By Michael Kruse, July 26, 2017<\/p>\n
The president makes a mess, then makes it worse. It\u2019s what he\u2019s always done.<\/p>\n
It started Monday morning with Donald Trump calling his own attorney general \u201cbeleaguered<\/a>.\u201d It continued with an Air Force One flight to West Virginia and a rambling, partisan speech<\/a> to thousands of hollering Boy Scouts. And it kept going with another manic jag of tweets on Tuesday, as the president took a second shaming swipe<\/a> at Jeff Sessions, delegitimized<\/a> the acting director <\/b>of the FBI, urged <\/b><\/a>senators to \u201cstep up to the plate\u201d on getting rid of Obamacare and railed away in his exclamation-laced syntax about Democrats who are \u201cobstructionists<\/a>\u201d and the \u201cWitch Hunt<\/a>\u201d of the Russia investigation. Meanwhile, his new communications director was threatening to fire his entire staff for leaking as rumors swirled about Cabinet-level departures. Chaos bordering on crisis.<\/p>\n This is how Trump ran his business, and it\u2019s how he ran his campaign. For six months now, it\u2019s how he\u2019s run his White House. But within the whirl of these past two nonstop, dizzying days, it has reached blinking-red-light levels. To people who have been around him, and those who still are, from Trump Tower to the West Wing, this can be unnerving. To people across the country and the world, it can feel dismaying or disorienting or just plain insane.<\/p>\n For Trump, though, it feels like \u2026 the start to another week.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is Donald,\u201d former Trump Organization Vice President Louise Sunshine told me Tuesday. \u201cThis is his style.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHe\u2019s operating just like he always has,\u201d former Trump Shuttle President Bruce Nobles said in an interview.<\/p>\n \u201cThe prince of chaos,\u201d said Trump biographer Gwenda Blair.<\/p>\n The spawn of Norman Vincent Peale<\/a> and Roy Cohn<\/a>, Trump has stomped through life armed with the obstinate, self-centered tenets of optimistic thinking and the sneering, deep-seated lessons of attack, attack, attack<\/i>. He creates chaos, and then he responds to that chaos, withstanding it, even embracing it, feeding on it\u2014and then he outlasts the outrage, emerging not only alive but emboldened.<\/p>\n \u201cHey, look, I had a cold spell from 1990 to \u201991,\u201d Trump said<\/a> almost a quarter-century ago to a reporter from New York<\/i> magazine, referring to the breakup of his marriage to the mother of his first three children, his affair with a busty, B-movie actress and the reckless spending<\/a>and negligent management of his company that left him nearly a billion dollars in debt\u2014all of which was covered breathlessly<\/a> by the press. \u201cI was beat up in business and in my personal life. But you learn that you\u2019re either the toughest, meanest piece of shit in the world, or you just crawl into a corner, put your finger in your mouth, and say, \u2018I want to go home.\u2019 You never know until you\u2019re under pressure how you\u2019re gonna react.\u201d<\/p>\n This crisis was formative, and Trump survived because of family money, permissive banks that were tied to him as much as he was tied to them, the Houdini-esque work of a lender-mandated financial rescue artist and far more than his fair share of chutzpah. The close scrape with personal bankruptcy and business ruin didn\u2019t chasten Trump. It did the opposite. \u201cThe fact that he got through it,\u201d former Trump Organization Vice President Barbara Res said, \u201cmade him believe he could accomplish anything, conquer anything.\u201d<\/p>\n His path from The Art of the Deal<\/i> to The Art of the Comeback<\/i> to “The Apprentice” consisted of a media-stoked stew of self-promotion and provocation. WrestleMania antics and celebrity feuds were fuel. And he talked<\/a> when he could about running for president. It was always a bluff. Until, of course, it wasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n His campaign was a rolling crisis. Beset by backstabbing and infighting, careening from one five-alarm fire to the next, Trump\u2019s unprecedented presidential bid seemed perpetually on the edge of political viability. And he won.<\/p>\n \u201cChaos creates drama, and drama gets ink,\u201d former Trump campaign aide Sam Nunberg told me Tuesday. \u201cThis is a new kind of presidency. He\u2019s followed the tabloid model, and it got him to where he is, and it\u2019s the model that will be followed until it doesn\u2019t work. And it has<\/i>worked. He\u2019s sitting in the Oval Office.\u201d<\/p>\n On Monday, at the fairly standard hour of 6:40 a.m., he kickstarted a particularly agitated sequence of tweets by labeling Washington not a \u201cSwamp\u201d but a \u201cSewer\u201d and yelling \u201cFake News!\u201d He insisted there\u2019s \u201cZero evidence\u201d of his or his campaign\u2019s collusion with Russian officials. Then he called Sessions, the first senator to endorse him and for a long period during the campaign his most credible surrogate, \u201cbeleaguered.\u201d Then he called a member of Congress \u201cSleazy.\u201d Then he poked Republicans about their \u201clast chance\u201d to \u201cRepeal & Replace.\u201d Then he boarded the presidential plane to go talk to the Boy Scouts.<\/p>\n In Glen Jean, West Virginia, at the National Scout Jamboree, at a gathering of \u201cthe nation\u2019s foremost youth program of character development and values-based leadership training,\u201d Trump pledged to the crowd of an estimated 40,000, mostly boys between 12 and 18 years old, that he wouldn\u2019t talk about policy fights or political disagreements. \u201cWho the hell wants to speak about politics when I\u2019m in front of the Boy Scouts?\u201d he said. He did. The president talked about Tuesday\u2019s health care vote and called Obamacare \u201cthis horrible thing that\u2019s really hurting us\u201d and found ways to criticize Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and told the amped-up teens stale stories about his big win of 2016. \u201cUSA!\u201d they chanted back.<\/p>\n By Tuesday morning, he was back on Twitter, blasting the FBI boss and Sessions, too, for his \u201cVERY weak position on Hillary Clinton crimes\u201d and \u201cleakers.\u201d He also praised John McCain for being a \u201cBrave\u201d \u201cAmerican hero\u201d after disparaging him for being captured in Vietnam not once but twice<\/a> before. (Trump never apologized.)<\/p>\n This is not the way it\u2019s supposed to work, or at least not how it has. \u201cI have not seen any indication of a normal appreciation of the functioning of government coming from the president,\u201d former Senate attorney and Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste told<\/a>POLITICO on Tuesday. But while members of Congress scrambled to respond<\/a>, their assessments of the president\u2019s latest behavior ranging from confusion to condemnation to twisted justification to tepid defense, the people who have watched Trump for a lot longer simply shook their heads.<\/p>\n \u201cTypical Donald,\u201d Sunshine said.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m not surprised by anything I\u2019m seeing,\u201d said Nobles, the former Trump Shuttle boss. \u201cHe\u2019s always liked chaos.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHe\u2019s spent his life creating and surrounding himself with chaos,\u201d Res said, \u201cso that he can be the one person who can emerge in charge. The winner. The guy on the top. It\u2019s a way of slaying his enemies.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIf you\u2019ve ever been on a construction site, they\u2019re always chaotic,\u201d Billy Procida, another former Trump Organization vice president, told me Tuesday. \u201cAnd he\u2019s good at construction.\u201d<\/p>\n But he\u2019s no longer on a construction site. He\u2019s the most powerful person in the world.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is certainly different. It\u2019s certainly new,\u201d Nunberg said. \u201cBut it\u2019s what people want.\u201d<\/p>\n Chaos? All the time?<\/p>\n \u201cEntertainment,\u201d Nunberg said. \u201cEntertainment.\u201d<\/p>\n