Don and Jeff on the outs
Furthermore, Trump is mad at his racist Attorney General. Aw. Not because he’s racist, of course, but because he didn’t lie down in front of the nearest approaching locomotive for Trump’s sake.
Those tweets yesterday made this visible to the public.
In private, the president’s exasperation has been even sharper. He has intermittently fumed for months over Mr. Sessions’s decision to recuse himself from the investigation into Russian meddling in last year’s election, according to people close to Mr. Trump who insisted on anonymity to describe internal conversations. In Mr. Trump’s view, they said, it was that recusal that eventually led to the appointment of a special counsel who took over the investigation.
He expects people who work for him to defy the law and ethical rules.
David B. Rivkin Jr., a lawyer who served in the White House and Justice Department under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush, said Mr. Trump clearly looked at the case from the lens of a businessman who did not get his money’s worth.
“He’s unhappy when the results don’t come in,” Mr. Rivkin said. “I’m sure he was convinced to try the second version, and the second iteration did not do better than the first iteration, so the lawyers in his book did not do a good job. It’s understandable for a businessman.”
And that’s why a business person with zero experience of government or public policy or law or anything relevant to being president should not run for president. What’s understandable for a (corrupt and dishonest) businessman is not understandable for a president.
The frustration over the travel ban might be a momentary episode were it not for the deeper resentment Mr. Trump feels toward Mr. Sessions, according to people close to the president. When Mr. Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation, Mr. Trump learned about it only when he was in the middle of another event, and he publicly questioned the decision.
A senior administration official said Mr. Trump has not stopped burning about the decision, in occasional spurts, toward Mr. Sessions. Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, who was selected by Mr. Sessions and filled in when it came to the Russia investigation, ultimately appointed Robert S. Mueller III, a former F.B.I. director, as special counsel to lead the probe.
In fact, much of the past two months of discomfort and self-inflicted pain for Mr. Trump can be tied in some way back to that recusal. Mr. Trump felt blindsided by Mr. Sessions’s decision and unleashed his fury at aides in the Oval Office the next day, according to four people familiar with the event. The next day was his fateful tweet about President Barack Obama conducting a wiretap of Trump Tower during the campaign, an allegation that was widely debunked.
BFFs no more.
I wish the news media would quit using words like ‘exasperated’ and ‘frustrated’. It isn’t frustration, it’s rage. This particular article did use words like fury further down in the article, but not up at top, which is what most people read.
Call it what it is – a temper tantrum.
I was pretty young at the time, but I seem to remember people willing to comment on Nixon’s rages as rages. Frustration and exasperation legitimize his pettiness, make it more like ordinary emotions and less like toddler-age tantrums.