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President Donald Trump mouths the words Youre fired during a signing ceremony for the Department of Veterans Affairs Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act of 2017. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Donald Trump think about how he talks, a senior White House official told me recently. This person then mimicked the presidents manner of speaking: How do you think Mike Pence is doing as vice-president? Is Mike Pence doing a good job? Let me ask you this: Did I make the right call on Pence?

The official continued: Okay, this is the vice-president of the United States. Think about what he did to Nikki Haley at that lunch: You guys like Haley? Should I keep her? Tell me if shes doing a good job, or Ill get rid of her. He asks everyday. It takes a while to understand how he talks.

This was an attempt to explain why, despite so much media speculation that there will be a wide-scale shakeup among the presidents inner circle, it hasnt yet come to pass. The question of Donald Trumps psychology when it comes to firing federal employees is of acute interest right now to anyone concerned by recent reports that he is, or was, seriously considering an action that would likely spark a Constitutional crisis dispatching Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

By appearances, Muellers tenure and whatever is left of the countrys sense of political normalcy depend entirely on whether the president, lately in a dark and unsettled mood, succumbs to the impulse to make a perceived antagonist go away, no matter the larger cost. Thats how it seems, anyway.But close observers of Trumps thinking have discerned some method to his apparent madness: He likes to hear a lot of advice, he likes to think out loud, he likes to prevaricate, and contrary to his image, he does not, in fact, like to fire someone unless forced to by somebody else.

One source close to the president who has been a part of his decision-making process put it this way: He plays his cards close to the vest. Lets say youre trying to give him advice and youre trying to get him to do something: youll make your case to him, and he doesnt agree with you or he doesnt disagree with you. He just says, Uh huh, uh huh, alright, uh huh, okay. Sometimes youre not sure whether he absorbed it or not. But you dont really know what hes gonna decide until he pops it out.

The senior White House official remarked that it wasnt uncommon for the president to speculate about the state of a given persons employment even while that individual was within earshot. He asks it in front of me, with people there! Literally, we will be sitting there having dinner, and hell just say, Hows he doing? Is he getting killed? The first couple of times, youre like, What the fuck? But you get used to it. Thats just how he talks. And hes done this forever, and thats the thing.

This phenomenon, the official said, often results in people around the president hearing snippets of his internal monologue and taking it as gospel. Trump is prone to thinking out loud even when those thoughts suggest plans that are potentially damaging to the credibility of his office and by extension the country. And he likes to hear from a wide variety of advisers and random passersby before he makes a decision. Recall, for instance, the time he polled Mar-a-Lago guests about who he should pick as secretary of State.

Observing Trump in the midst of a prolonged debate is like watching arguments in court and then being surprised by the verdict, the senior official said. When an insider draws an impression of where things stand based on a glimpse of the deliberation, that can lead to a narrative bleeding into the press.

The official cited the example of the Paris accord discussions as a parallel to the question of staff firings. People kept saying this during Paris, the official said. When someone would attempt to influence Trumps thinking, Hed listen, and hed ask a lot of questions. If you walked out of the room at the time, you might think, Wow, it got through to him! But until the decision comes down, its not final.

The speculation about Trump firing Mueller began when Christopher Ruddy, the head of Newsmax Media and personal friend of Trumps, suggested it was on the presidents mind a few hours after hed visited the White House earlier this month. The White House officially denied the claim and denied that Ruddy had even discussed the matter with Trump. But around the same time two other associates, Roger Stone and Newt Gingrich, publicly emerged with their own doubts about Mueller with Stone outright calling on Trump to dismiss him and Gingrich going on Sean Hannitys Fox News show to label him, the tip of the deep-state spear. The president retweeted a promotion for that episode of Hannity, a sign that, coupled with his own agitated tweets about the investigation being a witch hunt, the rumors might be true that is, if we are to take the president thinking aloud seriously.

As of press time, Mueller still has a job. Then again, so do Reince Priebus, Steve Bannon, Sean Spicer, Kellyanne Conway, Jeff Sessions, and a half dozen other staffers and appointees whom Trump was reportedly on the verge of firing at various points in his short White House tenure.

Certainly hes shown a willingness to oust administration officials who directly threaten his presidency (e.g., Michael Flynn) or whom he views as antagonistic (Sally Yates and James Comey). But this key fact remains: Setting aside Flynn as a special case, not a single member of the presidents inner circle has been removed despite the fact that the White House is in chaos and his approval ratings are on par with Richard Nixons in July of 1973, when he was refusing to turn over tapes to the committee investigating Watergate.

Although Trump once tried and failed to trademark the words, Youre fired! his catchphrase from The Apprentice it seems that he doesnt actually enjoy repealing and replacing the loyalists that surround him. Like so much with the president, its shtick designed to make him look tough. At the end of the day, hes a natural-born salesman and he likes people to like him, a second senior administration official said. Hes a conflict-avoider. He hates firing people. He knows hes gotta fire every one of them but he cant bring himself to do it. Hes a Gemini. Do you know what a Gemini is? Those are two people in one body. Theres always two faces with Trump.

When he does fire someone in his personal orbit, it comes with reluctance and many stages of deliberation. History would also suggest that it requires someone else close to him forcing the action. During the campaign, for instance, where there was high turnover, this was consistently the case: Sam Nunberg was pushed out by Corey Lewandowski who was pushed out by Paul Manafort who was pushed out by Jared Kushner.

Nunberg was the first casualty of the campaign. By July 2015, hed been fired twice by Trump. And the inner circle had recently expanded to include newcomers, making things feel like The Apprentice was being filmed on Nazino Island. While Trump was visiting Scotland, Nunbergs Facebook posts from 2007, in which hed used a racist term to describe Al Sharptons daughter, were published by Business Insider. Nunberg immediately suspected the story had been planted by Lewandowski, the increasingly influential campaign manager with whom hed clashed, and the two began fighting. Nunberg told him, By the time Im done with you, your family will be eating out of the garbage (he rejects the characterization of this statement as a threat).

Both men then repeatedly called Trump to shit-talk each other, but Trump was uninterested: He just wanted to play golf. Over the following 24 hours, surrounded by his children and other Trump Organization employees and calling campaign staff back home, he decided who to believe and what to do. When he finally called Nunberg to give him the news early Sunday afternoon, he was apologetic promising to write him a recommendation for a new job and to handle his exit quietly (though Lewandowski would ensure that wasnt the case, ultimately immediately alerting Bloomberg, the New York Times, and Business Insider).

Looking back on his own experience, Nunberg said, A lot of people always say, Well, Trump fired so many people during his campaign. But those were weird circumstances. You had somebody like me, who Id worked for him for four and a half years. I was blown out by somebody who was brought in. And people wanted revenge, and people were gonna return the favor.

Of course, a campaign is more fluid than a presidential administration. Its easier to replace staff, and less destructive to do so. Still, paranoia pulses through the West Wing. Each day, it seems, new stories emerge pushed by officials or sources close to the president about how things are about to fundamentally change. But is that speculation a reflection of the presidents thinking, or an attempt to influence his thinking by expressing their opinion in the press, where hes likely to see it? The answer is probably C. All of the above.

The chaos of the questions themselves have become a permanent feature of Trumps Washington. Thus reporting on potential firings continues to be exponentially more common than actual firings. And in fairness, the president is unpredictable and difficult to read. Everyone close to him might say one thing on Monday, another on Tuesday, and by Friday its back to Mondays story and then on Sunday its changed again. During an interview with Slate, Maggie Haberman of the New York Times explained it this way: He talks on tape the same way that he talks off the record, which is in this really discursive style. She added, The key is figuring out when hes actually thinking about making a change or not, and very rarely are you gonna know until after its done.

So while Trump might seem like an open book, the pages of that book are contradictory, and to assume you know what Trump will do before he does it is to fail to grasp this. The senior White House official admitted that usually with Trump, the answer is maybe. Oftentimes, there are days when hes upset about something. There are stories that hes upset about. This can affect how he discusses his staff or what he intends to do. When things go wrong, as they often have, staffers are an outlet for his rage, and so he might lash out, calling someone a fuck-up and asking others if he should get rid of them. That tends to quickly pass.

But heres the twist: With Trump feeling as though hes under siege from all sides, even the people he perceives to be fucking things up are earning points for fucking them up in an attempt to help him. He looks at Spicer and he sees, like, the coroner from the Wizard of Oz. Remember when the fucking witch got hit in the head with the house? the senior administration official said. So, he feels bad for the guy and he knows the guys trying really hard. He has a soft spot for the guy. His friends call him up and tell him hes a loser, and hes like, Oh, I feel bad for the guy.

The suspect was reportedly a former employee and physician at the hospital. He killed at least one person before turning the gun on himself.

McConnell is reportedly giving moderates more opioid funding, larger subsidies, and fewer tax cuts while giving far-right dissidents little.

California, Virginia, and Kentucky are among the states to tell Trumps voter fraud czar, Kris Kobach, to get lost.

A new initiative starting in September will offer a diversion program as an alternative to criminal penalties.

It could strip away some of the red tape to help the MTA move faster. But its not a long-term solution.

The Houses budget draft would slash $200 billion from entitlement spending 20 centrist Republicans say theyre reticent to support it.

Days after Trump was presented with military options against North Korea, he says Pyongyangs aggression will be met with a determined response.

The sort-of method behind the apparent madness.

The high-stakes tabloid showdown brokered by Jared Kushner.

Rand Paul and Donald Trump helped kill the original strategy for repealing Obamacare and enacting a replacement later. Now theyre both reviving it.

The council was established by President Obama to ensure gender equality in policy proposals.

Cardinal Pell and the risk Francis took.

Returning to one of the America First preoccupations of his campaign, Trump is on the brink of imposing steel tariffs on China and other countries.

One day after Trumps Twitter attack, Joe and Mika declare the president unwell and say the White House threatened them with bad tabloid coverage.

Chancellor Angela Merkel cleared the way for parliament to consider legalization, but she voted against it.

The jihadi group is losing land and resources. Defeating its nihilistic philosophy remains a much taller order.

Though the Trump administration reversed its stance on fiancs at the last minute, Hawaii still challenged its definition of close family.

A new Wall Street Journal report means the president has lost the benefit of the doubt.

A GOP opposition researcher says he tried to obtain missing Clinton emails for Flynn and intelligence reports support his tale.

The design of the Senate health-care bill is to slowly introduce Medicaid cuts that will grow much larger as time goes by.

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How Donald Trump Decides to Fire Someone - New York Magazine

Mr. Trumps social media presence can be a strange stew of family, politics and simmering anger. Like his father, the younger Mr. Trump sees social media as a way to circumvent the media that he thinks is not properly serving readers and viewers. By so flagrantly picking sides, Mr. Trump said in an interview this week, theyre forcing people to go to other places to watch.

Mr. Trump, 39, is used to doing battle on his fathers behalf. He was the one who carried out the firing of Mr. Trumps first campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski.

He said he was still frustrated by some of his fathers aides: I think hes being served well by some people. Other people, less so, he said.

Since assuming management of the Trump Organization with his brother Eric, Mr. Trump has been an infrequent presence in the White House, attending events like the Easter Egg Roll and his fathers birthday. But the Trumps are still able to close ranks from afar.

Both father and son use Twitter as a digital flogging machine when they sense that someone has treated them unfairly. The family resemblance was on display this week after CNN a perennial news nemesis quickly retracted a story about a Trump campaign aides business ties to Russia and accepted the resignations of three journalists. The network was also forced to defend the actions of a producer who criticized the networks news coverage the producer had been speaking to someone wearing a hidden camera.

The Trumps pounced.

Wow, CNN had to retract big story on Russia, with 3 employees forced to resign. What about all the other phony stories they do? FAKE NEWS! the president wrote at 6:30 in the morning on Tuesday.

Hey mainstream media, which one of you will actually report on this @CNN story this morning? Be balanced and fair!!! his eldest son chimed in a few hours later.

In some cases, conservatives have been reaching out directly to the younger Mr. Trump, asking him to jump in and fight. Political violence has been a preoccupation of Mr. Trumps. The episode in which the comedian Kathy Griffin held up what looked like the presidents severed head was a particular source of outrage.

Twitter allowed me to call her out immediately for her vile, sick, disgusting actions, Mr. Trump said. It brought attention to a serious issue that would have been glossed over otherwise. Social media, if used properly, is a fantastic tool to redefine the conversation in our terms.

Mr. Trump, who divides his time between Manhattan and a property upstate, seems to speak the language of conservatives most naturally. He is an avid hunter whose closest friends are not considered New York elite, but are people who enjoy the outdoors and are gun enthusiasts. This makes him as much his fathers ambassador to Middle America and a broader swath of conservatives as anyone.

As of late Ive probably taken more of a role in it of my own volition, Mr. Trump said of confronting critics, noting he is not working in concert with the White House. Im watching from the outside.

During sensitive times, the Republican National Committee has asked Mr. Trump to step in as a pinch-hitter when his father has been advised not to tweet. When James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, testified before the Senate in early June, the younger Mr. Trump coordinated with the national committee to push back against Mr. Comeys testimony. When Mr. Comey testified that the president had mentioned closing the federal investigation into contact between Russian officials and Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trumps former national security adviser, Mr. Trump took to Twitter.

Hoping and telling are two very different things, Mr. Trump wrote, you would think that a guy like Comey would know that. #givemeabreak

Lindsay Jancek, the deputy communications director for the national committee, said in an interview that there was frequent communication between the organization and Mr. Trump. The committee sends him messaging materials, including thoughts for posts, for him to consider sharing to his 1.7 million Twitter followers. That following has grown from about 700,000 since the presidential campaign began in earnest. Ms. Jancek called the work done during the Comey hearing very successful in driving a narrative and pushing back.

Mr. Trump has said he gets the national committee talking points or sometimes his friends share tweets, but that his own posts are not made at anyones behest. He has his own way of leaping into action: On Thursday, when his father drew swift backlash for using Twitter to crudely attack Mika Brzezinski, the co-host of the MSNBC show Morning Joe, Mr. Trump did not issue a defense but used the episode as another opportunity to attack CNN.

The message is working with millennials, according to Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, an activist group for young conservatives. Mr. Kirk, who interacts frequently with Mr. Trump on Twitter, said that members across the groups 1,100 college and high school campuses were avid followers of Mr. Trumps Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts, which tend to showcase his hunting prowess and dedication to his wife and five children.

As we work to grow the party and attract younger voters, Mr. Kirk, 23, wrote in an email, having strong, confident, funny, and respected voices like Donald Trump Jr. is a tremendous asset.

Mr. Trump also frequently interacts with prominent conservatives, and acknowledged that there are some people he has retweeted or praised who have flagged conspiracy theories. In April, he suggested that Mike Cernovich, a writer known for promoting false claims that Hillary Clinton was part of a pedophile ring located in the basement of a pizzeria, deserved a Pulitzer Prize for using shaky anonymous sourcing to report on the White House.

Mr. Trump said that a tweet of support for people who promote conspiracy theories was not an endorsement of everything that that person has ever said or done.

He said: That doesnt mean that one individual thought, though, is any less right or shouldnt be an issue.

Despite raising his public profile as a pugilistic defender of the president, Mr. Trump said he had no plans to follow his fathers path into politics.

For the time being, he said, I think Im much more effective doing what Im doing.

A version of this article appears in print on July 1, 2017, on Page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: Like Father Like Son, Using Twitter as a Foil To Skewer Political Foes.

Originally posted here:
Like His Father, Donald Trump Jr. Uses Twitter to Target the Media - New York Times

It was the fat joke heard 'round the world. Pope Francis, speaking with Donald and Melania Trump during their recent visit, asked the first lady whether she'd been feeding her husband potica, a rich Slovenian dessert.

His Holiness wasn't the only one eyeballing the president's diet. Recently, the public learned that the White House kitchen staff knows to deliver their boss extra Thousand Island dressing and a double serving of ice cream while his guests get vinaigrette and a single scoop of vanilla, triggering sniggers about presidential gluttony.

And since Trump so shamelessly slings stingingly personal insults tied to fitness and body type from "Miss Piggy" to "fat pig" to "Little Marco" why resist the urge to poke his proverbial soft underbelly?

We should resist, because Trump's attitudes toward healthy eating and exercise aren't a joke they have serious consequences for the nation's health. First, they mark a dramatic pivot from his presidential predecessors on both sides of the aisle. Previous presidents saw projecting a personal embrace of healthy living as politically attractive, while Trump perceives just the opposite.

And second, in a nation already defined by highly unequal access to healthy food and exercise, Trump's own inclinations threaten to make wellness an even lower public and private priority. Today, if your work schedule, child care and next meal are unpredictable, wellness is at best aspirational and at worst a cruel reminder of yet another dividing line between haves and have-nots. Trump's attitudes and actions will only exacerbate this inequality even as they thrill his fans.

American presidents have celebrated wellness as a personal and political virtue for so long it verges on clich. Teddy Roosevelt famously advocated an outdoorsy "strenuous life," which showcased his own swagger and resonated in a moment when urbanization and the expansion of white-collar work provoked anxiety that white men were becoming sedentary sissies.

Sixty years later, President-elect John F. Kennedy decried in Sports Illustrated that affluence had created a physically and morally "Soft American" unfit for Cold War citizenship. This essay painted JFK as a champion of "vigor" (even as he privately suffered from serious ailments) and boosted support for federally funded physical education and recreation programs.

Democrats Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were often photographed jogging, while a 1983 Parade spread featured Republican Ronald Reagan exercising on Nautilus machines and chopping wood. Fellow Republican George W. Bush installed a treadmill on Air Force One, required staffers to exercise and told Runner's World in 2002 that at long last, "statistic after statistic is beginning to sink into the consciousness of the American people that exercise is one of the keys to a healthy lifestyle."

President Trump, however, missed that memo. The president's conspicuous contempt for self-care unlike Obama's occasional furtive cigarette benefits him politically in part because it taps into the anti-Obama hatred that propelled him to power. The Obamas took the presidential embrace of healthy living as a vehicle to improve society and self to new levels.

Men's Health dubbed Obama the "fittest president ever" and stealth video of his workout in a Warsaw hotel gym went viral. If Michelle Obama first drew notice for her sculpted biceps, her legacy became Let's Move and lunchroom reform. So powerful is this association that a Tennessee school cafeteria worker recently told me that a Trump supporter crowed that serving her child chocolate milk and tater tots at school was a "personal F-U to Michelle Obama."

Not only does Trump benefit from being the anti-Obama, but he also gives voice to a sense among his supporters that healthy eating and exercise have become increasingly elitist. Back in 2007, Obama caught blowback at an Iowa campaign stop for making casual reference to buying arugula at Whole Foods. Soon after, white working class reality TV star Mama June proudly told In Touch that despite her wealth, she served her family "sketti" enriched spaghetti doused in butter and ketchup rather than snobbishly preparing quinoa.

Trump's self-fashioning as champion of the common man capitalizes on the contemporary association between wellness and unsavory cosmopolitan pretension. Yet his love of rich foods and leisure paradoxically trades on century-old tropes that also cast him as a kind of Everyman's Billionaire. Until about 1920, the wealthy conspicuously consumed caloric foods and avoided exertion because few felt they could afford to do so.

Dominant scientific theory at the time argued that humans were born with a finite energy supply and that the better classes should conserve theirs for loftier ends than physical labor. When industrialization and the white-collar sector made food abundant and sedentary work more accessible however, resisting these temptations through diet and exercise became a display of upper-class restraint as it remains today.

Trump, whose appeal to many stems from nostalgia, conjures an outdated but aspirational ideal of what wealth might feel, or taste, like. It's why dropping $36 on an "haute burger" just after overwhelmingly capturing the working class white vote didn't tarnish Trump's legitimacy. It's why the "cheap version of rich" marketed in every truffle-oil-soaked steak slung at his eponymous "Grille" still sells. Same goes for his peculiar but precedented explanation that he prefers relaxing at his various luxury properties to exercise that would deplete his "non-rechargeable battery." In the throwback image of American abundance that Trump hawks, his supporters envision themselves as deserving fat cats consuming cake rather than kale.

And yet. While expending energy on exercise and dietary restraint may be undesirable for Trump's everyman, it's a requirement for the women in his orbit. Of the little we know about Melania Trump, her penchant for Pilates is widely reported and a former roommate remembered her consuming only vegetables and diligently wearing ankle weights around the house. First daughter Ivanka Trump's diet and exercise routines have long been the stuff of lifestyle pubs, and she recently craved a sweat badly enough to cause controversy by enrolling at a Washington studio under an alias.

In 1996, Trump himself set up a media scrum in a gym to film a tearful Alicia Machado exercising after she gained what he determined was an unacceptable amount of weight for Miss Universe. A viral meme in the wake of the January Women's March announced, "In one day, Trump got more fat women out walking than Michelle Obama did in 8 years."

Clearly, Trump's world is a sexist one in which wellness is a women's issue. Weight control is appropriately top priority for the half of the population whose worth corresponds to their waistlines.

Unlike exercise and diet, sports especially football have long earned the approval of conservatives, including Trump, for building masculinity and competitiveness. The president's apparently contradictory celebration of sport and scorn for healthy living actually corresponds to a longstanding cultural divide between the two. In the 1950s and 60s, straight American males were assumed to be so uninterested in diet and exercise that women's magazines counseled wives to trim the fat from their husband's roasts out of eyesight in order to safeguard the health of their hearts and egos.

By 1979, historian Christopher Lasch bemoaned the "degradation of sport" due to the "new sports for the noncompetitive" taking place in gyms and studios, which promoted bland "amateurism" in the name of inclusiveness and health promotion. (Some might consider this a forerunner to conservative complaints about participation trophies.) Thus, in the Trump playbook, sports are commendable for building manly character, while expanding opportunities to exercise and eat mindfully for health or beauty is feminine and inferior.

Making America Great Again will affect our collective wellbeing in subtle ways beyond the AHCA, cuts to Planned Parenthood and the deregulation of school nutrition that Trump embraces. Contemporary wellness culture is flawed, but has dramatically improved Americans' lives and saved taxpayers millions. Diverse policies and programs ranging from Title IX, to yoga for the incarcerated, to corporate wellness initiatives, to body-positive activism have helped make the connection between healthy living and human flourishing widely accepted. Trump threatens to destroy those gains.

We owe our president the privacy to eat and exercise as he wishes, free from the fat-shaming cruelty for which his critics rightly fault him. But when he brandishes his unhealthy lifestyle to romanticize an era in which junk science upheld twisted ideas about gender, class and health, we owe it to each other to resist the deepening wellness divide, body, heart and mind.

Washington Post

Natalia Mehlman Petrzela is associate professor of history at the New School and the author of "Classroom Wars: Language, Sex, and the Making of Modern Political Culture." She is currently writing a book about American fitness culture.

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Donald Trump's diet is bad for America's health - Chicago Tribune

Some people simply cannot handle the fact that Donald Trump was elected president.

One of those people is Donald Trump.

Trump has shown himself intellectually and emotionally incapable of making the transition from minor entertainment figure to major political figure. He is in the strange position of being a B-list celebrity who is also the most famous man in the world. His recent Twitter attack on Mika Brzezinski of MSNBCs Morning Joe exemplifies that as much as it does the presidents other by-now-familiar pathologies, notably his strange psychological need to verbally abuse women in physical terms.

Trump may have his problems with women, but it is his unrequited love of the media that is undoing him.

I always tell the president, You dont need them, says Sean Hannity, the self-abasing monkey-butler of the Trump regime. The president, Hannity says, can reach more Americans via Twitter than he could through the conventional media. That isnt true, of course: Only about one in five Americans uses Twitter. Hannity might be forgiven for not knowing this, a consequence of his much more general habit of not knowing things. But he actually does know the president. How could he possibly believe that this man this man does not need them?

He needs them the way a junkie needs his junk.

Donald Trump cares more about how he is perceived in the media than he cares about anything else in the world, including money. Trump is a true discipline of Bishop Berkeley, professing the creed of the social-media age: Esse eat percipi To be is to be seen. Trump is incapable of enjoying anything money, success, sex without being perceived enjoying it.

Consider: Even though he has in fact been on the cover of Time magazine, it was discovered this week that he had had his people produce some fake Time magazine covers lauding the success of his television show, The Apprentice. He had these fake Time covers displayed at Trump properties around the world. Why? Because Trump, for all his professed contempt for the media, believes that success is not success until it is certified by Time magazine or (avert thine eyes, Hannity!) the New York Times.

Donald Trump is a man who invented an imaginary friend, John Barron, to call up members of the New York press and lie to them about his business success and his sex life. (He claimed, among other things, to be dating Carla Bruni.) A man who does not need the media does not do that.

Trump wrote of the third lady that he chose her because he wanted to be able to enter a room with her and make other men envious to see grown men weep a very strange admission that his satisfaction in his marriage rests neither with himself nor with his wife but with third parties who might ogle her. (His cuckoldry-obsessed fans must surely have noted this.) But envious of what? Asked during a public appearance whether shed have married Trump if he werent rich, she answered: If I werent beautiful, do you think hed be with me? There is a certain clarity in that, one of a very familiar sort.

As president and president-elect, Trump spent a great deal of time tweeting about his ratings as host of The Apprentice and those of his successor, about the ratings of various news programs covering him, about the viewerships and readerships of various media outlets, generally theorizing that those critical of him must by moral necessity be in decline. On the other hand, he plainly does not know that there are tax provisions in the health-care bill Republicans are trying to drag out of Congress: He was perplexed when they came up at a White House meeting with Republican senators, saying that he was planning on taking on tax reform at a later date, oblivious to the content of the bill he purports to be negotiating. He doesnt understand whats going on between Saudi Arabia and Qatar, but has taken to Twitter to argue surprise that, whatever it is, its all about him.

What do you think he reads first in the morning: His national-security briefing or Page Six?

Id wager that Trump could list at least three times as many cable-news commentators as world leaders. He is much better versed in CNNs lineup than in NATOs.

Doesnt need the media? He is the media, a former contract employee at NBC with a sideline in casinos. He was born to conduct Twitter feuds with second-tier cable-television hosts. Figuring out health-care policy?

Nobody watches that.

READ MORE: Why Trumps Vengeful Tweeting Matters Trumps Pettiness Is Damaging His Agenda Trump Should Get Off His Phoneand Start Lying to My Face

Kevin D. Williamson is National Reviews roving correspondent.

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Junkie Running Dry - National Review

As part of his America First principles, president Donald Trump and the steel industry figures he has brought into his administration, including commerce secretary Wilbur Ross, are planning to overrule virtually his entire cabinet to impose 20% tariffs on steel imports, Axios reports. They plan to cite national security concerns.

Aside from angering US allies and undermining global trade norms, the first victims of such a policy are likely to be American workers who make things with steel.

Here are the simple economics: There are 60,000 US workers employed in the steel and iron-working industry. More than 900,000 American workers make cars and car parts out of that steel. While tariffs will be a boon to the domestic steel industry, driving up prices, those same price increases will make using that steel more expensive, especially in a competitive global market. Driving up prices of raw materials is a good incentive to move manufacturing overseas.

We even have an object lesson: In 2002, president George W. Bush imposed tariffs on steel imports for much the same reason as Trumpcombatting cheap imports from other countriesbut ended them when the World Trade Organization ruled them illegal. Over the 18 months that the tariffs were imposed, a spike in steel prices put 200,000 workers out of their jobs, according to a study (pdf) paid for by companies who buy steel. Some of the states with concentrated job losses were those that were key to Trumps victory in 2016, including Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Florida.

Its true that the steel industry has suffered in the US and Europe thanks in part to state-backed firms in China dumping cheap steel on the international market. But unilateral tariffs dont promise a simple solution, since the US bought less than 2% of Chinas steel exports in 2015, and less than 1% last year, a result of 20 trade remediesrules that limit unfair salesincluding four that went into effect last December after court wins against China by the Obama administration. Most US steel imports come from Brazil, Canada and South Korea.

The policy-making process on steel appears seems similar to the one that resulted in restrictions on travel to Cuba. In that case, as with steel, most officials argued that the US would be better served by normalization but were overruled by a handful of White House advisers.

Other policies might do a better job of fixing the US steel industry. A confusing thicket of regulations, for example, means that companies melting down raw steel imported from abroad can sell their finished product under rules that privilege American manufacturers, while those that use more modern technology to heat and press raw steel from abroad dont get the same preferential treatment.

This is the challenge of industrial policy: Its very hard to intervene in one sector of the economy without creating unintended consequences in another. The steel industry may see gains from higher prices, but workers up the value chain will suffer. When Bushs tariffs went into place, Ford and GM challenged him in court. Were likely to see the same scenario this time around, so expect to see a clash of Donald Trump versus Americas carmakers.

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Donald Trump is planning a trade war, and the first casualty will be American jobs - Quartz