On Sunday, reporters Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush published an article in the New York Times providing an inside look at Trump’s White House that will make you laugh until you cry until your brain is oozing out of your butt.
The article is packed with descriptions of Trump aimlessly pacing through the White House like a lonely day-glo ghost, put together thanks to interviews with dozens of staffers and government officials, but several strike as particularly depressing. For one, Trump’s aides cannot figure out how to turn on the lights in the cabinet room, so they conduct meetings in the dark and try different doors until one opens and leads them to an exit. This is what I imagine Donald Trump is also doing regarding the presidency, and behind one of those doors is certainly nuclear holocaust. Also, he is often alone:
Usually around 6:30 p.m., or sometimes later, Mr. Trump retires upstairs to the residence to recharge, vent and intermittently use Twitter. With his wife, Melania, and young son, Barron, staying in New York, he is almost always by himself, sometimes in the protective presence of his imposing longtime aide and former security chief, Keith Schiller. When Mr. Trump is not watching television in his bathrobe or on his phone reaching out to old campaign hands and advisers, he will sometimes set off to explore the unfamiliar surroundings of his new home.
And, he has so much time on his hands (haha, how?) that he’s had to take up a hobby:
To pass the time between meetings, Mr. Trump gives quick tours to visitors, highlighting little tweaks he has made after initially expecting he would have to pay for them himself.
Flanking his desk are portraits of Presidents Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. He will linger on the opulence of the newly hung golden drapes, which he told a recent visitor were once used by Franklin D. Roosevelt but in fact were patterned for Bill Clinton. For a man who sometimes has trouble concentrating on policy memos, Mr. Trump was delighted to page through a book that offered him 17 window covering options.
Trump, according to the report, also refuses to hire a distinct communications director in addition to press secretary, forcing Sean Spicer to work as both, often summoning Spicer to his office after press briefings to compliment or berate him.
Most horrifically, if we are still able to identify horror in our daily stew of urgent and physically-sickening emotions, is that Trump hasn’t really been all that involved in the writing of his executive orders (not that he’d likely help) and didn’t mean to appoint Steve Bannon, his white supremacist chief advisor preoccupied with destruction, to the National Security Council:
From now on, Mr. Trump would be looped in on the drafting of executive orders much earlier in the process...
[Chief of Staff Reince] Priebus bristles at the perception that he occupies a diminished perch in the West Wing pecking order compared with previous chiefs. But for the moment, Mr. Bannon remains the president’s dominant adviser, despite Mr. Trump’s anger that he was not fully briefed on details of the executive order he signed giving his chief strategist a seat on the National Security Council, a greater source of frustration to the president than the fallout from the travel ban.
If it means anything, Trump is almost certainly as miserable as we hope he is. Read the whole article here.