Losing is winning

During a Republican retreat at Camp David last year, President Trump seemed particularly enthralled as Gary Cohn, then his chief economic adviser, delivered a briefing on infrastructure. The president impressed the assembled lawmakers with his apparent interest in the presentation, nodding along and scribbling furious notes.

But Trump’s notes “had nothing to do with infrastructure,” journalists Jake Sherman and Anna Palmer write in their new book, “The Hill to Die On.”

Instead, Trump had scrawled “Sloppy Steve” atop his index card, followed by “copious notes” criticizing Stephen K. Bannon, his former chief strategist whom he had fired several months earlier.

[...]

"[T]he president was writing down how he wanted to trash Steve Bannon the next time someone asked him about it."

  WaPo

Absolutely, totally unfit. At least he'll be able to claim the distinction of being the worst president ever.

According to a foreword, “A Hill to Die On” is the result of about 26 months of reporting, as well as interviews with White House aides and the president.

[...]

There is [...] the moment, during the presidential transition, in which Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) arrives at Trump Tower in New York for an interview with Trump for what many believe is “a done deal” — him nominating her to be his interior secretary. Instead, the authors recount, “the president-elect had a folder of media clippings at the ready, detailing various times McMorris Rodgers had spoken out against him.” The job ultimately went to someone else.

That is truly the move of a total dick.

Fox News host Sean Hannity also makes several appearances, including on a health-care conference call with Trump and a few Republican lawmakers where, “much to everyone’s surprise,” Hannity is also on the line.

Whoever was surprised hasn't been paying attention.

Trump’s son-in-law and senior White House adviser, Jared Kushner, also appears several times, coming off as generally naive. In one anecdote before the election, the authors write that Kushner tells Ryan he found congressional committees — which are the critical starting ground for the overwhelming portion of legislation — to be “inefficient.”

“ ‘We’ll get to that later,’ Kushner told Ryan’s aides, giving the impression he wanted to — and believed he could — single-handedly rewrite Congress’s two-hundred-year-old rules,” they write.

That's not so much naiveté as it is arrogance.

Later in the book, amid negotiations during the most recent government shutdown, the pair describe Kushner as marveling “at the fact that it costs the government $750 per day to keep an undocumented child in the United States,” before quipping, “They might as well put them up at the Four Seasons Hotel in Georgetown.”

And THAT is snobbery.

The subtitle of the book is “The Battle for Congress and the Future of Trump’s America.” And like nearly all things in Trump’s America right now, it is the president himself who most often makes for the best copy — and the pair return frequently to Trump, whom they depict as bumbling, if genial.

I guess a poor reading of Jared makes that poor reading of Trump unsurprising.

In a chapter devoted to Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s successful Supreme Court nomination fight, Sherman and Palmer write that at one point, “the president privately raised the prospect of tapping Merrick Garland — the very man [Senate Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell had blocked from even getting a hearing” under President Barack Obama. Still, they add some caveats, noting that it can be difficult to suss Trump’s “serious ideas from musings” and that “it’s not clear how serious Trump was.”

My reading on that is he would get two hits for the price of one: sticking it to Mitch and getting Obama's choice on the bench when Obama couldn't do it.

In another scene, Rep. Bill Posey (R-Fla.) urges Trump to stop the “tweets and whining about crowd size” — an admonishment that prompts the president’s ire.

“ ‘Who the f--- are you?’ Trump shot back, before once again incorrectly positing that he had had the ‘biggest inauguration’ ever,” the pair write.

Trump also seems to have copious free time, and the book gives the impression of a president constantly dialing lawmakers just to chat.

Which is going to be problematic for his ability to claim he's too busy with presidential work when it comes time to be deposed in the many lawsuits against him.

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