Donald Trump's manic, fantastical and utterly disastrous week
So, how do you like me now folks?(CNN)Quick: Think back to Monday. Can you remember what happened at the White House and in Congress?
Chances are that you can't. In fact, if you're like most of the political world, Monday feels as if it happened a month ago.
This is the nature of time in the Donald Trump presidency. There are so many storylines every single day that it's impossible to keep up with them even for a 24-hour news cycle. Some of this is, of course, strategy on the part of the President -- if you throw 1,000 balls in the air, any one person can only hope to focus on a few in hopes of catching them.
But, ascribing strategy to every ball Trump throws may be giving him and his White House too much credit. The truth is that this is a President who creates chaos in and around him. He acts, and then watches the wildness that ensues. The plan, seemingly, is that there is no plan.
He's the man knocking down the first domino in a massive chain that spiders in a thousand different directions. Or, maybe even more apt: He's smashing the ice on a thinly frozen pond and watching as the cracks spread out around him -- endangering both himself and anyone else unlucky enough to be sharing the ice with him.
Every week at the manic pace Trump keeps feels like a blur -- none more than this week, in which the President and his administration lurched from controversy to cataclysm to convulsion and back, all in the space of five days.
Let's go through the week that was:
To save some people eyes from having to read, here's the lowlights...
Monday: Tweets attacking the "Beleaguered Sessions" and Monday evening was the Boy Scouts of America political speech...
Tuesday: Tweets attacking Sessions again asking why Hillary isn't being investigated then back on the road to Youngstown, Ohio where he declares himself the 2nd most presidential president since Lincoln.
Wednesday: Tweets again getting the Pentagon in a tizzy by saying "After consultation with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow......" and waiting 9 minutes before banning transgender people from the military, without telling the military. Wed note was the dinner with Anthony Scaramucci, Sean Hannity and former Fox News executive Bill Shine. Scaramucci tweets about the leak and attacks Reince Priebus as a leaker then deletes the tweet.
Thursday: The day began with a 30-minute phone interview between Scaramucci and CNN's Chris Cuomo that was beyond odd. Scaramucci repeatedly insisted he had the confidence of the President, that he was acting and speaking at the President's behest and that he was on a mission to find and exterminate the leaks coming out of the White House. "Those are the types of leaks that are so treasonous that 150 years ago, people would have been hung for those types of leaks," Scaramucci told Cuomo in one of the many, many eye-popping quotes of the interview. Shortly after 5 p.m. ET, the New Yorker's Ryan Lizza posted a first person account of a phone conversation he had Wednesday evening with Scaramucci following a tweet revealing the dinner. Scaramucci was incensed, repeatedly insisting he would fire everyone in the communications department to get to the bottom of the leaks as well as blasting Priebus as a "paranoid schizophrenic" and describing an acrobatic act that it was hard to imagine chief strategist Steve Bannon pulling off. Scaramucci responded to it all by blaming the press: "I made a mistake in trusting in a reporter. It won't happen again."
Thursday was also apparently when Reince Priebus secretly resigned (was fired?) from the White House (as foretold by Scaramucci it seems).
Friday: Just hours into the day, three Senate Republicans -- Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and John McCain -- broke ranks with their 49 other colleagues, voting against the so-called "skinny repeal" of Obamacare. The dramatic vote in which McCain -- newly returned to the nation's capitol from Arizona after a brain cancer diagnosis -- cast the deciding vote was straight out of "West Wing."
Later in the day Trump delivered a humdinger of a speech to police officers in Long Island on the dangers posed by the MS-13 gang, which he derided as "animals." He also appeared to condone violence against criminals; "And when you see these towns and when you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon — you just see them thrown in, rough — I said, please don't be too nice," Trump said.
Just before 5 p.m. Eastern Time, Trump announced -- via Twitter -- that he had fired Reince Priebus as chief of staff and replaced him with John Kelly, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
Just another typical week on the reality show titled "
Trump's White House". Hopefully, the show will be cancelled after the 2018 elections and the democrats get enough votes to take over the House and Senate and bounce Trump's big fat ass out of Washington...
