As New York Magazine reporter Olivia Nuzzi was leaving the White House, Sarah Sanders was sent to bring her back for a face to face meeting with Donald Trump so that he could settle the burning question of the day—why isn’t John Kelly fired? Kelly has been reported as calling Trump every four letter word in the dictionary, urban dictionary included, and Trump has reportedly either raged at Kelly or ignored him in dozens of stories. So … why is he still there?
“General Kelly’s doing a very good job,” Trump told me. “We have a very good relationship. The White House is running very, very smoothly.”
Trump went on to tell Nuzzi that Kelly is “is doing a very good job” that “I’m very happy with him” and “we have a very good relationship” and everything, everything is good. Trump went on in a tumble of words, insisting that the economy is great, North Korea is great, General Kelly is great, Nikki Haley is great, and his poll numbers are great—especially since Trump is counting everyone who reports to be undecided as in his column.
Trump: There’s 10 percent, they think, where people don’t respond, unfortunately. I’m not sure if this is nice or not nice, but when they don’t respond, that means it’s an automatic Trump vote.
It’s neither nice nor not nice. It’s simply wrong. Trump went on bragging about rallies, which he claims have “built up our poll numbers very greatly” in between reassuring Nuzzi about his “very smooth-running organization.” Most of his conversation with the NY Mag reporter seemed to be concerned with bombarding her with the same rhetoric about “Trump accomplishments” such as authorizing pipelines that have generated no jobs (or pipelines) that he trots out at every occasion, and trying to convince her to write a favorable story about all that smoothness, and greatness. Great smoothness. Really.
And then Trump did an interview with the right-wing Washington Examiner … to explain how every other Republican was a wimp.
There’s honestly not a great deal of news content in Nuzzi’s NY Mag article. Trump comes off as amazingly scattered, with incomplete thoughts racing off in all directions and a huge concern that everything he does be seen as great, great, Tony Tiger grrrreaaatt. Even when he can’t think of anything he’s actually done. And he’s so convinced that he can talk her into writing a favorable article that he even announces to the room that she is going to say great things about them all.
The best reason to read the article is the article, which is well-written and simply fun … if you can get past thinking too closely about the implications of what is being said.
Kelly had appeared in the room, a wary expression on his face, which resembles a cross between Wallace Shawn and Woody Harrelson. Kelly’s military service began in 1970 and over the decades took him around the world. He’d served in Belgium and he’d overseen U.S. and Iraqi forces in Iraq and operations across 32 countries in Central America, South America, and the Caribbean. It seems silly to think that such a person would ever give a fuck about anything related to matters of palace intrigue in this White House. Had he known we’d be discussing this? Had the president ordered him to be here? Was it all a coincidence? It is a small place, in fairness. Nobody tells you that before you visit. It’s like it was built for elves. It’s possible he had just been walking by. But if that was the case, the president’s repeated comments about how serendipitous all of this was made it feel like a big production.
But the folks at the Washington Examiner aren’t interested in fun. They’re interested in supporting Trump, kicking Democrats, and standing on the neck of anyone not 200 percent in Trumpland. The result is an article in which Trump explains that the “easier path” that other Republicans would have taken would have been to let Kavanaugh go. Perhaps because Republicans in the past might have sensed that putting someone who was the subject of creditable accusations of sexual assault who defended himself by invoking a nonexistent but “well funded” conspiracy on the Supreme Court would be a bad thing. Trump did not have those thoughts.
In case Trump didn’t get that across firmly enough, the Examiner reporters prompted him again with suggestions that other Republicans would have withdrawn Kavanaugh, drawing an affirmation from Trump that none of his lily-livered predecessors “would have stuck by” Kavanaugh.
Trump: They would have abandoned. That's what people do. I think that's what people do, I think that people do that — not only Republicans but I think that's what people do.