himself against this new book by offering a mental health diagnosis of Steve Bannon, ‘He lost his mind.’ But this is just day one of the publicity generated by this explosive book which offers Rupert Murdoch hanging up the phone after a conversation with Trump and saying ‘What a fucking idiot.’ No word on Donald Trump’s reaction to that yet. Has Rupert Murdoch ‘lost his mind?’
Has Ivanka Trump lost her mind? Is that why she is described in the book making fun of how her father re-arranges what’s left of his hair to cover what she says is an enormous bald spot on the top of his head made somewhat smaller by surgical scalp-reduction? Is he going to say that his daughter has lost her mind by telling that story? If everyone in that book who says something negative about Trump is out of his mind then they are all out of their minds; all the president’s men and the president’s women.
The president’s wife who still has not held that press conference that the president promised during the campaign in which she would explain the legal records of her immigration history criticized the book today through a spokesperson calling it ‘trashy tabloid fiction’ because it reports that Melania Trump was distraught and was in tears when Donald Trump won the Electoral college on election night; something no one in Trumpworld expected to happen and something no one in Trumpworld apparently wanted to happen very much including Melania Trump.
Michael Flynn is quoted in the book as telling friends in the book that the $45,000 he took from the Russians in speaking fees was nothing to worry about because ‘it would only be a problem if we won.’ The book insists that everyone in Trumpworld on election day was planning the lives and incomes they believed they would earn by coming in second. Donald Trump junior is quoted as saying that when his father had realized he’d won the Electoral college he looked as if he’d seen a ghost.
This book is the story of incompetents running an incompetent presidential campaign for an incompetent candidate who then becomes an incompetent and dangerous president. The book quotes Steve Bannon as calling the meeting that Donald Trump junior arranged during the campaign at Trump Tower with a group of Russians that was attended by Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort as “treasonous.” Bannon says “They’re gonna crack Don Junior like an egg on national T.V.”
One of the sources for the book is Katie Walsh who served as deputy chief of staff in the first couple of months of the Trump White House. Here is how Wolff delivers Katie Walsh’s view of the commander in chief. “He didn’t process information in any conventional sense. He didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. Some believe that for all practical purposes he was no more then semi-literate. He trusted his own expertise no matter how paltry or irrelevant more than anyone else. He was often confident but he was just as often paralyzed. Less a savant than a figure of sputtering and dangerous insecurities whose instinctive response was to lash out and behave as if his gut however confused was in fact in some clear and forceful way telling him what to do. It was, said Walsh ‘like trying to figure out what a child wants.'”
