WH allies worry Trump has become unstable

Posted on: October 10, 2017 at 15:35:52 CT

White House Allies Worry Trump Has Become Unstable

For Republicans, the cost of running the president’s “adult day care center” is increasingly unaffordable.

Promoting her new memoir Raising Trump, the president’s ex-wife Ivana Trump breezily mentioned Monday that she has a direct line to the White House, though she doesn’t call too often because Melania lives there. “I’m basically first Trump wife. O.K.? I’m First Lady,” she added. Generally guarded, Melania issued an uncharacteristic response: “There is clearly no substance to this statement from an ex. Unfortunately only attention seeking and self-serving noise.”

It’s unclear why Melania chose this occasion to snap. Perhaps she’s simply getting into the sophomoric groove of her husband’s West Wing, which has seemed, impossibly, to be backsliding of late, undergoing a Benjamin Button-esque regression to what outgoing Republican Senator Bob Corker recently called an “adult day care center.”
Corker’s broadside, for which he began laying the groundwork last week, suggesting that the president’s advisers are the only thing standing in the way of “chaos,” seems to have been pre-meditated. Shortly after Donald Trump retaliated by jibing that Corker “didn’t have the guts to run for another term,” Corker unleashed a planned interview with The New York Times,* warning that the president is erratic, treats his office like “a reality show,” and is reckless enough to put his country “on the path to World War III.” He claimed most other Republicans in the Senate felt the same way, even if they wouldn’t say so publicly.

Despite Mike Pence’s dutiful efforts to rectify the situation in a statement ambitiously aimed at addressing “criticisms of the president,” Corker seems to have painted a familiar portrait. Speaking anonymously to The Washington Post, one aide likened Trump to a “whistling teapot, saying that when he does not blow off steam, he can turn into a pressure cooker and explode.”

Generally, efforts to prevent Trump over-boiling are overseen by the steely triad of John Kelly, Jim Mattis, and Rex Tillerson, though at least two legs of the stool have become wobbly of late. Kelly, as my colleague Gabriel Sherman reports, is clashing with Trump, and could be in line for replacement. Tillerson, who unconvincingly denied recent reports that he had called Trump a “****ing moron,” has now been challenged by Trump to “compare I.Q. tests.” Still, the White House chief of staff, defense secretary, and secretary of state remain, as Corker suggested, Trump’s primary babysitters. According to Politico, one tactic the three have employed is to encourage Trump to phone a friend for counsel (Corker himself has been a frequent adviser on foreign policy). Other times, allies are encouraged to make their cases on television, the one medium Trump respects above all else and which most consistently captures his undivided attention. When longtime ally Chris Ruddy was trying to dissuade Trump from firing special counsel Robert Mueller, he allowed himself to be interviewed to leak the news, provoking the outrage he hoped would constrain the president.

The triad’s interventions are also accompanied by concealment. Politico notes that Kelly oversees what lands on Trump’s desk and carefully regulates what reaches his ear. But, despite sticking to a rule book that might well share the same title as Ivana’s memoir, his aides can’t control everything. Trump is said to have walked into the Oval Office on multiple occasions and told assembled advisers he knows they don’t like various tweets he has posted that morning. “Then, the next day, he’d wake up and send more tweets they didn’t like,” one person familiar with his comments said.

In recent days, reports the Post, Trump’s mercurial flashes of fury have moved from teapot to pressure-cooker territory, and his attack on Corker took scrambling aides by surprise. “His presidency could be doomed,” moaned one Trump loyalist, noting the razor-thin margin with which Republicans hold onto a majority in the Senate. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his allies were “incredulous that the president would anger a senator just a week before a budget vote that is critical to tax cuts”. Corker has already said that he has serious reservations about the president’s plan to reform the tax code, which he worries will add trillions to the national debt.

Trump’s fraying relations with the establishment factions of the G.O.P. are not simply bluster: they are part of his political calculus. As he burns bridges in Washington and pushes senators to liken his administration to an unruly primary school, governed by social-media attacks and warring wives, he seems to be bolstering his appeal to his base. But catering to those core voters who revel in the chaos also risks blowing up a fragile political coalition. “We have been watching the slow-motion breakup of the Republican Party, and Trump is doing what he can to speed it up,” said veteran pollster Patrick Caddell to the Post. “Trump is firmly placing himself on the outside, trying to become an almost independent president . . . He knows that many people will be with him, that he helps himself when he’s not seen as the Republican president.” For many, the cost of containing Trump and maintaining the running of his “adult day care center” is becoming unaffordable.