The fundamental premise of nearly everybody who joined the Trump White House was, This can work. We can help make this work. Now, only three-quarters of the way through just the first year of Trump's term, there was literally not one member of the senior staff who could any longer be confident of that premise. Arguably-and on many days indubitably-most members of the senior staff believed that the sole upside of being part of the Trump White House was to help prevent worse from happening. In early October, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson's fate was sealed-if his obvious ambivalence toward the president had not already sealed it-by the revelation that he had called the president "a fucking moron." This-insulting Donald Trump's intelligence-was both the thing you could not do and the thing-drawing there-but-for-the-grace-of-God guffaws across the senior staff-that everybody was guilty of. Everyone, in his or her own way, struggled to express the baldly obvious fact that the president did not know enough, did not know what he didn't know, did not particularly care, and, to boot, was confident if not serene in his unquestioned certitudes. There was now a fair amount of back-of-the-classroom giggling about who had called Trump what.
( Michael Wolff )
[ Fire and Fury: Inside the ]
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