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Newsweek published this story under the headline of Citizen Trump on September 28, 1987. Newsweek is republishing the story.

Donald Trump, America's brash billionaire, wants the land Harry Stein's restaurant-equipment store stands on, and he wants it badly. It's behind Trump Plaza, a hotel and casino in Atlantic City that on a good day drops roughly $ 2 million into its owner's pocket. Where the Steins' store now stands, Trump wants to build a huge wall and turn it into a waterfalla $ 4 million touch. If he can buy out Harry Stein and knock down the building, the waterfall will look better. The Stein family has been in business in Atlantic City for more than 90 years; Harry and his son Bill sit alone with Trump in a windowless casino office. No lawyers, no bankers, no aides.

"I don't really need your land," Trump says, calmly and politely, "and, as you know, land prices aren't nearly what they were a few years ago. And I'll put up the wall anyway. Once we decide to build the wall, I will have zero interest in your building. So give me a number. All I want to know is if we have a deal."

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The Steins fidget. "We were looking for $ 200 a square foot."

"Three years ago I'd have given it to you."

"It will cost us $ 1.5 million to move."

"But you'll save a fortune in taxes. The price you're asking is far above what I paid others. The alternative I have is to preclude you forever. Once I don't buy it, I don't believe the property will have any value. The gravy train is leaving the station."

Trump tells the Steins to call his New York office in a week. He shakes hands and leaves. "You wait," he says later, "they'll come around. They always do."

A huge black helicopter with red letteringTRUMPflutters above the southern tip of Manhattan. The French-made military chopper can travel 180 miles per hour; at $ 2 million, the price Trump paid Warner Communications for it, it was a steal. He is flying to Atlantic City to promote an upcoming heavyweight fight that his casino is sponsoring. With him is Don King, the bombastic boxing promoter and heavyweight champ of hair. It is a cloudless morning, and before banking to the southwest the pilot hangs the copter directly above the gleaming twin towers of the World Trade Center for half a minute. Neither Trump nor King pays much attention to the staggering view. A reporter is present, and it's showtime. Trump, after a long soliloquy detailing his problems with his current archenemy, Ed Koch, the mayor of New York, turns the floor over to King.

"Donald Trump is a man of vision," King bellows. "New York City needs a man like Donald Trump. I have come up with a word to describe him: 'telesynergistic.' That means, 'progress ingeniously planned by geometric progressionthe capability of transforming dreams into living reality, in minimal time, at megaprofits.'"

"Go on Don, I kinda like this," Trump says sarcastically.

"Now, I believe the rift between Donald and Mayor Koch must be healed. We must get it behind us. New York needs Donald Trump's energy and his vision. That's why I am offering my services as an intermediary. To act as a peacemaker, to do anything I can to help bring them together."

"Don," replies Trump, stroking his chin thoughtfully, "I'm not interested in peace. I'm interested in competence."

Donald Trump sits in his office in the midtown Manhattan building that bears his name"the most luxurious building in the world," he calls it. All week he has been lampooned in Gary Trudeau's comic strip, "Doonesbury." In one of the series, Trudeau had Trump in front of a press conference, protesting that his alleged presidential ambitions are nothing more than "a billionaire developer exercising his right to float trial balloons."

"'Doonesbury,' 'Doonesbury,' everybody's asking me to respond to 'Doonesbury'," Trump says, a bit exasperated. A day earlier he had said he was only vaguely aware of the comic strip and had dismissed the barbs with a wave of his hand: "People tell me I should be flattered." Now he will lay the political rumors to rest. "I'm not running for president," he says, "but if I did . . . I'd win. There, I said it. I didn't think I would, but I did."

Donald John Trumpreal estate developer, casino operator, corporate raider and perhaps future politicianis a symbol of an era. He is the man with the Midas fist. For better or worse, in the 1980s it is OK to be fiercely ambitious, staggeringly rich and utterly at ease in bragging about it. He is the latest of a breed unique to the decade: the businessman who becomes larger than life, like a star athlete or popular actor. Trump has made it into that rarefied group as fast as anyone, and he revels in his high celebrity status as few have before him. "There is no one my age who has accomplished more," he boasts openly.

Trump has created one of the most profitable private empires in the most public of fashions. His high profile, in fact, has been central to his success. "The aura of the Trump name," as one of his attorneys puts it, "is a big asset." For the new rich, says a New York real-estate broker, the name is synonymous with "status." So Trump plasters it on practically every building he builds or casino he operatesand he promotes them brilliantly. "The P. T. Barnum of real estate," a friend once called him. He has become so wealthy in the process, he concedes, that life has become something of "a game" for him. The ultimate scoreboard, he says, "is the unfortunate, obvious one: money." Trump, who at 41 has amassed an empire whose assets are worth more than $ 3 billion, agrees with an assessment that others might find less than flattering. Asked if he's the ultimate Yuppie, he replies, "Yeah, maybe."

The ambition may be pure '80s, but the Trump lifestyle is roaring '20s. He owns three homes, and the word opulent does them no justice: 110 rooms at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, the former mansion of cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post; a huge triplex apartment in Trump Tower, the Fifth Avenue skyscraper he built four years ago, and a 10-acre, 45-room weekend estate in Greenwich, Conn.

He also owns a Boeing 727, the Darth Vader helicopter, and now he's negotiating to buy a yacht owned by Saudi arms broker Adnan Khashoggi that's about six times the size of the average Manhattan apartment. ("Not many people life a life like Khashoggi," he says, and then adds with a grain, "but I'm coming damn close.") Town & Country, an upper-crust print version of "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous," recently ran a 12-page cover spread featuring Trump's wife, Ivana, a beautiful ex-model from Czechoslovakia. A friend of Trump's younger brother, Robert, an executive vice president in the family-owned company, says Robert once left a Manhattan dinner party early, joking that he "had to go home and watch 'Dynasty' to learn how to act."

Star struck: Trump makes no apologies for his lifestyle. He is obsessive about surrounding himself with what he calls "the best" of everything. Walk with him through one of his casinos and he shows off "the best high roller's suite ever built," one replete with all "the best" touchesfrom the hot tub overlooking the ocean to the marble on the bathroom floor.

Trump believes he is in tune with times. "The man in the street, the little guy,digsthe limo, the helicopter, the 727." (In the final "Doonesbury" strip last week, a reporter asks what experience noncandidate Trump has with "people of modest means." Plenty, Trump relies, "evicting them.") Trump can hardly wall the streets of his native New York anymore without being hounded by autograph seekers, most of whom seem star struck.

Clearly, neither New York nor Atlantic City is big enough for Trump's ambition. In the last year he has thrust himself, his money and his ego onto the national stage. As a businessman sitting atop an empire worth $ 3 billion, Trump in the last year joined the richest army in the worldthe growing legion of corporate raiders. Three separate times he made millions of dollars after buying up big chunks of publicly traded companies and then selling after rumors of a possible acquisition drove the share prices up. It was all pretty easy, he says, easier than real estate.

Open pleas: Maybe too easy for a man who seems as attracted to power as he is to wealth. Last month Trump paid $ 94,801 to run a full-page advertisement in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe. He wasn't hawking luxury condos or the upcoming fight in Atlantic City. In an "open letter," Trump thumped U.S. foreign policy, saying, "The world is laughing at America's politicians" for protecting "ships we don't own, carrying oil we don't need destined for allies who won't help." Trump has agreed to an October speaking engagement in New Hampshire, where a lone political activist without any ties to the noncandidate is running around trying to organize a draft-Trump movement. Since the ad ran, Trump has denied presidential ambitions on several occasions; but since he does not intend to cancel the New Hampshire trip, talk of his political ambitions probably won't stop anytime soon.

To Trump's enemiesand he has enemies galorehis flirtations with politics confirm their worst suspicions: they view him as Citizen Kane sprung to life, an arrogant tycoon whose insatiable ambition leads him to seek political power. John Moore is an attorney who led a tenant group into bitter battle with Trump after he bought their rent-controlled building and announced he wanted to tear it down. "He is a dangerous man," Moore says. As a political leader, he's "the type who'd make the trains run on time."

Trump is undoubtedly enjoying the hype associated with his recent political forays. He has long recognized the benefits of publicity. The equation is simple: if more people know your name and your reputation, more people will buy your flashy condominiums, dump quarters into your slot machines or pick up a copy of your new book. Trump feeds the hype machine because nothing matters more to him than success. At times, say people close to him, it seems it's all he cares about. Says his sister Maryanne Trump-Barry, a federal district judge in New Jersey, "success brings success, which brings more success. The more he gets, the more he wants."

Ice show: How successful a promoter is Trump? Though he is now the largest casino operator in Atlantic City, he's still known in his hometown mainly as a real-estate developer. Several developers have had a bigger impact on the New York skyline recently than Donald Trump. Yet only one building constructed in New York during the last 10 years has become a tourist attractionTrump Tower. The difference is, the other developers don't build buildings with soaring waterfalls, lobbies made of pink marble and astonishingly opulent apartments that sell for more than $ 2 million. Most also don't name buildings after themselves. Few would humiliate the city's mayor by reconstructing a public skating rink in four months after the city had spent seven years trying to do it. And absolutely no one else would proceed to insult the mayor at every turn thereafter.

Trump has managed to thrive flamboyantly in two scandal-ridden industriescasinos and New York real-estate developmentand he's done it without a taint of corruption. A high-level law-enforcement official in New York says, "There aren't even rumors" about the Trump organization in the construction industry. In Atlantic City, the gaming-enforcement division several years ago asked Trump to sever his ties to a convicted felon who had worked for him in New York. He did so, and has had little trouble with the state since. He has also managed to avoid conflicts with unions in both industries, primarily because he pays union workers relatively well.

No one, not even people who loathe Donald Trump, denies his talent as a businessman. Born in Queens, the fourth of five intensely competitive children, he is the son of a successful New York real-estate developer,FredTrump, and his wife, Mary. As a teenager, Donald worked for his father's company, prowling around construction sites in Brooklyn and Queens in his spare time. After graduating with an undergraduate degree in finance from the University of Pennsylvania in 1968, Trump worked for his father full time. At 28, he set off on his own and moved into Manhattan. AsFredTrumpgot older he turned over most of his assets to Donald. Trump "very much wanted to match his father's success," says Trump-Barry.

Trump became the consummate dealmaker, possessing what seems to be an intuitive knack for acquiring attractive assets cheaply. He is smart, tough and as tenacious as anyone in getting what he wants. Those traits, combined with his ability to attract customers to casinos or condos"I do know how to sell," he saysmade Trump very rich, very quickly.

Trump laid the cornerstone of his New York empire in 1975, when he took on a project no other developer would. With the city practically broke, he cut a deal: he offered to rehabilitate a crumbling old hotel next to Grand Central Terminala block then in seemingly irreversible decline. In return, the city agreed to grant Trump a tax break worth $ 120 million to him.

The deal was vintage Trump. "Nobody believed I could pull it off," he recalls. But after getting the subsidy, he persuaded lenders to give him $ 70 million, and Trump constructed what is now the hugely profitable Grand Hyatt Hotel. Though the tax break was controversial then, few in New York today doubt its wisdom. "The project triggered a tremendous amount of investment when that end of 42nd Street could have fallen into dereliction," says Richard Kahan, a former state official.

Trump learned a lesson in the Grand Hyatt deal: it was important to have government officials on his side, particularly in New York, where a thicket of regulations makes it extremely difficult to build anything. He became, in the words of one major developer, "the ultimate inside player." When other developers made relatively small campaign contributions to government officials, "Trump was giving $ 50,000and bragging about it," says a former government official. He also hired key government people after they left public service because he wanted their intimate knowledge of the bureaucracy.

Screwing back: Whether that tack has actually helped him much is questionable. When he tried to get another major tax subsidy for Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, the city fought him. He finally won in court, but only after a long delay. Then he tried to get tenants evicted from a building he wanted to tear down next to Central Park. The tenants fought back and eventually won a favorable settlement from Trump.

Now he has alienated Koch by demanding a $ 1 billion subsidy for a quintessential Trump project: a 150-story buildingthe world's tallestthat he wants to build on a piece of land he bought for $ 92 million three years ago. The land sits against the Hudson River on Manhattan's West Side and, thanks to a real-estate boom in New York, is already worth much more than what Trump paid for it. In addition to the 150-story tower, Trump wants to build 11 other skyscrapers, all 45 stories high.

He calls the project Television City, because he wants his new buildings to house the National Broadcasting Co. NBC's parent company, General Electric, has been threatening to move the network out of New York. Trump says Koch should grant him tax relief so he, in turn, can offer NBC subsidized office space and keep it in New York. Though publicly cast as a struggle to keep the network in the city, the issue in fact has become a test of wills between Koch and Trump.

Even some city officials privately say they'd bet on Trump. Those who have sat across the table from him say his negotiating style is infuriating, but effective. A rival developer says Trump "does business through intimidation. It's bravado and shock. Intimidate until they collapse. Ask for the moon and you will get something." Trump doesn't necessarily disagree with all of that. He just characterizes it differently. "If people are fair to me, I'm fair to them," he says. "If people screw me, I screw back in spades."

Felling trees: That combativeness applies to anyone, anywhere. At Trump Tower he told Irving Fischer, chairman of HRH Construction Corp., for years the Trump family's main contractor, to get rid of a bunch of trees that had been installed in the building's lobby. It had been an ordeal getting the tall trees into the building to begin with, and Fischer was unclear as to how Trump though they could them out. "Ever hear of a chain saw?" he snapped. It cost Trump $ 100,000 more, but he got rid of the trees he didn't want.

Does toughness necessarily translate into more money for Trump? Ask Eric Silverstein. His sign-painting company had been working overtime to get ready for the opening of Trump Plaza, one of Trump's Atlantic City casinos. Silverstein was a minor contractor on a huge project. But for him, the $ 800,000 fee was enormous.

No choice: Trump kept asking for small improvements in his work, Silverstein says, and delayed payment until they were completed. Then, he claims, Robert Trump, who managed the project for Donald, called Silverstein to a meeting he swears took place in one of the hotel's men's rooms. Trump, Silverstein says, had a new offer. He would give him 50 cents on the dollar to settle the contract. If he didn't like it, he claims he was told, he could sue. Silverstein says he had little choice. A suit would take years, and he simply couldn't afford the legal fees.

Robert Trump says Silverstein's company got paid less than what he contracted for because it did "shoddy work and was late in finishing it, besides." Silverstein disputes those claims, but Robert Trump says, "Anything he got paid was too much." Donald says he is unaware of the incident, but adds, "If a contractor does a great job, he gets full payment on the first of every month. Sometimes even earlier. If a contractor does less of a good job, I will try to renegotiate. If a contractor has done a bad job, he will go through hell."

To Trump, that's simply good business. And outside time spent with his wife and three children, business consumes him. He recently bought a Florida condominium project in a poor locationan atypical move for Trump. He did it, he says, because when he stays at Mar-a-Lago, he needs something to do. "Now," he says, "I have someplace to go" on weekends.

Such ambition leaves little time for friendships. "Friendship is not part of his agenda," a business associate says, and Trump concedes as much. "I hate to have to rely on friends," he says. "I'm not a trusting guy. I want to rely on myself." His only "real friends," he says, are family members.

Where his ambition will take him is by no means clear. Trump believes one of his "strengths lies in my unpredictability." He could, without question, become one of the most feared corporate raiders around. Trump has cash and almost unlimited borrowing capability. He could go after almost any company he wants. Recently he took over Resorts International, a rival casino operator, the first time Trump had acquired a public company. In the last 12 months he has made more than $ 122 million buying large chunks of stock in three different companiesAllegis (formerly United Airlines), Holiday Corp. (owner of the Holiday Inns hotel chain) and Bally's. In each case news of his stake triggered takeover speculation that drove the stock price up.

But Harvey Freeman, one of Trump's closest advisers, says his boss isn't necessarily the next T. Boone Pickens. "He's not going to go after companies for the hell of it," says Freeman. "Each one of those deals this year were situations we had looked at closely, in businesses related to ours. Donald will just continue to pick his spots."

The political talk is probably also overdone. Even if Trump were serious about a career in public life, it would be difficult for a casino operator, no matter how well known, to get elected to anything. Nor is it at all clear that he is serious. Trump admits that he has only a glancing familiarity with important issues, and intimates say that he would hate running for office. "He'd love to be president, but only if he were appointed," says one friend.

In fact, Trump may have no grand strategic plan. His colleagues say he focuses on what's in front of him. The project at hand completely consumes his energy. For now, that's apt to be Television City and his casinos. A few years from now it may be something else; he just doesn't yet know what. He will simply pursue success obsessively in everything he does, time and time again. "No achievement can satisfy what he wants," believes one friend. "What he wants still is acceptance from his father. He is playing out his insecurities on an incredibly large canvas."

'Correct today':FredTrump, 83, still goes to work every day at his modest office in Brooklyn. He got rich years ago building thousands of brick, pillbox-size homes for the emerging middle class in Brooklyn and Queens. Fred talks to his son nearly every day and says he is "awed" by what Donald's done. His son is still very much a product of the Brooklyn office. His vernacular is neither that of an aristocrat nor of a polished executive. That may be why today, despite the outrageous trappings of his wealth and the unyielding ambition, Donald Trump remains a rather familiar figure.

In David Mamet's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, "Glengarry Glen Ross," a slick, street-smart real-estate salesman named Ricky Roma talks of ambition and money and what they mean. Forget Roma, for the moment, and substitute Trump.

"I do those things which seem correct to metoday.I trust myself. And if security concerns me, I do that whichtodayI think will make me secure. And every day I do that, and when that dayarrivesthat I need a reserve, (a) odds are that I have it, and (b) thetruereserve that I have is the strength that I have ofacting each daywithout fear. According to the dictates of my mind. Stocks, bonds, objects of art, real estate. Now: What are they? An opportunity. To what? To make money? Perhaps. Tolosemoney? Perhaps. To 'indulge' and to 'learn' about ourselves? Perhaps. So f---ingwhat?Whatisn't?They're anopportunity.That's all. They're anevent.A guy comes up to you, you make a call, you send in a brochure, it doesn't matter. 'There're thesepropertiesI'd like for you to see.' What does it mean? What youwantit to mean . . ."

For Trump, it can only mean more money, more power andwhat his $ 1 billion ego seems to covet mostmore attention.

Trump: On the Record

On Ed Koch:He's a bully, and you know what you do with a bully? You hit him between the eyes.On his enemies:If people screw me, I screw back in spades.

On Michael Dukakis and other Democratic presidential candidates:Americans are tired of the Seven Dwarfs. On his own political prospects:I'm not running for president, but if I did, I'd win. On Leona Helmsley:I feel sorry for Harry. On Trump:There is no one my age who has accomplished more . . . Everyone can't be the best.

Read more here:
Donald Trump Has Never Had Any Friends, Likes to Speak to His Family Every Day - Newsweek

It's a piece of conventional wisdom spouted by both Trump allies and Trump haters:

"You can't figure him out!" Trump supporters say with delight.

"Don't be distracted by his attempts to distract you!" scream his detractors.

The underlying message is the same: Trump is always playing three-dimensional chess while the media covering him is playing checkers. Everything Trump says, does and tweets is part of a grand plan that the press isn't smart enough to understand.

"See!" the three-dimensional chess crowd shouted. "He's doing it! Turning the narrative from one focused on his 'both sides' defense of the violence caused by neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Virginia to one focused on the removal of historic statues!"

Winning the former fight is impossible, they (rightly) note. But winning the latter fight is far more possible.

True! There is far more reasonable disagreement in this country about whether -- and how -- statues of Confederate generals should be removed than there is about whether white supremacists are, um, bad.

But. I would argue that the evidence we have from Trump's life -- in the business world and now in the political sphere -- makes at least as compelling a case that the President is actually playing zero-dimensional chess. Or in other words, he's not playing chess at all. Or checkers for that matter.

Consider this anecdote via Trump's seminal book "Art of the Deal."

Two sentences really jump out to me: 1) "I play it very loose" and 2) "I prefer to come to work each day and just see what develops."

It's reasonable to assume that Trump's approach to business (and life) in the 1980s is not dissimilar to his approach to politics and life in 2017. (Trump was 41 when "Art of the Deal" came out in November 1987. He's 71 now.) Everything else about his persona has only become more heightened since then, so why not this too?

Seen though that lens, Trump's candidacy and presidency take on a different tinge.

Rather than executing a brilliant long-term plan to take advantage of voters' discontent with the status quo and too-careful politicians, Trump just as likely sort of happened into his positioning in the race: as the anti-establishment, anti-political correctness, anti-polite figure that Republican voters were craving.

Ditto Trump's approach in the White House. A convincing case can be made that Trump's strategy, such as it exists, is to say provocative things -- and then react to the reaction to what he said. That there isn't any secret plan beyond being in the moment, dominating the news and making sure, no matter what, that people are talking about him.

Could Trump truly be playing a game so sophisticated that no one can fully understand it but him? I suppose. But the most obvious answer is usually the right one. And if you take Trump's word for how he lives his life, the most obvious answer is that Trump in the White House is doing what he's done his whole life: just winging it.

Continued here:
What if Donald Trump is just winging it? - CNN

President Donald Trumpissued an explosive statement against Radical Islamic Terrorjust hours after anattack in Barcelona, Spain,on Thursday left at least 13 people dead.

Earlier this week, Trump said he needed to get allthe factsbefore singling out hate groups for condemnation after violent protests sparked by a white supremacist rally left one woman dead in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday.

Trump initially posted a measured response to the incident in Barcelona:

Less than an hour after his initial tweet, Trump followed up, implying the Barcelona attack was linked to Radical Islamic Terror:

During the Republican presidential primary race, Trump told crowds a story a false one, according to historians about John Black Jack Pershing, the Army general who commanded U.S. forces in World War I. According to Mother Jones,Trump spoke of Pershing executing Muslim insurgents in the Philippines in the early 1900s with bullets dipped in pigs blood and eliminating a problem for 25 years (unlike the 35 years mentioned in his tweet):

He caught 50 terrorists who did tremendous damageand he took the 50 terrorists and he took 50 men and dipped 50 bullets in pigs blood. You heard about that? He took 50 bullets and dipped them in pigs blood [which is considered haram]. And he has his men load up their rifles and he lined up the 50 people and they shot 49 of those people. And the 50th person, he said, you go back to your people and you tell them what happened. And for 25 years there wasnt a problem.

After telling that story, Trump claimedweve got to start getting tough and weve got to start being vigilant and weve got to start using our heads or were not gonna have a country, folks.

As Time reported in 2016, historians know of no evidence to support Trumps claim. The magazine quoted one saying it would have been out of character for Pershing.

Trumps comments on Barcelona came just hours after news broke of the carnage there, which police confirmed they were treating as a terrorist attack. The so-called Islamic State claimed responsibility for the assault via its Amaq news agency, but its unclear to what degree the groups leadership was involved in planning it.

White House chief of staff John Kelly briefed Trump on the matter Thursdayafternoon.

Trumps quick response sharply contrasts with his reactionsto the violence in Charlottesville.

Trump argued in hisinitial response on Saturday thatmany sides were to blame for the tumult, which erupted amid a white supremacist protest against efforts to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. The president didntexplicitly condemn hate groupsuntil Monday,two days after a car allegedly driven by a white supremacist plowed into a group of counterprotesters, killing a 32-year-old woman.

In a rambling press conference Tuesday, Trump defended his initial statement,arguing he needed to get the facts before making more definitive remarks against racist groups.

I wanted to make sure, unlike most politicians, that what I said was correct, not make a quick statement. The statement I made on Saturday, the first statement, was a fine statement, but you dont make statements that direct unless you know the facts, Trump said Tuesday. It takes a little while to get the facts. You still dont know the facts. It is a very, very important process to me. It is a very important statement. So I dont want to go quickly and just make a statement for the sake of making a political statement. I want to know the facts.

Trump on Tuesday also again blamed both sides for the clashes in Charlottesville. You had a group on one side that was bad. You had a group on the other side that was also very violent, Trump said. Nobody wants to say that. Ill say it right now.

But Trump has been quick to cite radical Islamic terrorism for attacks in the past. It took him less than a day to respond to terrorist attacks in Paris, Manchester, England, and London, the last of which he used as a reason to plug his proposal for a travel ban from several Muslim-majority countries.

His rhetoric toward radical Islam is often violent and sweeping, unlike his comments on the white supremacist and racist groups who gathered for the rally in Charlottesville,which Trump claimed had some fine people.

As Vox has pointed out, Trump has been generally slow to respond to violent incidents where Muslims are the victims.

Trump also has claimed he can predict terrorism, saying he can feel it. After a gunman who claimed allegiance to the Islamic State attacked a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in June 2016, killing 49 and wounding scores more, Trump bragged about being right on radical Islamic terrorism.

See the rest here:
Trump's Quick Response To Barcelona Attack Makes His Charlottesville Reactions Look Even Worse - HuffPost

For all of the work John Kelly has put into his new role as White House chief of staff, instituting new limits on whom President Trump speaks with and what information he sees, Trump has an escape hatch: his phone. Put limits on who can reach Trump at the White House? Fine, but then Trump just calls them from his cell later that night. Limit the data that lands on his desk? Great, until he fires up Twitter and sees whatever he wants to see. (Twitter, Axios reported in May, is the only app on his phone.)

Much of what Trump learns about the world is filtered through two lenses: what he watches on cable news (particularly Fox) and what he sees on Twitter. Wireds Ashley Feinberg linked the arguments from Trumps Tuesday news conference about the violence in Charlottesville last weekend to rhetoric that he may have picked up from Twitter or from watching Fox. The liberal site Media Matters put a fine point on that latter connection, pairing Trumps language with similar statements that had previously aired on Fox.

Users of Twitter will understand, however, that it can be tricky to know what someone else sees when he or she fires up the application. Everyone follows a different group of people, and that colors the information they receive.

To that end, weve created @trumps_feed, an account that checks whom Trump follows every five minutes and then retweets any new tweets from them over that period. The net result is a replication of what Trump would see on those occasions that he switches over from the Mentions tab.

Its this. This is what Trump would see right now if he opened Twitter.

Again, this account will update every five minutes with any new accounts that Trump follows.

Whom does he follow right now? Twitter allows us to see all 45 of those accounts right now, and, interestingly, the order in which he followed them.

That order, from earliest to most recent follow, goes like this:

Of the 45 accounts he follows, nine are for the Trump Organization and seven are linked to his other favorite business, Fox News.

And what do they tweet about? We took all of the tweets from those accounts this month (except the Trump Organization ones) and created a word cloud.

They tweet about Trump.

The Trump name is mentioned 389 times in August tweets from these users. His Twitter handle is mentioned 230 times. Fox Newss Twitter handle is mentioned 184 times. The word president comes up 164 times and the news of the month, Charlottesville, 120 times.

Anyway. If youre ever curious whats spurring Trumps views on something out there in the world, take a dip into @trumps_feed and see. If its not being discussed there and its not on Fox News, maybe its something that his senior staff decided he should focus on.

But wed recommend starting with Twitter or Fox News.

A side-by-side look at how President Trump and Fox News pundits discussed the Charlottesville violence. (Thomas Johnson/The Washington Post)

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Now you can see what Donald Trump sees every time he opens Twitter - Washington Post

In many ways, the Trump presidency never got off the ground: The presidents legislative agenda is going nowhere, his relations with foreign leaders are frayed, and his approval rating with the American people never enjoyed the honeymoon period most newly elected presidents do. Pundits who are sympathetic toward, or even neutral on, the president keep hoping that the next personnel movethe appointment of White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, say, or the long-rumored-but-never-delivered departure of Steve Bannonwill finally get the White House in gear.

But what if they, and many other people, are thinking about it wrong? Maybe the reality is not that the Trump presidency has never gotten started. Its that hes already reached his lame-duck period. For most presidents, that comes in the last few months of a term. For Trump, it appears to have arrived early, just a few months into his term. The president did always brag that he was a fast learner.

The White House Is Under Siege

Who knows when the lame-duck period began. Was it on January 21, when Trumps administration tried to argue, against all evidence, that he had the largest inauguration crowd in history? Or the next day, when Kellyanne Conway introduced the world to alternative facts? Was it when Trump fired FBI Director James Comey? Was it the days-long slow reveal on Donald Trump Jr.s meeting with a Russian lawyer in June 2016? Or did it come on Tuesday, when Trump stepped to a lectern in Trump Tower and delivered a strange de facto defense of white nationalism?

Whatever the turning point, thinking about Trump as a lame-duck president seems a better rubric for making sense of his administration than most. Consider the things that happen in a lame-duck period.

A lame-duck presidents legislative agenda starts to stall out. Members of Congress are just no longer interested in following the presidents lead, especially where it might create a political liability for them. Big bills start to waste away on Capitol Hill, and where a new president would bring both political capital and novelty to bear, a lame duck just doesnt have the juice. So it is with Trump. His various attempts to repeal and replace Obamacare have all failed, and while he was able to force both houses of Congress to take them back up before, largely through sheer force of will, his more recent pleas have fallen on deaf ears. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has indicated he has no interest in heading into the breach once again, and GOP members have largely agreed with him.

A lame-duck president gets caught in a vicious cycle. Once legislators start refusing to follow his lead, he begins to look like a paper tiger, so they follow his lead even less. Now that Republican senators have defied Trump once, why should they get in line on other controversial bills, like tax reform?

By the time a president reaches his lame-duck period, scandals have begun to pile up. Sometimes they are minor and varied; sometimes theyre blockbusters, from Iran-Contra to Monica Lewinsky. Either way, the taint of controversy tarnishes the president, diminishes his political capital, and starts to absorb time and energy that once would have been spent on constructive rather than defensive actions. Trump is already facing an open-ended investigation, unmatched in breadth by anything except the Clinton-era Whitewater scandaltaking in allegations of money-laundering, of espionage, and of violations of campaign-finance laws, and potentially reaching into Trumps own personal financial dealings prior to becoming president. Its already proving a large distraction, as demonstrated by Trump taking time while returning from a trip to Europe to dictate a statement on behalf of his son, Donald Trump Jr. The statement he dictated turned out to be an obfuscatory disaster that only made the matter worse. Meanwhile, Trumps personal lawyer is busy sending defenses of Trumps Charlottesville comments to conservative journalists.

As controversy and inaction set in during a presidents lame-duck period, he starts to lose staffers who see no reason to stick around for a final stretch of inaction. Others stick around but grumble to the press about lack of discipline and lack of progressand as they look ahead to their next job, they often put preserving their own reputations ahead of advancing their bosss agenda. Trumps West Wing has a busy revolving doorhes already lost two communications directors, one press secretary, one chief of staff, and a national-security adviser, among othersand the tenor of leaks about the White House, once largely a chronicle of internecine warfare, is increasingly full of statements of disappointment and frustration about the president himself.

Another problem for a lame-duck president is that exhaustion sets in. Its the seven-, or in some cases, three-, year itch, as someone who was a fresh and exciting face at the start of his term has become tired, boring, or irksome. Trump benefited from his outsize media personality during the campaign, but now hes paying for it. Barely a day goes by without a new Trump-involved controversy. The public, and even the journalists paid to care, have become numb. Some of Trumps aides and allies want him to take a less public approach, but thats beyond him. He has one mode: on, and public-facing. Just take his alleged vacation over the last week or two, which has produced a surfeit of presidential news even by Trump standards.

As a result, mostthough not allpresidents see a slow slide in their approval rating toward the end of their terms. Trumps presidency has been one long slide, with his numbers now resting in the mid-30s.

The Trump presidency keeps offering occasions on which people ask how long the status quo can possibly continue. I have wondered that, and Erick Erickson does today:

This is not sustainable. Something is going to have to give. I do not know what, but something will give. The nation cannot sustain this constant state of chaos and crisis drift for three and a half more years. We will either see external or internal forces applied that will hurt the nation.

But thinking about Trump as a lame duck who will just have to stumble through the rest of his presidency makes more sense, at least at the present moment, than expecting that Trump will be removed from office, whether by resignation, impeachment, or some more far-flung possibility. The president shows little sign of being the sort of person who could be forced into resigningafter all, after he was bullied by staff into condemning racism, he was so agitated that the following day he defended the Charlottesville marchers with a more strongly worded statement.

Impeachment remains a remote possibility, even with 40 percent of voters favoring it in a new Public Religion Research Institute poll. Special Counsel Robert Muellers investigation is likely months, if not years, away from concluding with any charges or referrals. And the hope of some other solutionfrom a 25th Amendment removal to a military coupis, as I wrote earlier this week, both dangerous and unrealistic. Meanwhile, negative partisanship guarantees that a durable partisan equilibrium persists. Even after the backlash to Trumps comments Tuesday, including from many staunch conservatives, two-thirds of Republicans now say they back Trumps comments.

Instead, Trump will have to muddle through, no doubt with the accent on mud. Are there ways that presidents can fight their way back to relevance once relegated to the duck pond? Its difficult, though not impossible. Barack Obama, for example, faced some notable defeats late in his termmost importantly, he was unable to get his nominee for a Supreme Court seat confirmedbut he also put together a long list of real (if fragile) achievements.

Trump has one big benefit that other lame-duck presidents havent: He has three and a half years, minimum, left in office. (Its hard to believe that hed win reelection if current trends persist, but then it was hard to believe that hed win election in the first place.) But there are also several reasons he might be particularly ill-equipped to bounce back.

A classic step for a lame-duck president is to concentrate on foreign affairs. Thats one area where the executive branch has wide latitude to act on its own, without requiring the cooperation of a recalcitrant Congress. Trump doesnt have cohesive enough a foreign-policy vision to point to obvious goals. Indeed, he ran on a platform of retrenchment on the world stage, not greater involvement. Where he has ventured overseas, trouble has awaited. He has feuded with the leaders of some of the closest U.S. allies. Even Britains Theresa May, who has worked to maintain a decorous relationship with Trump, delivered a veiled criticism of Trumps reaction to the violence in Charlottesville. Besides, Trump may have less leeway in foreign affairs than most presidents. Congress has already shown an unusual degree of willingness to meddle in executive-branch autonomy. Angry about Russian interference in the election and worried about Trumps proposed rapprochement with the Kremlin, Congress overwhelmingly passed new sanctions, over the White Houses objections.

Trump could try to work domestically through executive action, too, but hed face challenges there as well. With a sheaf of executive orders at the start of his term, the president already ordered much of what he had identified as possible through the White House. Finding new and more creative ways to flex presidential muscle would require a well-staffed, orderly, and experienced administration able to work as a well-oiled machine, and theres no indication that exists.

There is one other possibility: a crisis. In moments of catastrophe, citizens like to rally around even an unpopular president, seeking unity and leadership. But the signs so far about how Trump might handle a genuine, huge crisis are not promising. In fact, given the chance to deal with a crisis, he has often just made things worse for himself. Over the last week, his improvised language inflamed an already dangerous standoff with North Korea. Then he turned a national tragedy in Charlottesville into a huge personal liability for himself out of an inability to simply condemn racism and leave it at that.

The result is that, as improbable as it seems, the nation could be in for an indefinite period much like the current one. If Donald looks like a lame duck, swims like a lame duck, and quacks like a lame duck, theres a good chance hes a lame duck.

See the article here:
Donald Trump Is a Lame-Duck President - The Atlantic