Trump 27: Happy Holidays Orange Menace

[AnywhereButHere]

@GrumpyGran I was reading your last paragraph in the same tone as the opening credits to SOAP. Does anyone remember that show?

Not that any of this is funny, but it does feel like we’re in some surreal tv show with a constant refrain of “what could possibly happen next”. 

Spoiler

 

It seems like we keep saying - This is it! People have to see it now! He’s crazy, and here’s proof. He’s on his way out now. But here we are. One year in, and same as it ever was. I know the investigation takes time, and the midterms are coming up, but it just feels so discouraging sometimes. I wonder how the history books are going to portray this period? I’m trying to imagine my (hopefully much)future grandkids learning about this in class and asking questions about what it was like to live through it. Really hoping there’s a positive other side to it and we don’t all drown with this fucker.

[fraurosena]

Yeah, you're right @GrumpyGran, Wolf knew how much the administration would be in turmoil over the revelations in his book. And I think that is precisely why so much of it has already been put out there: so that that information would be in the public domain. Because of course he anticipated what @AmazonGrace posted: an effort to stop the book from being released. And in case they succeed, at least these revelations, which are bombshells in and of themselves, are now public knowledge.

Plus, let's be honest here, it's a really great marketing strategy.  I mean, free advertising on all the big news outlets has got to positively influence sales of the book. Everybody will want to know all the salacious details, after all.

[AnywhereButHere]

I’m sure there would’ve been a fairly decent sized audience for the book anyway, but do Caligula and his minions realize that they just lit up sales with a giant spotlight?

It’s the equivalent of DON’T LOOK AT THE ELEPHANT! IT’S A REALLY SMALL ELEPHANT! NOT WORTH LOOKING AT THE ELEPHANT! Basically guaranteeing that everyone looks at the elephant. Even people who would rather see turtles. 

Are they just that dumb, or do they really feel they can suppress it and keep their more fringe followers focused on the turtles (because god knows the rabid followers wouldn’t see an elephant if it sat on them)?

[GrumpyGran]

7 minutes ago, AnywhereButHere said:

I’m sure there would’ve been a fairly decent sized audience for the book anyway, but do Caligula and his minions realize that they just lit up sales with a giant spotlight?

It’s the equivalent of DON’T LOOK AT THE ELEPHANT! IT’S A REALLY SMALL ELEPHANT! NOT WORTH LOOKING AT THE ELEPHANT! Basically guaranteeing that everyone looks at the elephant. Even people who would rather see turtles. 

Are they just that dumb, or do they really feel they can suppress it and keep their more fringe followers focused on the turtles (because god knows the rabid followers wouldn’t see an elephant if it sat on them)?

Well, the elephant distracts from the penis, so...

Yeah, they are just making it worse by trying to block it. There's a lot of humiliation in there and Dumpy hates, hates, hates that. This attempt to block the publication is a gut reaction. Why not just let it be published and then sue? Except they, like everyone else, know that there are tapes. Now they could just claim that whoever is on the tapes is a liar. So they don't seem to want to go there. Which begs the question: who is on the tapes? Who do they not want to accuse of lying? What we've already seen is quite juicy. Does it get better?

[apple1]

Trump won't actually sue. He historically has used threatening lawsuits as an intimidation tactic, but seldom has followed through. And in this case, it would subject him to the discovery processes and to being deposed.

(not a lawyer)

[fraurosena]

Awww... duh poow widdle snowflake was afwaid of meeting duh pwess and deiah awkwahd kweshions... 

 

[GrumpyGran]

Is it possible that this is Bannon's revenge? I can see that. He believes that he got Trump elected and expected to be treated as an equal by Trump. Then he is shown the door. He's angry that Trump did not stand up for him and fight to keep him. It was humiliation for him so now he wants to humiliate Trump.

I wonder how much of what is in this book came from Bannon. He hasn't denied anything. And we know that Bannon and Ivanka were sworn enemies. So who is looking disloyal in this book? From what I've heard there is a story about Ivanka and Jared talking about which one of them would be the President after Daddy and it was decided that it would be Ivanka. That makes them look foolish. Maybe the plan is to not only make Trump look foolish but to cause trouble within the family.

I also wonder if Bannon was secretly taping conversations while there. He has said some conciliatory things about Trump since he left the WH but in reality, he has to have been talking to this Wolff guy since the day after he was fired. Books don't get written in a week or even a month.

Just a notion

[fraurosena]

2 minutes ago, GrumpyGran said:

Is it possible that this is Bannon's revenge? I can see that. He believes that he got Trump elected and expected to be treated as an equal by Trump. Then he is shown the door. He's angry that Trump did not stand up for him and fight to keep him. It was humiliation for him so now he wants to humiliate Trump.

I wonder how much of what is in this book came from Bannon. He hasn't denied anything. And we know that Bannon and Ivanka were sworn enemies. So who is looking disloyal in this book? From what I've heard there is a story about Ivanka and Jared talking about which one of them would be the President after Daddy and it was decided that it would be Ivanka. That makes them look foolish. Maybe the plan is to not only make Trump look foolish but to cause trouble within the family.

I also wonder if Bannon was secretly taping conversations while there. He has said some conciliatory things about Trump since he left the WH but in reality, he has to have been talking to this Wolff guy since the day after he was fired. Books don't get written in a week or even a month.

Just a notion

Hmmm. I don't know. If it was all about Bannon, then maybe you could be right. But from what I've gathered, Bannon is only one of a large number of WH staffers that Wolff interviewed for his book. I think that the press is focussing mostly on what Bannon is supposed to have said according to the book because of the explosive contents, but I've also seen excerpts of things Katie Walsh allegedly said. And even better, what Ivanka said about her daddy's hairdo.

I think Bannon is still busy trying to ride two horses at once, where his ultimate goal may be of running for office himself or at the very least starting his own party. Whatever the case with Bannon though, it's clear that he's got ulterior motives.

 

[GrumpyGran]

Well, Dumpy is furious, demanding that the book not be released, but oopsy, it's coming out tomorrow. Bannon called him a great man last night and of course, Dumpy has to mention that. Reports are that the book contains tales from the dark side up until the exit of Bannon and Kelly taking over the Chief of Staff job so that's when access stopped. I think Bannon's fucking with him all the while appearing to be "supportive" so he can keep the attention of the faithful.

[Cartmann99]

6 hours ago, 47of74 said:

The White House is going to start barring employees from using their personal cellphones at work, press secretary Sarah Sanders said early Thursday.

How exactly is something like this enforced? Will body cavity checks be performed? 

[GreyhoundFan]

A good perspective piece from CNN: "Donald Trump's 'chaos' presidency reaches frightening new levels"

Spoiler

(CNN)Jeb Bush was right.

"He is a chaos candidate," the former Florida governor said of Donald Trump at a CNN debate in December 2015. "And he'd be a chaos president."

At the time, Trump embraced the "chaos" moniker. He was chaos in the sense that he was the only candidate willing to shake up the status quo -- to freak out the squares. Chaos worked for him, as both a symbolic image of the campaign he was running and a day in, day out approach to the race. None of the candidates he ran against -- including Bush and Hillary Clinton -- could ever settle in to any sort of campaign rhythm because Trump was purposely unsettling it all the time.

But the first year of his presidency has revealed the considerable limits of a strategy that relies solely on stirring chaos. It's created uncertainty here at home, as no one -- not even Trump -- seems to know what he will say or do on a daily basis. And it's stoked instability abroad as other countries -- allies and enemies -- find themselves sifting through Trump's often-contradictory public statements and tweets for some semblance of a cohesive mindset.

The peril in this approach has been crystallized over the last 72 hours as Trump has, among other things, questioned the methods and credibility of his own Justice Department, played a game of nuclear one-upmanship with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un (via Twitter no less!), announced his plan to deliver "awards" for the worst of the worst in the media and broken -- in fiery fashion -- with former top adviser Steve Bannon.

Amid that chaos from within has come chaos from without: Excerpts of a new book by journalist Michael Wolff detail the first year of Trump's presidency and paint the White House -- and the president -- as a sort of bad high school drama (think "Riverdale") dominated by back-biting, big egos and little sense of continuity or strategy.

The response by Trump to the Wolff book, which isn't even formally out until next week, has reaffirmed that sense of chaos and discontinuity.

The book is filled with lies, according to the White House. But they make few specific claims -- or offer any specific proof -- about what exactly Wolff got wrong. (On Thursday, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders did cite one specific thing as false -- the claim that Trump did not know former House Speaker John Boehner's name following the 2016 election.)

Other elements are harder to dispute. Bannon is a crazy person who was less relevant to Trump's success than he claims, according to the President after the excerpts were released. Except that, after Bannon said that Trump was a "great man" on the radio Wednesday evening, Trump was quick to note that fact when talking to reporters today.

The prevailing image created by the last three days -- particularly in the broader context of Trump's presidency -- is one that was first suggested to me by longtime Republican consultant (and never-Trumper) Stuart Stevens.

Here's how Stevens described the Trump campaign when we spoke in August 2016:

"It's like a car. Most cars do fine at 40 or 50 miles an hour. But the test comes when you take it up to 100 mph and run it all day and night. That's when problems emerge and things start to fall off. Conventions and post conventions is when campaigns must start to hit the high speeds necessary to compete in a general election. I don't think Trump or the campaign is any worse or better than a couple of months ago. They were just driving slower. As the speed increases, they can't keep it out of the ditch."

Obviously Stevens was wrong about the timing of when (or if) Trump would land in a ditch. Trump got elected president -- running the engine at (or above) its top limits every single day.

But looking back at the last 72 hours, Stevens' image of a car beginning to break down after running in the red for months on end keeps coming back to me.

Chaos, as Jeb Bush noted more than two years ago, is not a strategy. It is barely a tactic. And chaos -- even when it works -- stresses the parts of an administration tasked with carrying out the haphazard -- and often contradictory -- orders from a President who, increasingly, is facing questions about his competence.

Stress anything -- a piece of metal, a person -- too long and, eventually they (or it) snaps. Donald Trump is learning that lesson with each passing day.

The problem is, the car in question is towing all of us and we are careening towards a cliff, not a ditch.

[singsingsing]

I just pre-ordered the e-book. It says it's coming out on January 9th, but on another screen it says it's available tomorrow. Lordy, I hope I can read it tomorrow...!

I have no idea how credible the author really is. I just heard that Trump was trying to block it from being released, and immediately decided to buy it. 

[Cartmann99]

4 hours ago, AnywhereButHere said:

@GrumpyGran I was reading your last paragraph in the same tone as the opening credits to SOAP. Does anyone remember that show?

GET OFF MY LAWN!  

[Cartmann99]

4 hours ago, AnywhereButHere said:

I’m sure there would’ve been a fairly decent sized audience for the book anyway, but do Caligula and his minions realize that they just lit up sales with a giant spotlight?

It’s the equivalent of DON’T LOOK AT THE ELEPHANT! IT’S A REALLY SMALL ELEPHANT! NOT WORTH LOOKING AT THE ELEPHANT! Basically guaranteeing that everyone looks at the elephant. Even people who would rather see turtles. 

Are they just that dumb, or do they really feel they can suppress it and keep their more fringe followers focused on the turtles (because god knows the rabid followers wouldn’t see an elephant if it sat on them)?

Has nobody in this administration heard of the Streisand effect?!?

[GreyhoundFan]

"We’re rushing toward the breaking point"

Spoiler

Can our government function normally when President Trump tweets about his “button” being bigger than that of an armed adversary? Can there be business as usual when the word “insane” is being applied with increasing frequency to his actions, and when one of his most loyal supporters has called a meeting between Russian operatives and Trump campaign officials “treasonous”?

Only a few days into the new year, there is a striking disconnect in the nation’s capital between the ordinary and the mind-boggling — between the sorts of transactions politicians routinely make to keep the country running and displays of the irrational, the abusive and the menacing emanating from the White House.

There has been an inclination over the past year in both politics and journalism to separate Trump’s tweets and other outbursts from the realities of governing. The idea is that his eruptions are either (a) largely irrelevant forms of his letting off steam or (b) signs of a brilliance beyond the comprehension of mere mortals. What looks to most of us like madness is cast as genius in setting up enemies, signaling his base or distracting us from one thing or another.

But we are past the time when we can believe any of this. Trump is, without question, doing enormous damage to the United States’ standing in the world, and his strategy for political survival is rooted in a willingness to destroy our institutions.

While the news on Wednesday understandably focused on Stephen K. Bannon’s treason comments in a new book by journalist Michael Wolff, 2018 has already produced two remarkable essays explaining the genuine threat the president poses to the nation’s foreign policy interests.

Susan Glasser, writing in Politico, offers frightening detail about how Trump’s stunning lack of knowledge and his indifference to his own obliviousness have led diplomats to label him “insane,” “catastrophic,” “terrifying,” “incompetent” and “dangerous.” Glasser concludes: “When it comes to Trump and the world, it’s not better than you think. It’s worse.”

And Evan Osnos’s carefully reported and much-discussed article in the New Yorker demonstrates how Trump’s policies — but also his pathological focus on himself, his ignorance, and his astonishing susceptibility to flattery — have profoundly weakened the United States’ position in Asia and played into Chinese President Xi Jinping’s reach for international power.

Osnos cites a Chinese think tank’s observation that the Trump administration is a collection of hostile “cliques,” the most powerful of which is the “Trump family clan.” And its analysis uses a term from feudal China, “jiatianxia,” to define Trump’s approach. It means “to treat the state as your possession.”

This insight cuts to the heart of the peril the president represents to our democracy and the rule of law.

On the second day of the year, Trump called on the Justice Department to “finally act” against Huma Abedin, a Hillary Clinton aide, and also against James B. Comey, the FBI director he fired. And by referring not to the Justice Department but to the “Deep State Justice Dept,” Trump continued to push back against all others investigating him, treating them as if they were a band of spies and traitors.

Directing the prosecution of political enemies is a habit of autocrats. As Benjamin Wittes, my Brookings Institution colleague, wrote recently, Trump is “normalizing for an entire political movement the politicization and weaponization of law enforcement and intelligence.” Is this the legacy the Republican Party wants?

In the midst of all this, Republicans and Democrats in Congress go about their business, trying to negotiate a budget agreement to avoid a shutdown and, in the Democrats’ case, trying to protect the “ dreamers” and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

And, who knows, maybe we can manage with a kind of split-level politics. While we sit back and wait on special counsel Robert S. Mueller III to issue his findings, we pray that regular governance will be possible because there is no other choice.

Yet doing so means continuing to absorb Trump’s blows to our system and to our country’s influence around the globe. It also requires great faith in our capacity for restoration despite the readiness of the president’s allies to place his survival above the health of our polity.

The United States does have extraordinary gifts for self-correction. But we must face the fact that Trump is accelerating us toward the breaking point. No matter how confident we are in our resilience, we should not imagine otherwise. Not even Mueller has a button on his desk he can press to get us out of this without scars.

Dumpy "family clan"... kind of sounds like a fourth-rate music group.

[GreyhoundFan]

[GreyhoundFan]

Isn't this the truth? "With book-blocking effort, Trump is living his authoritarian fantasy"

Spoiler

When candidate Donald Trump first spoke of a plan to “open up” libel laws during the 2016 presidential campaign, he seemed serious. And he also seemed ill-informed: As president, Trump would lack the requisite power over the courts to make it easier for people to secure damages for defaming other people.

Now installed in the White House, Trump has occasionally returned to his authoritarian fantasy of shutting down independent media outlets. Like the time he riffed on Twitter about de-licensing NBC News — something neither he nor his allies at the Federal Communications Commission could manage. A good many media types have rolled their eyes at such conduct, and moved along to other stories. Margaret Talev, a Bloomberg White House correspondent and the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, told the Erik Wemple Blog that such outbursts were “rhetoric” and not part of a policy initiative.

The Thursday letter from Trump attorney Charles Harder goes a bit beyond rhetoric, though perhaps not that far. It’s directed at Michael Wolff and his publisher, Henry Holt & Co., over his impending book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” which depicts the president as an unstable and incompetent man. “Mr. Trump hereby demands that you immediately cease and desist from any further publication, release or dissemination of the Book, the Article, or any excerpts or summaries of either of them, to any person or entity, and that you issue a full and complete retraction and apology to my client as to all statements made about him in the Book and Article that lack competent evidentiary support” reads the action part of the letter. Chock full of the usual lawyerly threat verbiage, the letter alleges that the book charges defamation, libel per se, and false light invasion of privacy (against the president!), not to mention an argument that publication of the book messes with Stephen K. Bannon’s agreement with the Trump campaign.

Laughable, all of it. The Erik Wemple Blog doesn’t think too highly of the publicly released excerpts of Wolff’s book, which appear poorly substantiated and shot through with shaky assertions. Those poorly substantiated and shaky assertions should — and will — hit bookstores Jan. 5, four days earlier than scheduled. Many of them have already surfaced in highly circulated excerpt form — so there’s very little to cease and desist from anymore.

The threat letter is drawn up by Trump’s private lawyer; this is not an official White House action. In her press briefing Thursday, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders spread bluster over the cable-news airwaves. “There are numerous mistakes, but I’m not going to waste my time or the country’s time going page by page talking about a book that’s complete fantasy and just full of tabloid gossip,” Sanders said, focusing on a passage in which the president is quoted as saying he didn’t know who former House speaker John Boehner was. Trump has played golf with Boehner.

Just for the record — the standard response of any party stung by a mostly correct investigative story is to lash back with something along the lines of: Oh, the falsehoods, inaccuracies and misrepresentations are too numerous to recount!

If Trump could only press a big button and snuff out the book, surely he would. After all, he has shown little understanding of and appreciation for the limitations on executive power programmed into the Constitution. Just over the holiday break, he riffed to the New York Times, “I have absolute right to do what I want to do with the Justice Department.”

Lacking that ability, Trump the president is behaving pretty much like Trump the businessman. Suing people, or, failing that, threatening to sue people. We’ve seen this from Trump-the-politician before, as when he threatened to sue the New York Times over its investigation of his treatment of women. Now a CNN analyst is reporting that Bannon, who fed Wolff a number of juicy quotes about Trump and his lieutenants, is thinking of responding with paper:

... < tweet >

Don’t say that the media didn’t prepare us for this enduring national embarrassment. A USA Today investigation during the campaign found that Trump had been involved in at least 3,500 legal actions over the previous three decades.

I think John Kelly should get the TT one of those "easy buttons" from Staples and cover the "easy" with something that would appeal to his baser interests. I'm sure he'd spend all day pressing that button.

[Howl]

2 hours ago, singsingsing said:

I have no idea how credible the author really is.

Not very or very depending and the author himself clarifies this in his preface.  That said, he claims to have recorded many, many hours of interviews. 

Bannon has not disputed any part of the text.  

[GreyhoundFan]

By Joe Scarborough: "I asked Trump a blunt question: Do you read?"

Spoiler

Michael Wolff’s tantalizing takedown of President Trump’s White House is so tightly packed with tales of political convulsion and personal betrayal that official Washington will be buzzing off its sugar high for weeks. But after the shock of Wolff’s account of Trump’s willful ignorance and intellectual incoherence fades, Americans will be left with the inescapable conclusion that the president is not capable of fulfilling his duties as commander in chief.

The GOP’s defense of this indefensible president appears even more preposterous following Wolff’s revelation, in his new book “Fire and Fury,” of former adviser Stephen K. Bannon’s observation that members of Trump’s team, including his son, committed nothing less than treason. (Disclosure: I am thanked in the book’s acknowledgments and make an appearance in a handful of passages.) Republican politicians who have spent the past year eagerly wading through the slimy political backwash churned up by Trumpism will look even more foolish aping the former reality star’s attacks on the special counsel. Despite their desperate declarations that the Vietnam war hero is dragging his feet, Robert S. Mueller III has proved himself ruthlessly efficient in rooting out public corruption.

In just the past two months, the president’s first national security adviser and most trusted traveling companion pleaded guilty to federal charges; he is now cooperating with Mueller’s investigation. Trump’s campaign manager through the Republican National Convention was also arrested, charged and released only after posting $10 million in bail. A man Trump identified as one of his top foreign policy advisers has also pleaded guilty in federal court and is cooperating with the feds. Another Trump campaign aide was charged in a 12-count indictment. And with the release of “Fire and Fury,” we now know that yet another campaign official for the Republican president — one who subsequently served in his White House — believes that close Trump advisers were “treasonous” to meet with Russians during the campaign.

A cancer again is growing on the presidency, and few know whether the 45th president will survive a single term. Bannon has his doubts. “He’s not going to make it,” Bannon told Breitbart staffers, according to Wolff. “He’s lost his stuff.” But if Trump does escape legal prosecution, Wolff’s terrifying political tome adds weight to a growing body of evidence that the Manhattan billionaire is temperamentally unfit to serve. An email Wolff describes as “purporting to represent the views” of chief economic adviser Gary Cohn neatly summarizes what campaign workers and White House staff have been telling me about Trump for two years. He is an “idiot surrounded by clowns. Trump won’t read anything — not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers; nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored. And his staff is no better.”

Mika Brzezinski and I had a tense meeting with Trump following what I considered to be a bumbling debate performance in September 2015. I asked the candidate a blunt question.

“Can you read?”

Awkward silence.

“I’m serious, Donald. Do you read?” I continued. “If someone wrote you a one-page paper on a policy, could you read it?”

Taken aback, Trump quietly responded that he could while holding up a Bible given to him by his mother. He then joked that he read it all the time.

I am apparently not the only one who has questioned the president’s ability to focus on the written word. “Trump didn’t read,” Wolff writes. “He didn’t really even skim. If it was print, it might as well not exist. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semiliterate. Others concluded that he didn’t read because he didn’t have to . . . He was postliterate — total television.” But “Fire and Fury” reveals that White House staff and Cabinet members believed Trump’s intellectual challenges went well beyond having a limited reading list: Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin called him an “idiot,” Cohn dismissed him as “dumb,” national security adviser H.R. McMaster considered him a “dope” and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson infamously concluded that the commander in chief was a “moron.”

We are a nation that spent the past 100 years inventing the modern age, winning World War I, defeating Hitler and winning World War II, and liberating half of Europe by beating the Soviets in the Cold War. But today we find ourselves dangerously adrift at home and disconnected from the allies abroad that made so many of those triumphs possible. The world wonders how the United States will survive Donald Trump. And I ask, what will finally move Republicans to deliver a non-negotiable ultimatum to this unstable president? Will they dare place their country’s interests above their own political fears? Or will they only move to end this American tragedy when there is nothing left to lose?

Answering the last couple of lines -- the Repugs won't do a damned thing.

[singsingsing]

So apparently the publisher has pushed up the book’s release date. It’s coming out tomorrow! 

[Curious]

On 12/29/2017 at 4:58 PM, AmazonGrace said:

He gets stuck so much, just repeats words over and over again and then he repeats them and you know how it is, he repeats words and believe me, virtually all Democrats say he repeats words so much. 

  Hide contents

 

 

Edit: I missed coloring one different. 

It's like a record that skips and finally gets back on track.   I have come to believe when he says "believe me" it is a verbal tic for when he knows what he is saying is either completely made up or is untrue in some way.

He makes Sarah Palin's word salad look like coherent speech.  

Did any of you see the John Oliver ep (maybe the finale) where he showed a bit of a Trump speech and it literally made no sense?  It wasn't even complete sentences for the most part.  

[AmazonGrace]

2 hours ago, Curious said:

It's like a record that skips and finally gets back on track.   I have come to believe when he says "believe me" it is a verbal tic for when he knows what he is saying is either completely made up or is untrue in some way.

He makes Sarah Palin's word salad look like coherent speech.  

Did any of you see the John Oliver ep (maybe the finale) where he showed a bit of a Trump speech and it literally made no sense?  It wasn't even complete sentences for the most part.  

This? 

the word salad bit is at about 4 minutes. 

 

[onekidanddone]

3 hours ago, Curious said:

It's like a record that skips and finally gets back on track.   I have come to believe when he says "believe me" it is a verbal tic for when he knows what he is saying is either completely made up or is untrue in some way.

It is called a 'tell'. He is so transparent anybody playing poker with him must rake it in every time.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump was right to hope he’d lose"

Spoiler

The White House is being used to stage some kind of dark, dystopian comedy in which all the humor is of the gallows variety. Somebody tell me how we survive three more years of this oppressive, exhausting show.

The revelations about the Trump administration from journalist Michael Wolff are, if true, stunning, jaw-dropping, gobsmacking — but also pretty much what many in Washington expected. The craziness and dysfunction were obvious from the beginning. Wolff simply documents what others say privately about an administration that is dangerously erratic and incompetent.

The central problem, according to Wolff’s forthcoming book, “Fire and Fury,” is President Trump himself. Voters elected to the nation’s highest office a man who is unfit to do the job, who has proved unworthy of the public trust and who seems, to be blunt, increasingly unbalanced.

It is of some comfort, I suppose, that there are people around Trump who are aware of his flaws — who describe him with words such as “crazy” and “stupid” and “moron,” according to Wolff’s reporting. We have to hope that family members, staff members, political allies and longtime friends can serve as guardrails to keep Trump from driving us all off some cliff.

But that is not an acceptable risk for the world’s greatest economic and military power to run. We’ve made it safely through almost a year, but at some point our luck is going to run out.

As Wolff tells the story, after the election he proposed to Trump that he be allowed to write a fly-on-the-wall account of the administration’s early days. Trump “seemed to say” that would be okay, so Wolff began a routine of coming to the White House, installing himself on one of the couches in the West Wing lobby and latching on to senior staff members as they walked by.

No competent White House communications shop would have given such access to any journalist, let alone one known in New York media circles as a shark among sharks. Day after day, Wolff feasted.

Clearly Wolff’s principal source was Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s political guru who served as a high-ranking White House adviser before being ousted in a palace coup. Bannon is quoted as describing the meeting Donald Trump Jr. convened with a Kremlin-tied Russian lawyer as “treasonous” and painting extremely unflattering portraits of Trump’s daughter Ivanka and son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Perhaps it was this material about Trump’s family that sent the president into such a rage Wednesday, issuing a statement blasting Bannon — it said that when Bannon was fired, “he not only lost his job, he lost his mind.” The White House has loudly disputed the book’s veracity and, on Thursday, a Trump attorney sent a cease-and-desist notice to Wolff and his publisher seeking to stop the book’s publication on Friday and threatening possible charges, including libel.

When the president calms down, someone should point out to him that the legal threat unwittingly gives credence to Bannon’s version of events.

An excerpt of Wolff’s book published by New York magazine opens on the day of the election, with senior officials of the Trump campaign — including campaign manager Kellyanne Conway — preparing for what looked like certain defeat. Around 8 p.m. Eastern, however, it became clear that Trump might actually win. Wolff writes that Donald Jr. “told a friend that his father, or DJT, as he calls him, looked as if he had seen a ghost.”

Wolff writes that Melania Trump “was in tears — and not of joy.” The first lady’s office issued a statement Wednesday maintaining that she was in fact happy when her husband won the presidency.

About the president, Wolff writes: “There was, in the space of little more than an hour, in Steve Bannon’s not unamused observation, a befuddled Trump morphing into a disbelieving Trump and then into a horrified Trump. But still to come was the final transformation: Suddenly Donald Trump became a man who believed that he deserved to be, and was wholly capable of being, the president of the United States.”

But he is not capable. This whole administration is based on a desperate delusion.

On Tuesday, the president of the United States taunted North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, who has a nuclear arsenal: “Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”

You can decide whether to laugh or cry. Or perhaps scream.

I'll go with cry and scream.

[AnywhereButHere]

Any laughter is of the maniacal (they've driven away my sanity and I can't believe this is real life) sort.