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[h=1]This is a telling article about the dysfunction in this White house.
The education of Donald Trump
[/h] The White House remains on a collision course between the president's fixed habits and the demands of his new job.
Some snippets:
The education of Donald Trump
[/h] The White House remains on a collision course between the president's fixed habits and the demands of his new job.
Some snippets:
As he [Trump] sat in the Oval Office last week, Trump seemed to concede that even having risen to fame through real estate and entertainment, the presidency represented something very different.
“Making business decisions and buying buildings don’t involve heart,” he said. “This involves heart. These are heavy decisions.”
...
Perhaps the defining and unanswered question of the Trump presidency is what he truly believes in... No single day was more telling about the ambiguity of Trumpism than April 12. It was that day that Trump not-so-quietly reversed himself on at least four of his campaign promises. He canceled a federal hiring freeze imposed in his first week. He flipped on labeling China a currency manipulator. He endorsed the Export-Import bank that he had called to eliminate. He declared NATO relevant, after trashing it repeatedly on the campaign trail.
“I said it was obsolete,” Trump said. “It is no longer obsolete.”
...
As Trump is beginning to better understand the challenges—and the limits—of the presidency, his aides are understanding better how to manage perhaps the most improvisational and free-wheeling president in history. “If you’re an adviser to him, your job is to help him at the margins,” said one Trump confidante. “To talk him out of doing crazy things.”
...
White House aides have figured out that it’s best not to present Trump with too many competing options when it comes to matters of policy or strategy. Instead, the way to win Trump over, they say, is to present him a single preferred course of action and then walk him through what the outcome could be – and especially how it will play in the press.
“You don’t walk in with a traditional presentation, like a binder or a PowerPoint. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t consume information that way,” said one senior administration official. “You go in and tell him the pros and cons, and what the media coverage is going to be like.”
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