Inside Trump’s anger and impatience — and his sudden decision to fire Comey at WaPo is an interesting read. Part of reading it made me feel like I was watching a car wreck. Don the Con is showing his true colors and “lawyering up” with Beauregard, his wartime consigliere. He’s acting as if the presidency were an imperial one.
That didn’t work out well the last time it happened. It’s as if the normalization of attacks on the legitimacy of the office over the past 16 years has had an effect on the administration’s attitude to the word “legal”.
Heads are rolling in the administration. They are doing some bad shit over there at 1600 Penn.
First, though, [Trump] wanted to talk with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, his trusted confidant, and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, to whom Comey reported directly. Trump summoned the two of them to the White House for a meeting, according to a person close to the White House.
The pair quickly fulfilled the boss’s orders, and the next day Trump fired Comey — a breathtaking move that thrust a White House already accustomed to chaos into a new level of tumult, one that has legal as well as political consequences.
Rosenstein threatened to resign after the narrative emerging from the White House on Tuesday evening cast him as a prime mover of the decision to fire Comey and that the president acted only on his recommendation, said the person close to the White House, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.
Justice Department officials declined to comment.
Look, there are a million questions to answer here in TrumpLandia. And it will take some time to work it all out. Nothing short of an independent Special Counsel will do. Expect to see a surge in the popularity of the phrase “What did he know and when did he know it?”
There’s a bunch of stuff swirling around about Russia and leaks and directives around this administration. Somehow, Ivanka and Jared Kushner are treating the federal coffers like the petty cash account of the Trump Corporation. Bannon and Priebus are some bad hombres.
I offer you this little morsel as well.
Trump’s team did not have a full-fledged communications strategy for how to announce and then explain the decision. As Trump, who had retired to the residence to eat dinner, sat in front of a television watching cable news coverage of Comey’s firing, he noticed another flaw: Nobody was defending him.
The president was irate, according to White House officials. Trump pinned much of the blame on Spicer and Dubke’s communications operation, wondering how there could be so many press staffers yet such negative coverage on cable news — although he, Priebus and others had afforded them almost no time to prepare.
“This is probably the most egregious example of press and communications incompetence since we’ve been here,” one West Wing official said. “It was an absolute disaster. And the president watched it unfold firsthand. He could see it.”
Former House speaker Newt Gingrich said Trump bears some responsibility for the turmoil because he kept the decision secret from some key aides.
“You can’t be the quarterback of the team if the rest of the team is not in the huddle,” Gingrich said. “The president has to learn to go a couple steps slower so that everyone can organize around him. When you don’t loop people in, you deprive yourself of all of the opportunities available to a president of the United States.”
Yessir, there is some shit going down. Pay close attention to the events over the next few months.