“My whole life, you know what I say? ‘Don’t worry about it, I’ll just figure it out.’ Does that make sense? I’ll just figure it out”
by digby
Those quotes are so revealing. The first was Trump on the campaign trail in 2018. The magazine profile was about his approach to the 2020 campaign:
The 2020 campaign is unmistakably Trump’s show. “We all have our meetings,” the President says. “But I generally do my own thing.” Campaign staff have been hired to follow Trump’s lead, and the President has made it known that when he tweets a new policy or improvises an attack at a rally, everyone had better be ready to follow along. “He blows the hole and everyone runs into the breach,” says an aide.
Let’s see how that works with impeachment:
A week after House Democrats jump-started their impeachment inquiry, the White House has yet to converge on any single plan, strategy or even unified messaging to fight back.
All the talk about setting up a so-called war room inside the West Wing, similar to the approach of the Clinton White House, has gone nowhere. Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, other top aides, lawyers and Trump advisers have been jockeying among their own internal factions for control of the approach or messaging. And President Donald Trump has expressed little interest in responding to House Democrats in such a conventional manner, preferring to deploy his own messaging on Twitter.
“He doesn’t need a war room,” said Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House and an informal Trump political adviser. “This is not about impeachment. This is just a coup d’état.”
The infighting over the fate of a war room reflects the long-standing operational styles of the Trump White House and 2016 campaign over the past four years, during which personnel battles often overshadowed any well-honed strategy. The president has always preferred to run his White House with a team-of-rivals approach, with aides fighting over various policies or political options and Trump alone as the decider at the center of the action.
The impeachment battle may be no different.
“Have all of these geniuses been able to get this done for him? No, he gets it done for himself,” a former senior administration official said of the president’s approach to management.
A senior administration official said Trump is currently discussing his options with his family, aides and outside advisers, while another person close to the White House called it a “disorganized mess.”
He’s just dancing as fast as he can as usual. He’s been very lucky in his life to escape accountability for the many mistakes he’s made. Maybe he’ll escape this time too.
But maybe not.
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