Another wacky interview

President Trump regularly expresses pique over scathing kiss-and-tell books written by former aides and advisers. But he had no beef with “Let Me Finish” by Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor and his onetime transition director.

“Well, honestly,” Mr. Trump said in an interview in the Oval Office this week, “he was very nice to me.”

But not nice to his family, it was pointed out, most notably Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and senior adviser, who was eviscerated in the book. “No,” Mr. Trump conceded, “but he was unbelievably nice to me, actually.”

  NYT

Fuck the family. I'm the only one who matters.

He knew that Mr. Christie wrote nice things about him because his staff summarized it for him. “I don’t have time to read it, but I get all — I have somebody — boom, boom! They give me quotes, it’s like five pages,” Mr. Trump said. “That you can read, right? And he was very respectful of me.”

The same people who clip only good press to put in a folder for him to review?

He went after former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, rewriting the history of their split. While Mr. Mattis resigned in protest of the president’s decision to pull out of Syria, Mr. Trump insisted that he pushed the secretary out. “I wasn’t happy with the job that he was doing at all,” he said. “And I said, ‘It’s time.’ That’s why in the letter he wrote, ‘You have to have your own choice.’ The reason he said that was because I said, ‘You’re just not my choice.’”

[...]

Mr. Trump initially accepted [Mattis' resignation letter] and characterized it as a retirement “with distinction,” but took offense after seeing reports characterizing the letter as a rebuke and forced Mr. Mattis to leave two months earlier than originally scheduled.

[...]

Perhaps most notably let out of the president’s doghouse were the nation’s intelligence chiefs, whom he had described just a day earlier as “extremely passive and naïve” people who “should go back to school!” Now, he said, all was fine because they had reassured him that their report to Congress this week that conflicted with his foreign policy had been misinterpreted by the news media.

Well, that's what he heard them say anyway.

“One of the things they said very strongly, according to — was that Iran is, essentially, a wonderful place,” the president recounted. “And I said, ‘It’s not a wonderful place, it’s a bad place, and they’re doing bad things.’ And they said, ‘We agree.’ I said: ‘What do you mean you agree? You can’t agree.’ And they said the testimony was totally mischaracterized.”

[...]

Trump’s description of his call-on-the-carpet meeting with the intelligence chiefs underscored how the president forms what his former communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, himself an author of a tell-all, once called Mr. Trump’s “reality distortion field” where he “curves facts toward himself.”

[...]

Mr. Trump was happy enough to blame the disparity on the news media via Twitter — tweets that were actually sent out while he was talking with his Times visitors. He had an aide fetch printouts of the tweets to pass around.

When it was noted that he had been in the room with them when the tweets were posted from his account, he acknowledged, “Well, sometimes I dictate tweets.”

So did he dictate the tweets while being interviewed??

On Thursday, he gave the reporters three times as much time as scheduled, gamely taking on all questions, unrushed, and asked them to call him personally if they had questions. “I came from Jamaica, Queens, Jamaica Estates, and I became president of the United States,” he said, beseeching A.G. Sulzberger, the Times publisher, for better coverage. “I’m sort of entitled to a great story from my — just one — from my newspaper.”

[...]

Mr. Trump does not obsess about precision.

That's a new way of saying he lies or is ignorant.

He suggested that it was excessive for the F.B.I. to deploy a “team of 29 people with AK-27s, or whatever they were using” to arrest his longtime associate, Roger J. Stone Jr. There is no such thing as an AK-27 rifle. Presumably, the self-described Second Amendment champion was confusing it with the AK-47, although the F.B.I. of course does not use Russian-made weapons.

[...]

Mr. Trump was asked if he was the person in Mr. Stone’s indictment who directed a campaign official to contact Mr. Stone about damaging information in the possession of WikiLeaks, which was releasing Democratic emails stolen by Russian agents.

“Can I tell you? I didn’t see it,” he said of the indictment. But then he suggested he was knowledgeable about what was in the document. “I know what was in the indictment — if you read it, there was no collusion with Russia.”

Similarly, referring to Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, he first said, “Rod told me I’m not a target of the investigation.” But then he suggested that the assurance had gone to his lawyers. “The lawyers would speak to him a lot about that,” he said.

And he said that he did not initially know about a memo that Mr. Barr wrote as a private lawyer criticizing one of Mr. Mueller’s lines of inquiry, only becoming aware of it later. “I mean, I read it afterwards,” he said. Then he said: “I didn’t see the memo. I never read the memo.”

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