Must-read from Politico: 'He Doesn't Give a Crap Who He Fires'

[highplainsdem]

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/05/10/donald-trump-fires-james-comey-215123

A strategically incoherent, predictably unpredictable, private-sector lord who ran his family business by doing what he wanted when he wanted and with limited consideration for consequences stretching beyond his own immediate interests and gratification, Trump has spent the first not quite four months of his presidency running headlong into the constitutional checks and balances of American democracy. The system of safeguards against dictatorial intemperance has flummoxed him. Where there has been objective failure, Trump as usual has proclaimed historic success.

In instances, though, in which executive power is sufficient for actual action, he has been nobody but his imperious, impetuous, spiteful self. And here, according to the reporting of POLITICO and other news organizations, Trump made a fraught, monumental, republic-rattling decision the way he’s always made decisions—quickly—and for the same central reasons—vengeance and self-interest. Comey wasn’t the first person he fired—he canned National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and interim Attorney General Sally Yates—but this sacking in many ways was Trump’s quintessential act as the country’s chief executive.

-snip-

Trump’s worldview, based on hundreds of interviews in the last year and a half, as well as an extensive, ongoing study of what he’s said and done for decades, is that everybody is out to get everybody. Life is a zero-sum struggle, and you’re on your own. For him to win, others must lose. “Man is the most vicious of all animals,” Trump told People in 1981.

“The world is a horrible place,” he wrote in Think Big in 2007. “Lions kill for food, but people kill for sport. People try to kill you mentally, especially if you are on top. We all have friends who want everything we have. They want our money, our business, house, car, wife, and dog. Those are our friends. Our enemies are even worse! You have got to protect yourself in life.”

-snip-

The title quote is from Artie Nusbaum, described in the article as "one of the top bosses at the construction firm that built Trump Tower." Nusbaum also said of Trump: "This is who he is. No morals, no nothing."

[Skidmore]

1. That man posses nothing

that I would covet.

[enough]

2. Firing people has always been his ultimate form of self-gratification and

assertion of power. Possibly his only one. He can't see that it might have some other meaning in the world.