September 15, 2017

Rep. Dana Rohrabacker (R-CA) “contacted the White House this week trying to broker a deal that would end WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s U.S. legal troubles in exchange for what he described as evidence that Russia wasn’t the source of hacked emails published by the antisecrecy website during the 2016 presidential campaign,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“He’s being played by these dictators in a way that undercuts our credibility and the capacity to come up with a diplomatic solution in that region… I’m deeply concerned, and I think in many ways the Trump presidency poses a clear and present danger to our country and to the world.”

— Hillary Clinton, discussing President Trump in a PBS interview.

Jonathan Swan: “The dramatically different information Trump receives daily under the leadership of Chief of Staff John Kelly is an under-looked factor in Trump’s decision to double down on his partnership with the Democratic leaders.”

“Trump gets mostly positive feedback for his turn towards bipartisanship. He watches cable news in the morning, and even ‘Fox and Friends’ finds a way to praise his deal with the Democrats. He reads his morning news clips and briefing materials, which are managed by Staff Secretary Rob Porter, under the guidance of Kelly. And during the day it’s not possible for a staff member to sneak a story onto Trump’s desk that might rile him up and turn him in a wildly different direction in an instant.”

“Staff who oppose the moderate immigration turn no longer have unfettered access to Trump, and nor do allies on the outside who, in the first six months of the administration, used to send text messages to Trump’s bodyguard Keith Schiller, and often receive a snappy callback from the president. Kelly now has real control over the most important input: the flow of human and paper advice into the Oval Office. For a man as obsessed about his self image as Trump, a new flow of inputs can make the world of difference.”

Politico: “His critics might see his growing isolation as a product of his political inexperience—an aversion to the norms of the legislative process, a penchant for topsy-turvy management. But as unprecedented as this might be in the annals of the West Wing, it’s merely a continuation of a lifelong pattern of behavior for Trump. Take away the Pennsylvania Avenue address, the never-ending list of domestic and international crises, and the couldn’t-be-higher geopolitical stakes—and this looks very much like … Trump throughout his entire existence. Isolated is how he’s always operated.”

“The middle son of a stony, workaholic father with whom he had an ‘almost businesslike’ relationship, Trump is a double divorcee, a boss with a professed distaste for having partners or shareholders, a television-tethered, hamburger-eating homebody and a germaphobe who has described shaking hands as ‘terrible,’ ‘barbaric’ and ‘one of the curses of American society.’ He’s been a loner most of his life.”