Why Is Everyone So Unfair to Donald Trump?
“I was with Mike Pompeo before,” President Donald Trump said at his first press conference in 587 days on Thursday. “We were dealing at a very high level with Japan. I was saying things that nobody in the room even understood. And I said them a long time ago—and I was right. He said, ‘That’s not the Twenty-Fifth Amendment that I’m looking at.’ I think I can say that from Mike.”
That bizarre anecdote about Trump baffling unnamed senior Japanese leaders occurred about six paragraphs deep into an answer to the question, “Are you planning to fire Rod Rosenstein?”
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Like so much at the press conference, the answer was both a crazy detour away from the subject at hand—and a startling revelation of the president’s own anxious dialogues with himself. Again and again, the president told stories about unnamed third parties reassuring him—and unspecified theys plotting against him. Here he reassures himself about laughter at the United Nations.
And I was in front of a large group of highly professional people, most of whom are from either other countries or the United Nations, people that aren’t big into clapping, applauding, smiling. And I heard a little rustle as I said our country is now stronger than ever before—it’s true. I mean, it is true. And I heard a little rustle and I said it’s true.
And I heard smiles—and I said, Oh, I didn’t know that’d be like a—they weren’t
