He shoulda told him
Oof, he’s landed us with a whole new plateful of headlines.
He sat down for a cozy chat yesterday with the “failing” “fake news” New York Times. He said he was very very mad at Jeff Sessions for recusing himself, and that he never would have given him the job if he’d known he was going to recuse himself for cryin out loud. He seems to think Sessions knew all along that he’d be recusing himself, that it was a plan, like planning to go to Hawaii on vacation next year.
In a remarkable public break with one of his earliest political supporters, Mr. Trump complained that Mr. Sessions’s decision ultimately led to the appointment of a special counsel that should not have happened. “Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job and I would have picked somebody else,” Mr. Trump said.
It was very unfair to him, Trump said mournfully.
In a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times, the president also accused James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director he fired in May, of trying to leverage a dossier of compromising material to keep his job. Mr. Trump criticized both the acting F.B.I. director who has been filling in since Mr. Comey’s dismissal and the deputy attorney general who recommended it. And he took on Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel now leading the investigation into Russian meddling in last year’s election.
See, it wasn’t like this on The Apprentice. On The Apprentice Trump was the Top Dog and that was the end of it – there weren’t all these people getting in his way and investigating him and recusing themselves. The presidency should be like that too. It should be The Donnie Show, on which Donnie gets whatever he demands, and everyone jumps when he says jump, and there are frequent opportunities for everyone to gather round and say how awesome Donnie is. That’s how a presidency should be. Except when it’s Obama of course, but that’s a whole other thing.
Instead there’s all this annoying policy and procedure, all these rules and constraints, all these people cluttering up Donnie’s photo ops. It’s such a crappy third-rate loser kind of presidency when it should have been so golden and awesome.
Asked if Mr. Mueller’s investigation would cross a red line if it expanded to look at his family’s finances beyond any relationship to Russia, Mr. Trump said, “I would say yes.” He would not say what he would do about it. “I think that’s a violation. Look, this is about Russia.”
It should be up to Don to decide what gets investigated. Not this underling guy Mueller. Don is president and they’re not. Nobody else is. Everybody should be doing what Don tells them to do, but they just won’t.
While the interview touched on an array of issues, including health care, foreign affairs and politics, the investigation dominated the conversation. He said that as far as he knew, he was not under investigation himself, despite reports that Mr. Mueller is looking at whether the president obstructed justice by firing Mr. Comey.
“I don’t think we’re under investigation,” he said. “I’m not under investigation. For what? I didn’t do anything wrong.”
His self-knowledge is as impressive as ever.
Mr. Trump left little doubt during the interview that the Russia investigation remained a sore point. His pique at Mr. Sessions, in particular, seemed fresh even months after the attorney general’s recusal. Mr. Sessions was the first senator to endorse Mr. Trump’s candidacy and was rewarded with a key cabinet slot, but has been more distant from the president lately.
“Jeff Sessions takes the job, gets into the job, recuses himself, which frankly I think is very unfair to the president,” he added. “How do you take a job and then recuse yourself? If he would have recused himself before the job, I would have said, ‘Thanks, Jeff, but I’m not going to take you.’ It’s extremely unfair — and that’s a mild word — to the president.”
Because that’s all that matters – the president: the glorious sanctified all-important president. That’s the criterion for everything: is this good or bad for the president, from the point of view of the president.
He also said Comey informed him about the Russian dossier – the golden shower one – in order to blackmail Trump into letting him keep his job. Projection much? That sounds like something Trump would do, a thousand times over; it doesn’t sound like something Comey would do.
Mr. Trump rebutted Mr. Comey’s claim that in a one-on-one meeting in the Oval Office on Feb. 14, the president asked him to end the investigation into his former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn. Mr. Comey testified before Congress that Mr. Trump kicked the vice president, attorney general and several other senior administration officials out of the room before having the discussion with Mr. Comey.
“I don’t remember even talking to him about any of this stuff,” Mr. Trump said. “He said I asked people to go. Look, you look at his testimony. His testimony is loaded up with lies, O.K.?”
Oh, well then. That’s definitive.
He expressed no second thoughts about firing Mr. Comey, saying, “I did a great thing for the American people.”
Oh right, he did it for us. He’s very noble that way.
He also kvetched about Mueller, and he also kvetched about Rosenstein.
The president also expressed discontent with Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, a former federal prosecutor from Baltimore. When Mr. Sessions recused himself, the president said he was irritated to learn where his deputy was from. “There are very few Republicans in Baltimore, if any,” he said of the predominantly Democratic city.
So now Baltimore is code for “Jew” too?
In his first description of his dinnertime conversation with Mr. Putin at the Group of 20 summit meeting in Hamburg, Germany, Mr. Trump played down its significance. He said his wife, Melania, was seated next to Mr. Putin at the other end of a table filled with world leaders.
“The meal was going toward dessert,” he said. “I went down just to say hello to Melania, and while I was there I said hello to Putin. Really, pleasantries more than anything else. It was not a long conversation, but it was, you know, could be 15 minutes. Just talked about things. Actually, it was very interesting, we talked about adoption.”
He noted the adoption issue came up in the June 2016 meeting between his son and Russian visitors. “I actually talked about Russian adoption with him,” he said, meaning Mr. Putin. “Which is interesting because it was a part of the conversation that Don had in that meeting.”
But the president repeated that he did not know about his son’s meeting at the time and added that he did not need the Russians to provide damaging information about Mrs. Clinton.
“There wasn’t much I could say about Hillary Clinton that was worse than what I was already saying,” he said. “Unless somebody said that she shot somebody in the back, there wasn’t much I could add to my repertoire.”
True, but not in the sense he means. It’s true because he told so many hyperbolic lies about her, not because she’s actually committed every crime short of shooting someone in the back.
New definition of context: transcript of anything Trump says.