He has unwavering faith in himself

Facing the dawn of his third year in office and his bid for reelection, Trump is stepping into a political hailstorm. Democrats are preparing to seize control of the House in January with subpoena power to investigate corruption. Global markets are reeling from his trade war. The United States is isolated from its traditional partners. The investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III into Russian interference is intensifying. And court filings Friday in a separate federal case implicated Trump in a felony.

[...]

Trump remains headstrong in his belief that he can outsmart adversaries and weather any threats, according to advisers. In the Russia probe, he continues to roar denials, dubiously proclaiming that the latest allegations of wrongdoing by his former associates “totally clear” him.

  WaPo

I'd like to think he'll believe this right up until he has to leave, but I'm worried that if he gets a whif of an inkling that he actually might not be up to the task, the world is not safe.

The White House is adopting what one official termed a “shrugged shoulders” strategy for the Mueller findings, calculating that most GOP base voters will believe whatever the president tells them to believe.

That's probably true, but there aren't enough of them to keep him in office in any legitimate election. That's why I worry.

Stephen K. Bannon, the former Trump strategist who helped him navigate the most arduous phase of his 2016 campaign, predicted 2019 would be a year of “siege warfare” and cast the president’s inner circle as naively optimistic and unsophisticated.

“The Democrats are going to weaponize the Mueller report and the president needs a team that can go to the mattresses,” Bannon said. “The president can’t trust the GOP to be there when it counts . . . They don’t feel any sense of duty or responsibility to stand with Trump.”

It's not like they get any in return.

Rather than building a war room to manage the intersecting crises as past administrations have done, the Trump White House is understaffed, stuck in a bunker mentality and largely resigned to a plan to wing it.

And let's not forget he has idiots for lawyers.

Political and communications operatives are mostly taking their cues from the president and letting him drive the message with his spontaneous broadsides.

“A war room? You serious?” one former White House official said when asked about internal preparations. “They’ve never had one, will never have one. They don’t know how to do one.”

Trump’s decision to change his chief of staff, however, appears to be a recognition that he needs a strong political team in place for the remainder of his first term.

Stephen Miller?

Throughout the 18-month special counsel investigation, Trump has single-handedly spun his own deceptive reality, seeking to sully the reputations of Mueller’s operation and federal law enforcement in an attempt to preemptively discredit their eventual conclusions.

The president has been telling friends that he believes the special counsel is flailing and has found nothing meaningful.

And Rudy is right there with him.

“It’s all games and trying to connect dots that don’t really make sense,” one friend said in describing Trump’s view of Mueller’s progress. “Trump is angry, but he’s not really worried.”

He tweets like he's worried. And if he's worried, I'm worried for the world.

Some GOP senators were particularly shaken by this week’s revelation that former national security adviser Michael Flynn had met with Mueller’s team 19 separate times — a distressing signal to them that the probe may be more serious than they had been led to assume, according to senior Republican officials.

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Trump’s legal team, meanwhile, is bracing not only for new Mueller developments but also for an onslaught of congressional requests. New White House counsel Pat Cipollone and his associate, Emmet T. Flood, are the leaders inside, although both have taken pains to stay out of the spotlight.

Cipollone has been scouring the résumés of congressional Republican staffers with experience handling investigations and trying to recruit them to the White House, officials said. Meanwhile, Flood, who advised former president Bill Clinton during his impeachment, has been prepping for months to forcefully exert executive privilege once House Democrats assume the majority.

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Trump’s lead outside attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, said he and his team are busy writing a defiant “counter report” to Mueller, which the president boasted this week was 87 pages long. Giuliani described the effort as a collaboration in which he, Jay Sekulow, Jane Raskin and other lawyers draft different sections and then trade them among the group, debating how to frame various passages on the president’s conduct and Russian interference.

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“No matter what your client says, if you’re not ready with factual messages to rebut charges, you’ll fail,” said [former Clinton lawyer Lanny] Davis, who now advises former Trump attorney Michael Cohen, who faces possible prison time for crimes including lying to Congress about his Russia contacts. “Even if you think the Trump strategy of attacking the messenger can continue to work, it will not work once the Mueller report is done.”

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.