We now have a story from The Washington Post ("The first days inside Trump’s White House: Fury, tumult and a reboot") to match yesterday's from The Times ("Rocky First Weekend for Trump Troubles Even His Top Aides"). They are each a classic type for a major newspaper. Throw your biggest reportorial names at the story, talk to every one and put together an over-arching from-the-inside narrative. They are each fascinating, occasionally comic and in some ways horrifying reads. But there is an underlying, not-made-explicit message to both which is perhaps the most important. We are three days into the administration and the Trump White House leaks not so much like a sieve as a bucket with no bottom.
The Trump White House not only leaks like crazy. It casually leaks the most intimate and humiliating details about the President - hurt feelings, ego injury, childlike behavior, self-destructive rages over tweets, media failure to credit his own grandiosity. We have simply never seen this level of leaking, with this little respect for the President's dignity or reputation, this early.
There is, to put it mildly, a rather clearly recurring theme: a torqued up man-child, alternatively rageful and fragile, both grandiose and profoundly insecure. To a degree it is difficult to maintain perspective since the contrast between the departed and incoming Presidents could simply not be any greater - either in the composure and steadiness of the man in question or in his associates' willingness to share his secrets with the press. Would it even be possible to mount a leak investigation when everyone seems to be leaking?
It is a bracing picture, chilling and hilarious. But don't lose the point: no White House leaks like this, leaks this much or leaks this casually about the President's emotional weakness.
Is anyone surpised?
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