Nero, while Rome was burning

Have they MET Trump?

A handful of aides already quit following the mayhem Wednesday at the Capitol, including first lady Melania Trump’s chief of staff. And on Thursday morning, former White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, who has more recently been serving as special envoy to Northern Ireland, said he had called Secretary of State Michael Pompeo to let him know he was resigning from the diplomatic post.

[...]

Before Trump held a rally with thousands of supporters outside the White House in the morning, he spoke with Vice President Mike Pence by phone, urging him to reject some of Biden’s votes while presiding over the count in a joint session of Congress. Trump told Pence that he could either be courageous or not, using a vulgarity, according to two people familiar with the matter.During the rally, the president exhorted his supporters to march on the Capitol. Crowds swelled before protesters finally broke through police lines and entered the building just after the joint session got underway.

It took aides about 45 minutes to persuade Trump to issue a tweet urging protesters against violence after they entered the building, according to people familiar with the matter.

Those who tried to reason with the president included his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and White House Counsel Pat Cipollone.

[...]

Meadows and the president’s daughter and senior adviser, Ivanka Trump, later persuaded Trump to film a short video he posted on Twitter, in which he repeated his unfounded claims of election fraud and held the protesters blameless for the violence while urging them to go home.

[...]

A State Department spokesman, Gabriel Noronha, criticized Trump in a tweet from his personal account late Wednesday, saying he “fomented an insurrectionist mob that attacked the Capitol” and “needs to go.”

[...]

Also Wednesday, the president told aides not to allow Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, into the White House, the people said. Trump acted out of anger toward Short for multiple reasons, according to people familiar with the matter, including a New York Times report that Pence had privately told him Tuesday he would not seek to halt the certification of Biden’s Electoral College victory. Trump blamed Short for the story, one person said.

  Bloomberg

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