Behind Woodward's September surprise: White House aides saw a train wreck coming, then jumped aboard

[brooklynite]

Politico

Aides spent months fretting about President Donald Trump opening up to the famous Watergate journalist, fearing the consequences all the way through Wednesday’s bombshell revelations.

Trump bulldozed through them all, believing he could charm the man who helped take down a president and chronicled half a dozen administrations over the past half century.

Now Trump’s impulse may cost him as the interview transcripts and recordings are released this week, just under just eight weeks from Election Day and as some Americans start receiving mail-in ballots. The revelations in “Rage” have sent the Trump White House scrambling, with aides blaming each other for the predictable fallout from injecting even more chaos into an already challenging reelection race.

“You don’t talk the president out of things,” one White House official said Wednesday, one of 10 current and former White House officials who described the circumstances leading up to the latest book.

[Thekaspervote]

1. Lady g told dotard to talk with him....it's all his fault

Wonder what kind of wrath will be rained down on him in the next week.

[grumpyduck]

6. No no no, it's all Obama's fault.

[smirkymonkey]

7. Maybe Lady G was subconsciously (or consciously) trying to get revenge upon him for whatever

Trump was holding over his head. Because there is definitely something. Nobody flips like that overnight. Maybe Lindsey will get the last laugh after all.

I'm sure LG wasn't the only one encouraging him and he could just play dumb and pretend he had no idea it would play out like this. All he has to do is flatter him a bit to throw off Trump's suspicion.

Besides, Trump was the idiot gave Woodward all the rope to hang him with. Nobody forced him to say what he did. I mean, how stupid can you be to blab like that to one of the guys who outed Nixon, ffs!

[OAITW r.2.0]

2. Good...the train wreck needs people onboard.

Next week will be even more bizarre than this one.....

[Hekate]

3. Have the tweets started? What category of hurricane are they?

[underpants]

4. Good article.

[Jirel]

5. I love how the roaches scramble.

I love how they’re all painting fingers at each other and Dump.

Except it’s a total fail. If you know POStus is about to train wreck himself, you do a noisy resignation. You remove yourself from the train wreck, then send a cake to your idiot former co-workers that says
KMAG YOYO.

They stayed because they drank the kool-aid. They were too stupid, too brainwashed, or too scared to think anything horrible would really happen.

[JI7]

8. Fuck those White House Aids.

[GopherGal]

9. "Believing he could charm the man who helped take down a president"

sounds like a line from a future case study in narcissism. The "I'm so charming, my targets are so in my thrall, that I can get away with anything" may work when your targets are MAGAt voters who'll forgive you that Fifth-Avenue murder because they fantasize about using their beloved weaponry to knock off a couple East-Coast elites themselves, but maybe not so much Bob Woodward, who has made a career/identity of disclosing the corruption of the powerful.

Everything we're learning about this disordered personality stays true to the pattern. Pretty easy to believe that a man with such a grandiose opinion of his own abilities is not easily talked out of things. It's a little harder to understand the hangers-on who keep watching it happen and still stick around. Sunk-cost fallacy? "I've already got a stain-by-association on my resume, better just stick it out until the end of his term."