The rigged Russian witches must have done it… because he’s trying to do a reality-TV unveiling (or in GOP-speak, unmasking), to counter the closing investigation. Fantasy is his refuge by therapizing to friendly press. Trying to drop silent bombs.
More interesting is that Trump pulling security clearances of ex-IC officials like John Brennan may have been a retaliation for an upcoming WaPo book on the 2016 election. Much like his interview with The Hill is as usual raising more questions about his fitness for office. He’s still an apprentice. Still a hypothetical POTUS*.
“If I did one mistake with Comey, I should have fired him before I got here. I should have fired him the day I won the primaries,” Trump said. “I should have fired him right after the convention, say I don’t want that guy. Or at least fired him the first day on the job. ... I would have been better off firing him or putting out a statement that I don’t want him there when I get there.”
[..]
Trump said he had not read the documents he ordered declassified but said he expected to show they would prove the FBI case started as a political “hoax.”
“I have had many people ask me to release them. Not that I didn’t like the idea but I wanted to wait, I wanted to see where it was all going,” he said.
In the end, he said, his goal was to let the public decide by seeing the documents that have been kept secret for more than two years. “All I want to do is be transparent,” he said.
Asked what he thought the outcome of his long-running fight with the FBI, the president said: “I hope to be able put this up as one of my crowning achievements that I was able to ... expose something that is truly a cancer in our country.”
thehill.com/...
Trump’s running out of reasons, short of appealing to the RWNJ CT community, who have been agitating more because of Brett Kavanugh’s high school assault. There are now more witnesses (imagine how that assault got discussed at an all-girls school).
From: “The Apprentice: Trump, Russia and the Subversion of American Democracy,” a Washington Post book, which will be published Oct. 2 by Custom House.
A narrative history of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and its fallout, the book is based on hundreds of interviews with people from Trump’s inner circle, current and former government officials, individuals with close ties to the White House, members of the law enforcement and the intelligence communities, foreign officials and confidential documents. Most people interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified or sensitive U.S. and foreign government deliberations.
[...]
Brennan’s ... call to the White House was driven by something else — extraordinary intelligence that had surfaced in late July and reached deep inside the Kremlin, showing that Putin was himself directing an “active measures” operation aimed not only at disrupting the U.S. presidential race but electing Trump.
[..]
Trump’s ability to see these perils was impaired by his own unfamiliarity with the norms of governance, his insecurity and self-regard. Other presidents had varying levels of these traits, but none had ever possessed such a concentrated combination. These qualities had been on display from the start of his campaign. But now, against a backdrop that symbolized the profound burden of presidential responsibility, his shortcomings seemed suddenly and gravely consequential.
[...]
Trump refused to read intelligence reports, and he grew so visibly bored during briefings that analysts took to reducing the world’s complexities to a collection of bullet points.
The supposedly accomplished mogul was the opposite of how he’d been presented on prime-time television. Now he was the one who was inexperienced, utterly unprepared, in dire need of a steadying hand. Now he was the apprentice.
The word, of course, has another connotation: an aspect of servility.
www.washingtonpost.com/...