Burning a Source ?
Who thinks that Trump is “in the grip of some kind of paranoid delusion” ? That is the very hottest quote in the must read Phllip Rucker “analysis” of what is very wrong with the President.
I immediately tried to guess who had told Rucker that. The source is “One GOP figure close to the White House “. My first guess was Newt Gingrich (who can be relied upon to stab everyone close to him in the back). However, I now think Rucker made it very clear who is the “GOP figure”.
Later in the article I read
Robert M. Gates, a former defense secretary who informally advised Trump during the transition, criticized his handling of Comey’s ouster.
“Not terribly well done,” Gates told John Dickerson in a CBS News interview scheduled to air Sunday on “Face the Nation.”
Hmm Gates is a GOP figure close to the White House who Rucker might have asked to supply additional cutting comments.
The second to last paragraph in the article is
“Trump is so unsophisticated about government, and he lacks even basic knowledge about how the government functions, of what the unwritten but very important rules and traditions are. His attitude toward all those things is they don’t matter: ‘I’m going to drain the swamp!’ ” said a veteran of past Republican administrations who is close to the Trump White House and spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly critique the president.
That anonymous source is virtually identified as Gates (to the extent that I searched for the quote by searching for “Gates” and had to scroll down and find it by hand to remind myself that the name wasn’t, quite, spelled out.
In other transparent anonymity I read “a third person denied that Bannon first learned Comey had been fired from television news reports and said that he had actually counseled Trump to delay his decision to lessen the political backlash.” Uh what “third” person could be the one who claims that Bannon wasn’t out of the loop, is familiar with Bannon’s thoughts, and notes that they were prescient ?
How about Patrick Caddell (the most hacktacular hack in the world) later identified as “Pollster Patrick H. Caddell, a longtime confidant of Bannon who served in Jimmy Carter’s White House,”? Rucker couldn’t find a Republican to Ballance the general view that Trump is destroying his presidency, so he had to go to old reliable Caddell for the Democrats in disarray distraction.
It’s like reliving the Carter administration on steroids,” Caddell said. “This is an outsider administration being surrounded by Apache knives. Every inch of the political class and both parties are going after him. The president can’t afford in this type of environment to not execute these kinds of announcements better.”
Look at how far down the hack depth chart Rucker (et Costa et Paletta) had to go to find someone willing to say anything sympathetic about the Trump administration. Does anyone (but me) even remember who Caddell was 40 years ago when he was a somebody ?