The White House is getting battered with one scandal after another, thanks to the unstable, irresponsible, dangerous narcissist in the Oval Office. And it sometimes seems as though the only break Donald Trump’s staff are taking from trying to respond to and manage the scandals he creates is when they go dish to reporters about the chaos in the White House. The Trump team has been plagued by leaks from the beginning, but every new scandal now comes with a predictable torrent of quotes like “we are kind of helpless” and tales of Trump yelling at his advisers for problems he has caused:
Mr. Trump’s rattled staff kept close tabs on a meeting early Monday in which the president summoned Mr. Spicer; the deputy press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders; and the communications director, Michael Dubke, to lecture them on the need “to get on the same page,” according to a person briefed on the meeting.
That was Monday. Tuesday, after the reports of James Comey’s memo detailing pressure from Trump to drop the investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s Russia ties:
Trump was furious about the story, one of the officials said, but retreated to the White House residence within 75 minutes of it going online – leaving aides to “figure out how bad the fallout was.”
It’s a routine by now: Trump’s actions get reported and he blames his staff for the consequences. When they try to put the fires out, within a day he makes them look terrible by showing the world that they were lying—which makes them less able to respond to the next crisis.
“There is this misunderstanding all these people want to go out there and defend us,” said one of the senior administration officials. “Who are they? Do you want to call them? Do you know how to get them on TV?”
Gosh, whose misunderstanding is that? Who is getting upset that there are no people on TV defending “us”? And in case it wasn’t clear when the White House statement on the Comey memo went out on background rather than with a name attached, Politico reports that Trump’s aides “are becoming increasingly leery of putting their names on statements in the immediate aftermath of stories—because Trump often contradicts them publicly or on Twitter.”
You know, guys, if things are so bad, you could always resign.