Without his WH staff’s knowledge, Trump granted on Sunday a golf course dining room interview of 30 minutes with a NY Times reporter he’s spoken to before.
Attention-starved Trump needed to spin things away from his lawyers’ threat of treating Mike Flynn as a liar and CNN mocking the box truck used to block camera views of his golf swings.
Looming large is #TrumpRussia and Robert Mueller’s systematic homing in on the truth of the 2016 election.
Trump’s narcissistic moments like these interviews and some untimely tweets have had unintended consequences, and could be the undoing of Trumpistan.
It is unfortunate that MSM has become stenographers, but perhaps that’s why The Post movie may remind the public that there are multiple roles of the press that don’t all operate at once even if they should in the age of social media.
Trump chose Michael Schmidt as an interviewer because he’s white, male, not a “star” and asks questions that don’t rub Mighty Mango the wrong way … how else would he repeat “no collusion” 16 times in 30 minutes. Trump thinks he’s in command ... he’s dictating.
The proximity to truth will improve only under testimony since those moments tend to keep Trump away from his default position of pathological lying, although even then we know from his 2007 disavowal of Felix Sater in the Bayrock case, that he seems never to know anyone well, even if they’re “good guys”.
Then there’s the unhinged aspect of White Box Truck’s presidency, occluding a free press
As usual if a reporter just lets Agent Orange think he has control of the interview, we get insights about the clueless autocrat beneath the bloat.