The Room Where it Happened - Trump's Inner Circle Breaks Silence

[The Frankish Reich]

This Axios series is just stunning.

 

https://www.axios.com/trump-lawyers-biden-election-victory-debf79bc-750b-457b-a736-789b501d62a7.html

 

It shows a President becoming more and more unhinged, more and more dependent on a bunch of aging clowns (Giuliani, Powell, etc.) when the lawyers and advisors who actually know what they're doing told him the truth. It's worth reading the whole thing - it isn't long (so far in 2 parts) - for a full understanding of how what started as a longshot strategy (the real experts told Trump he had maybe a 10% chance of prevailing with a fact-based recount/litigation approach) morphed into insane conspiratorial allegations. "Deeply sourced" as they say, and well-written by Jonathan Swan:

 

These two groups — the professional staff and the Giuliani cabal — filled in around one long, rectangular table in a conference room walled in by frosted glass. The pattern repeated itself the day after that and the day after that.

A bizarre routine set in. These meetings would begin with official staff raising plausible legal strategies. Then Giuliani and Powell, a lawyer with a history of floating “deep state” conspiracy theories, would take over, spewing wild allegations of a centralized plot by Democrats — and in Powell's view, international communists — to steal the election.

Bewildered campaign aides would look around the table at one another, silently asking what the hell was going on. One would invariably shuffle out of the room, followed by another a few minutes later. Then another. Then another. The professional staff would reconvene in Stepien's office, about 20 yards down the hall.

Eventually, Giuliani would realize that he and his crew were alone in the conference room. He'd walk down the hall and knock on the glass outside Stepien's office, where about eight aides had squeezed onto a pair of couches. "You guys, where did you go?" Giuliani would say. "This is serious!"

[SoTier]

A 74-year-old man who can't deal with a simple fact of life __ you can't always get what you want __ that most of us learned to deal with even before we reached adolescence is simply pathetic.   He's a bully who has never been thwarted in getting his way by lies, bribes, and threats.   F him and his enablers in his inner circle, the GOP, and in the media.  All of them are nothing but the worst kind of cowards.  Some of them are outright traitors who aided and abetted in an attempted coup d'etat.

[The Frankish Reich]

Bump.

Really, if you haven't read the Axios "Off The Rails" series, you need to now:

https://www.axios.com/off-the-rails-trump-cia-kash-patel-6c5ea317-43e9-48da-993f-5c7ab823c4c1.html

 

White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows was ordered to fire — and then immediately unfire — the CIA's Deputy Director Vaughn Bishop.

In his place, Trump planned to install Kash Patel — a former top Intelligence Committee staffer to Nunes who had served on Trump's National Security Council but had no agency experience. In Trump's mind, this could potentially lead to Patel running the agency without needing to get Senate confirmation.

 

 

Even after Pence and Cipollone killed the "Kash Patel for CIA" dream, it lived on among outside allies of the president, including Mike Lindell, CEO of MyPillow and a prominent election-overturning conspiracy theorist. Patel told Axios: “I do want to say on the record that I have never met, spoken to, seen, texted, or communicated with Mike Lindell."

On Jan. 15, Trump's final Friday at the White House, Lindell visited Trump in the Oval Office.

Washington Post photographer Jabin Botsford caught a picture of Lindell’s notes before he entered the West Wing. Among the pillow entrepreneur's prescriptions for the president was this eye-catching line: "Move Kash Patel to CIA Acting."

 

I was not in favor of the whole 25th Amendment thing under the "what's to stop it from being used again for purely political reasons?" theory.

But I've reconsidered. This is the Madness of King Donald. Shakespeare's King Donald Lear. Seriously unhinged, and not just in the way we've become accustomed to. It's a whole new level of paranoia and irrationality. Fitting that it essentially ended with his closest counsel being the My Pillow Guy.