Trump’s bubble
by digby
According to this eye-opening piece about the inner workings of the White House, President Trump isn’t reading his Executive Orders before he signs them. He was unaware that his adviser Steve Bannon had been named to the National Security Council and was angry at the blow-back he has been getting from the media:
Mr. Bannon remains the president’s dominant adviser, despite Mr. Trump’s anger that he was not fully briefed on details of the executive order he signed giving his chief strategist a seat on the National Security Council, a greater source of frustration to the president than the fallout from the travel ban.
The article is a portrait of a strange man who is simply floating from meeting to meeting and phone call to phone call and in between giving tours of the oval office and poring over fabric swatches for the redecorating project he’s excited about now that he’s found out it’s paid for by the taxpayers. At night he’s alone and sometimes wanders the halls in his bathrobe. But mostly, when he’s on his own, he watches TV news obsessively.
There’s no sign in the article that Bannon is really on thin ice with the king, but it certainly could happen. If there is any more mockery about “President Bannon” or skits like we saw on Saturday Night Live last week-end, in which Bannon is portrayed as the real president in the guise of the Grim Reaper while Trump is a little boy at sitting at a child’s desk, he could start to lose favor. We know Trump watches that show and sees how he is portrayed, really sees it. And we know it bothers him — bigly.
The Trump supporters are happily living in their alternative reality in which the president is “shaking things up and living up to his promises. But Trump isn’t a Trump supporter. As unbalanced as he is, he isn’t a creature of the right wing propaganda machine. We know this by his cloddish rhetoric on abortion and torture among dozens of other things — it was clear that he wasn’t steeped in the obfuscatory rhetoric the right wing had developed to hide its true intentions. He wasn’t just rejecting political correctness. He didn’t know how he was supposed to say it because he still reads the New York Times and watches CNN along with Fox. Since nobody on the right normally speaks that way he was simply unfamiliar with the fact that his instincts had to be expressed in different terms. He just blurted it out.
But unlike his followers, Trump’s bubble still exists in the real world. He’s ignorant and he’s nuts, but he still wants the real world to love him. So he’s bothered when the mainstream media calls him out on his ignorance and ineptitude.
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