Pathetic loser

On Tuesday night, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro—whom Donald Trump affectionately calls “my Peter”

  Daily Beast

Stop right there. "Affectionately" calls "my Peter"??? All kinds of ways inappropriate - one being, it implies he's jerking Navarro off in the way he's treating him. And no doubt he is.

—decided to dump gasoline on a smoldering fire when he sent USA Today a statement that it published as an op-ed in which he slammed Dr. Anthony Fauci for standing in the way of “the president’s courageous decision” making on the COVID-19 pandemic.

[...]

[M]embers of the White House press office were left, once again, to repair the residual damage, insisting that the USA Today opinion piece didn’t go through the “normal White House clearance processes.”

Nobody's making them prostrate themselves.

According to three individuals familiar with the matter, in the past few months Trump has privately encouraged multiple senior officials and allies, including Navarro, to remind journalists and the American public of how Fauci has been “so wrong”—in the president’s phrasing—in some of his predictions about the coronavirus pandemic.

Navarro hadn’t “gone rogue,” as one White House official put it. He’d performed the precise task that many in Trump’s orbit have been given in recent days. He pleased the boss.

Trump's peter.

[T]he president’s staff has devoted considerable resources to finding novel ways to make him feel better about the crumbling world around him.

Have they tried spanking him with a magazine whose cover he's on?

They tell him tales of his sagging poll numbers being fake. They’ve concocted ways of convincing him that the adoring crowds he loves on the campaign trail are still there and ready.

Hence the New Jersey stunt.

Among Trump’s modern-day court jesters are administration brass and prominent White House allies. Navarro may be the most pugnacious of the bunch. But he’s hardly the only one going out of his way to trash Fauci.

[...]

Fauci has fared markedly better in gaining the public’s trust than the president has during this global pandemic, which has a U.S. death toll north of 130,000.

[...]

Stephen Moore, a conservative economist who informally advises Trump, told The Daily Beast earlier this week that he’s already in the midst of co-authoring a new memo for the president, titled “Dr. Wrong,” that will demonstrate “how many times Dr. Fauci’s been wrong during not just corona, but during his entire career.”

Jesus wept.

One of [the ways his sycophants attempt to massage his ego] is to simply highlight for the president—as much as they possibly can—the images and footage of Trump-loving citizens the president has affectionately dubbed his “beautiful ‘boaters’” during the pandemic.

According to two people who’ve been in the room when Trump has fixated on the issue, the president has repeatedly stressed that “boaters”—MAGA fans who join in on pro-Trump flotillas, with ships adorned with Trump and Mike Pence banners and gear—are a shining exemplar of the enthusiasm gap he enjoys over Biden. He has delighted in advisers showing him boater photos and videos that have bubbled up on social media. And during strategy sessions in the past two months, he’s told officials to keep bringing him more and to push out the content on their own accounts, as well.

And the idiots have done, of course.  Eg...

“I think we have really good poll numbers,” Trump declared at a press conference Tuesday when asked about his position in the election. “They’re not suppression polls; they’re real polls. You look at the Intracoastal in Florida. You look at the lakes. You see thousands of boats with Trump signs.”

At one point last month, the president privately asked in a meeting if his people could organize more boater events and even inquired, “Are we polling the boaters yet?” as one of the sources recounted. Another source familiar with this inquiry insisted that Trump was merely “joking.”

That's what they always say. And then he comes out and insists he's not joking.

John McLaughlin, a top Trump pollster whom the president values in part for providing internal data that give Trump significantly better odds than most of the public polling does, told The Daily Beast that though “there’s not enough boaters” to buoy the president to a November victory, “we also do well with bikers, NASCAR fans, NFL, college and high school tailgaters, golfers, aviators, RV people, campers, [and] homeowners,” for instance.

LOLOLOLOL.

It is not common—and, indeed, may be strategically unsound—for a president’s political apparatus to be fixated on a sliver of the U.S. population its own pollster says is statistically and demographically insignificant.

May be, indeed.

[S]uch are the machinations of the Trump campaign, where manpower, time, and money are directed toward the goal of ameliorating the boss’ wounded emotions in the face of increasingly stiff electoral competition.

[...]

In recent weeks, Trump’s political advisers have also been sure to present to him not only his campaign’s internal poll numbers but also have slipped in print-outs of public polling that’s deemed favorable to the president, even if the public poll is not quite reputable.

[...]

“The point is to show the president that it’s not just our data but to say, ‘Look, the ‘real’ [public] polls have good numbers for you, too,’” this source said, adding that this has included showing Trump polls done by Zogby, once derided by FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver as the “worst pollster in the world” for the shoddiness of its online polling.

And he's gone out and repeated it: the real polls show I'm doing great.

In their official efforts to soothe the president’s feelings, Trump’s campaign has also resorted to wasting a ton of money. In June, The Daily Beast reported that Team Trump had dropped hundreds of thousands of dollars on cable-news ads in the Washington, D.C., area, purchasing time largely on the president’s preferred network, Fox News. The ad buys had no real chance of making a positive electoral difference, given that they were reaching solidly Democratic turf in Virginia, Maryland, and D.C. But knowledgeable sources said at the time that the real purpose was to get the pro-Trump ads in front of the president, a voracious TV watcher, to set him at ease that his campaign was defending him strongly on television.

[...]

Unable to get him out of D.C., Trump’s staffers have, instead, tried to assuage his stir-craziness and gloom by other means, including telling the president how many people are viewing him while he’s in the nation’s capital.

[...]

[S]ources described how much pleasure this president has derived, including throughout the major crises of the past six months, from being shown or told about his large television audiences for specific events.

Polling the boaters???

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