Saturday, January 6, 2018

What did Donald Trump do today?

Saturdays are traditionally slow political news days--even for Trump, who has unfailingly provided this page with something that any reasonable American of any political persuasion should be worried about on every single day of his presidency to date. Today, as Trump convened with some (but, pointedly, not all) of his cabinet and senior staff at Camp David for a series of meetings about his legislative agenda, there were a number of developments that meet that threshold.

Some had to do with his honesty. At a press briefing, Trump repeated a favorite claim that he was "an excellent student" in college, which he split between Fordham and the undergraduate section of Penn's Wharton School. If so, it was the kind of excellence that left no trace in the grade book: Trump was given no academic honors, not even the lowest level of cum laude.

Some dealt with his temper. At the same briefing, Trump grew visibly upset as he railed for the third consecutive day about "sloppy Steve" (Bannon) and the book written by Michael Wolff, who--if Trump's various accounts are to be believed--somehow had unfettered access to the White House for three months, including conversations with Trump, but without Trump's knowledge or approval. (Wolff says he "absolutely" spoke to Trump for the book, and that he has recordings of his interviews with many of the staff quoted in the book.)

Some were about serious allegations of wrongdoing in his administration. Trump denied a recent New York Times story reporting that he had ordered the White House counsel, Don McGahn, to pressure attorney general Jefferson Sessions not to recuse himself from the Russia investigation. The story also confirmed that Trump believed Sessions was something akin to a personal criminal defense lawyer, whose responsibility it was to keep his presidency free of investigation. But Trump did not explain why the story was wrong, only that it was "off."

But for all this, January 6, 2017, the 351st day of his term, will most likely be remembered as the day on which the sitting president of the United States of America felt it necessary and wise to assert, in public, that he was "a very stable genius."

So what?

It feels unnecessary to point this out, but for the record: