Gabriel Sherman: “In Donald Trump’s West Wing, being a member of the Trump family has historically been the ultimate job security. But that truism is being stress-tested after a run of polls consistently show Trump losing to Joe Biden at this stage of the race—a CNN poll this morning has him down 14 points. According to a source close to the White House, Trump has mulled taking oversight of the campaign away from his son-in-law Jared Kushner.”

Said a former West Wing official: “Trump is malignantly crazy about the bad poll numbers. He’s going to broom Kushner and Parscale—the numbers are not getting better.”

“Long before the reelection campaign went sideways, Trump frequently blew up at Kushner. For instance, former West Wing officials recall how Trump hated when Kushner received too much positive press.”

“This powerful, good nation is in trouble. The root cause is division and anger purposely created by Trump. The next President will need four years of national reconciliation. We need to restore American values. We need to address racial injustice.”

— Retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, on Twitter.

“President Trump traveled to Maine Friday to tour a facility that makes medical swabs used for coronavirus testing, but the swabs manufactured in the background during his visit will ultimately be thrown in the trash,” USA Today reports.

“Puritan Medical Products said it will have to discard the swabs… It is not clear why the swabs will be scrapped, or how many.”

“Workers in white lab coats, hair nets and plastic booties worked at machines making swabs while the president walked through the room. Trump, who did not wear a mask for the visit, stopped at one point to talk with some of the workers.”

“What he actually did — as you saw for the remaining days — was turn out more people and more people who were there for peaceful protests.”

— Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, telling ABC News that President Trump’s actions made the protests against police violence bigger.

“General Mattis’s comments yesterday, I felt like perhaps we’re getting to the point where we can be more honest with the concerns that we might hold internally and have the courage of our own convictions to speak up.”

— Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), quoted by the Washington Post, suggesting she’s not the only GOP senator with concerns about President Trump.

Washington Post: “There are few constants in the tumult of the Trump administration, which has had far more staff departures than any recent president. But one rule of thumb is that if you speak ill of Trump — and a remarkable number of former officials have — the president will strike back.”

“But beyond illustrating Trump’s counter punching ethos, it’s a pattern that raises serious questions about his ability to fill some of the most important posts in government and why he continually hires top officials he later comes to describe as incompetents.”

George Conway: “It’s more than just narcissism that drives this failing, flailing president. However difficult they can be, even extreme narcissists can have consciences. They don’t necessarily cast aside behavioral standards or laws, or lie ceaselessly with reckless abandon. Trump’s behavior is conscienceless, showing utter disregard for the safety of others, consistent irresponsibility, callousness, cynicism and disrespect of other human beings. Contempt for truth and honesty, and for norms, rules and laws. A complete inability to feel remorse, or guilt. As a New Yorker profile of Trump put it nearly a quarter-century ago, Trump lives ‘an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul.’ That’s Donald Trump’s problem yesterday, today and tomorrow.”

“It’s our problem, too, for now: We remain governed by a soulless man with a broken mind. The damage will continue, and it won’t stop until voters end it. Come November, it will be up to the eligible human population of this country to look to their souls, their consciences, their humanity — and to cast their votes for one of their own.”

Attorney General William Barr told the AP “that law enforcement officers were already moving to push back protesters from a park in front of the White House when he arrived there Monday evening, and he says he did not give a command to disperse the crowd, though he supported the decision.”

“Barr’s comments were his most detailed explanation yet of what unfolded outside the White House earlier this week. They come after the White House and others said repeatedly that the attorney general ordered officers to clear the park.”

A U.S. Park Police spokesperson told Vox it was a “mistake” to insist that it didn’t use tear gas the day before in Lafayette Square to disperse a crowd ahead of President Trump’s photo op, explicitly noting that pepper balls shot by officials irritate the eyes and cause tears.

“A leaked Trump administration document details the federal law enforcement and military personnel squaring off against protestors in Washington, D.C., including a 1,300-strong force currently deployed to the south side of the White House,” Yahoo News reports.

“Thousands of federal enforcement and military personnel have been called to Washington to respond to growing demonstrations sparked by the death of George Floyd… but the Trump administration has so far refused to disclose many of the details about who is policing the nation’s capital.”

“An internal report obtained by Yahoo News shows which agencies are involved.”

Former White House chief of staff John Kelly said he agrees with former Secretary of Defense Gen. Jim Mattis’ stark warning this week that President Donald Trump is “the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people,” CNN reports.

Said Kelly: “I agree with him… There is a concern, I think an awful big concern, that the partisanship has gotten out of hand, the tribal thing has gotten out of hand. He’s quite a man, Jim Mattis, and for him to do that tells you where he is relative to the concern he has for our country.”

Washington Post: “In Mattis’s eyes, the appearance of the two top military leaders appeared to condone an unprovoked use of force. The nonpartisan military that Mattis had served for nearly five decades was being featured as decoration for a photo op, and Mattis fumed that the president was using the leaders who replaced him at the Defense Department to further divide the nation, according to four people familiar with his thinking.”

“He was especially upset to see Milley — whom Mattis believed had sought to curry favor with Trump when he was defense secretary — appear in his Army combat uniform at a peaceful demonstration. That jarring image highlighted the military’s involvement in a heavy-handed crackdown on civilians.””

“With that, the military historian and retired Marine general decided it was time to call out the damage he saw Trump doing to the country.”

David Hopkins: “Trump has started to echo Nixon’s famous invocation of a supportive ‘silent majority.’ But he is the only president in the history of public opinion polling who has never had a majority of Americans on his side, even on his first day in office, and he has never shown much interest in courting skeptics rather than attacking them. Winning a second term will likely require him to eke out a narrow margin in the electoral college, very possibly without a popular-vote plurality once again.”

“The current governing regime seeks to retain political power from behind barricades that are primarily psychological, separated in spirit more than in physical distance from a growing population of fellow Americans whom it no longer trusts to be on its side. When you see your own domestic political opponents as an irredeemably hostile force trying to destroy the country as you know it, perhaps it’s only natural to fantasize about calling in the troops.”

“President Trump is forging ahead with a trip to Maine on Friday, defying a direct plea from the state’s Democratic governor to stay home and concerns from Republicans his visit could hurt Senator Susan Collins’ re-election bid,” Bloomberg reports.

A Portland Press Herald editorial: “President Trump: We’re sorry that you decided to come to Maine, but since you are here, could you do us a favor? Resign.”

Just Security: “‘We train our boys to be killing machines,’ President Trump declared on Twitter in October 2019. He meant it as a compliment—and, as Peter Bergen shows in his powerful new book, Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos, Trump’s sense of military men and women as ‘killing machines’ was what drew Trump to populate his cabinet early on with generals like Michael Flynn, John Kelly, James Mattis, and H.R. McMaster.”

“Yet, in some cases sooner and in some cases later, Trump soured on all of them—and they soured on Trump. (The possible exception is Flynn, but he at least soured enough to cooperate extensively with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.)  So, what did Trump think he would get from these generals, and what went wrong?”

Earlier for members: Trump Loses ‘His’ Generals

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