“Trump Believes There’s a Coup”: Freaked by the Times Op-Ed, the President Is Seeing Enemies Everywhere
With Anonymous still on the loose and the “administrative state” unchecked, the last person Trump trusts is Stephen Miller.
by Gabriel Sherman September 13, 2018 12:45 pm As Hurricane Florence bears down on the Carolinas, Donald Trump’s West Wing is still struggling to recover from yet another deluge of horrible news. Yesterday, Bob Woodward’s publisher Simon & Schuster announced that Woodward’s new book, Fear, has sold more than 750,000 copies and is on its way to a ninth printing. A CNN poll released this week showed Trump’s approval rating plummeting to 36 percent. With the midterm elections less than two months away, the West Wing is girding for Republicans to lose the House and even the Senate, sources said. Ivanka Trump is even worried about impeachment, a source close to her told me. “It’s just horrible,” a former White House official said. As the parade of former allies and employees who’ve turned on him gets longer, Trump is increasingly embittered. According to sources, Trump has been furious at former economic adviser Gary Cohn and staff secretary Rob Porter for their apparent cooperation with Woodward’s book. “Trump thinks he took Gary in and gave him a job when he was going nowhere at Goldman,” a Trump adviser told me. According to the adviser, Trump let it be known to Cohn and Porter that he would attack them publicly if they didn’t disavow the book. (On Tuesday, they both did.) “The president has had it,” a former West Wing official said. “When books like this come out, he tends to shut down and calls up people he sees on TV saying good things about him.”
But Trump’s anger over Woodward’s book is dwarfed by his continuing fixation on the anonymous New York Times op-ed. Sources told me Trump is “obsessed,” “lathered,” and “freaked out” that the leaker is still in his midst. His son Don Jr. has told people he’s worried Trump isn’t sleeping because of it, a source said. Meetings have been derailed by Trump’s suspicion. “If you look at him the wrong way, he’ll spend the next hour thinking you wrote it,” a Republican close to the White House said. Much of what’s fueling Trump’s paranoia is that he has no clear way to identify the author. One adviser said Trump has instructed aides to call the anonymous author a “coward” in public to shame him or her. “He’s going to continue to shame this person,” a person close to Trump said. “The author will break under pressure or will eventually say, ‘fuck it, it’s me.’” Plans to administer polygraph tests to staff have seemingly died. “Nobody knows who it is,” a former official said.
Besides family, one of the only people Trump continues to trust is Stephen Miller. “The op-ed has validated Miller’s view, which was also Steve Bannon’s, that there’s an ‘administrative state’ out to get Trump,” a Republican close to the White House said. “There is a coup, and it’s not slow-rolling or concealed,” Bannon told me. “Trump believes there’s a coup,” a person familiar with his thinking said. Trump’s relationship with Secretary of Defense James Mattis, which was already strained, has become almost nonexistent, a former official said.
The West Wing is bracing for the climate to worsen. The increasing likelihood that Democrats will make big gains in the midterms is frustrating the White House’s efforts to get nominations confirmed in the Senate. According to a source, Johnny DeStefano, who’s in charge of personnel, has complained that Mitch McConnell’s staff will only focus on confirming judges before the midterms, leaving many important appointments, such as ones in the Export-Import Bank, unfilled. Ivanka and Jared Kushner, meanwhile, continue to agitate for Trump to replace Chief of Staff John Kelly with a more pliable manager. Ivanka recently asked a friend about Republican political adviser and former lobbyist Wayne Berman, a source briefed on the conversation said.
Gabriel Sherman is a special correspondent for Vanity Fair. Most recently, Sherman served as national-affairs editor at New York magazine, and he is a regular contributor to NBC News and MSNBC.
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Senate obstructionism handed a raft of judicial vacancies to Trump—what has he done with them?
Russell Wheeler Monday, June 4, 2018
Donald Trump inherited 88 district and 17 court of appeals vacancies. Fourteen months later he proclaimed “when I got in we had over 100 federal judges that weren’t appointed. I don’t know why Obama left that … Maybe he got complacent.”
The reasons for the vacancies—old news to most—was the flimsy confirmation record in the 2015-16 Senate (the 114th), with its new Republican majority. Just as it refused to consider Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court nomination, it shut down the lower court confirmation process. That’s water under the bridge. But documenting how the 114th Senate ratcheted up the contentiousness and polarization of an already broken confirmation process suggests how much harder it will be to ratchet it back into something with more comity and bipartisanship. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell now insists that there’s nothing “we can do …that’s more important … than confirming judges as rapidly as we get them.” Commentators boast that “Trump has had a massive impact on the federal bench.” The Republican majority refuses to grant Democratic senators privileges that Republicans and Democrats exploited vigorously in previous administrations.
Senate Democrats in turn are using their reduced arsenal of parliamentary maneuvers to slow down confirmations. If they get a Senate majority in divided government, confirmations will stop, long-term vacancies will proliferate, and sitting judges and litigants will pay the price.
The 114th’s record pales when compared to the final two years of the Reagan, Clinton, and Bush administrations. Then, as in 2015-16, the other party controlled the Senate. The 114th Senate both confirmed far fewer judges than its recent other-party predecessors and stopped confirming them at a much earlier point. Some of the 2016 vacancies Trump inherited occurred after any confirmation clock would have stopped. Still, of the 21 circuit vacancies he’s filled as of late May and others he soon will, up to seven could have had Obama appointees under pre-2015 norms. So too, up to 71 of the district vacancies he inherited and has only begun to fill could have had Obama appointees.
2015-16 confirmations vs. previous final-two-year confirmations
Kavanaugh’s accuser steps forward [...] The nomination fortunately does not hang on whether the White House or the vast majority of Senate Republicans behave responsibly, for surely they will not. Here, the two pro-choice Republican senators, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, once more are in the driver’s seat. If they indicate they will not vote to confirm unless and until the matter is investigated, then the nomination stops in its tracks. Now, it is one thing for a senator to accept the dubious proposition that Kavanaugh won’t impair federal protection for women seeking an abortion; it is quite another to refuse to investigate a plausible accusation of sexual assault, no matter how old. It’s hard to see how these two moderate Republicans can brush the allegations aside without further inquiry. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=143596660
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