Interesting article on former Trump cabinet members' books related to their experiences with the President.
In the article, this is one of my favorite quotes"Anonymous: Working for Trump was like “showing up at the nursing home at daybreak to find your elderly uncle running pantsless across the courtyard and cursing loudly about the cafeteria food.” "
news.yahoo.com/trumpworld-grown-ups-room-left-152334860.htmlA bit more quotes and comments from the article:
How to describe the experience
"Striving for new ways to characterize the head-spinning unreality of the Trump White House, the authors of the memoirs turn to a variety of vivid figures of speech.
Spicer: “I sometimes felt like a scuba diver, abandoned in the middle of the ocean, treading water.”
Comey: “The demand was like Sammy the Bull’s Cosa Nostra induction ceremony — with Trump, in the role of the family boss, asking me if I have what it takes to be a ‘made man.’”
Manigault Newman: “The selection process for his cabinet was like an episode of ‘The Bachelor.’”
Bolton: “It was like making and executing policy inside a pinball machine.”
Anonymous: Working for Trump was like “showing up at the nursing home at daybreak to find your elderly uncle running pantsless across the courtyard and cursing loudly about the cafeteria food.”
Trump as instigator
To read these books is to read of a chaotic, paranoiac workplace, where the boss delights in fomenting discord and instability among the employees.
He encourages them to keep tabs on one another. “Give me their names,” he tells Sims, wielding a Sharpie and a White House note card, vowing to rid the White House of nonloyalists.
He praises their rivals. “Keith Kellogg knows all about NATO,” the president says airily to Bolton, speaking with ominous intent of Pence’s national security adviser. “He never offers his opinions unless I ask.”
“As Pompeo and I reflected later, this statement told us exactly who my likely replacement would be if I resigned soon,” Bolton writes. “I said, ‘Of course, if you resign, maybe Keith would be Secretary of State.’” To which Pompeo responds: “Or, if we both resign, Keith could become Henry Kissinger and have both jobs.’”)
The president’s verbal style
Trump likes to talk, the memoirists agree, and he does not like to listen.
He meanders from topic to topic, loops back around, adds new topics, repeats himself, boasts, mixes facts with fake facts, throws in his latest obsession, continuing on and on according to some labyrinthine stream-of-consciousness impulse in which whatever is on his mind is worthy of public utterance. He does this in rallies and at campaign events; he also does it in briefings, in one-on-one conversations and at policy meetings.
“I don’t use the word ‘conversation’ because the term doesn’t apply when one person speaks nearly the entire time,” Comey writes of the experience.
The presidential attention span
It is true that Trump successfully repeated the words “person, woman, man, camera, TV” on television in an effort to demonstrate the superiority of his mental acuity, but it is also true, the books argue, that he rarely reads, gets bored easily, is irritable and distracted, has trouble remembering complicated things, has no intellectual curiosity and is ignorant not just about his job but about things generally considered common knowledge.
With his short attention span, he is averse to learning anything at briefings if he finds the information difficult to follow, boring, or in contravention of what he already thinks. Staff members are told to stick to a single point and repeat it often, and to boil complex proposals down to a single page — or, better, a single paragraph. They are told not to present Trump with too-long briefing papers, lest he shout at them, or with too many slides, lest his eyes glaze over.
“Any time somebody new came in to brief him, he’d get angry and say, “Who’s that guy? What’s he want?” Manigault Newman writes.
The presidential schedule
The president keeps unconventional office hours, is often late to meetings and events and watches a lot of TV.
“At 9:35 I called Trump, who was as usual still in the residence,” Bolton writes.
“He often doesn’t start the day in the Oval Office until 10 or 11 a.m.,” Anonymous writes. He is “channel-surfing his way through the presidency.”
“His official schedule was more of a loose outline than a strict regimen,” Sims writes.
The presidential ego
In “Too Much and Never Enough,” Mary Trump describes her uncle as “a savant of self-promotion” with a “delusional belief in his own brilliance and superiority” stemming from a bottomless insecurity that needs to be assuaged with a constant stream of ego-boosting compliments.".