Donald Trump's paranoia

Trump’s World- Donald Trump believes there's a coup. He's freaked by The New York Times, "anonymous" opinion and he's seeing "enemies everywhere", reports Gabriel Sherman* in Vanity Fair.

With "Anonymous" still on the loose and the “administrative state” unchecked, the last person Trump trusts is Stephen Miller (OMG - that's Joseph Goebbels reincarnated or Bela Lagosse's ghost).

As Hurricane Florence (September 2018) bears down on the Carolinas, Donald Trump’s West Wing is still struggling to recover from yet another deluge of horrible news.

On September 11, Bob Woodward’s publisher Simon & Schuster announced that Woodward’s new book, Fear, has sold more than 750,000 copies and is on its way to a ninth printing. A CNN poll released this week showed Trump’s approval rating plummeting to 36 percent. 

With the midterm elections less than two months away, the West Wing is girding for Republicans to lose the House and even the Senate, sources said. 

Ivanka Trump is even worried about impeachment, a source close to her told me. “It’s just horrible,” a former White House official said.

As the parade of former allies and employees who’ve turned on him gets longer, Trump is increasingly embittered. 

According to sources, Trump has been furious at former economic adviser Gary Cohn and staff secretary Rob Porter, for their apparent cooperation with Woodward’s book. 

“Trump thinks he took Gary in and gave him a job when he was going nowhere at Goldman,” a Trump adviser told me. According to the adviser, Trump let it be known to Cohn and Porter that he would attack them publicly if they didn’t disavow the book. (On Tuesday, they both did.) “The president has had it,” a former West Wing official said. “When books like this come out, he tends to shut down and calls up people he sees on TV saying good things about him.”

But Trump’s anger over Woodward’s book is dwarfed by his continuing fixation on the anonymous New York Times op-ed. 

Sources told Gabriel Sherman that Trump is “obsessed,” “lathered,” and “freaked out” that the leaker is still in his midst. 

His son Don Jr. has told people he’s worried Trump isn’t sleeping because of it, a source said. 

Meetings have been derailed by Trump’s suspicion. “If you look at him the wrong way, he’ll spend the next hour thinking you wrote it,” a Republican close to the White House said. Much of what’s fueling Trump’s paranoia is that he has no clear way to identify the author. One adviser said Trump has instructed aides to call the anonymous author a “coward” in public to shame him or her. “He’s going to continue to shame this person,” a person close to Trump said. “The author will break under pressure or will eventually say, ‘fuck it, it’s me.’” Plans to administer polygraph tests to staff have seemingly died. “Nobody knows who it is,” a former official said.

Besides family, one of the only people Trump continues to trust is Stephen Miller. “The op-ed has validated Miller’s view, which was also Steve Bannon’s, that there’s an ‘administrative state’ out to get Trump,” a Republican close to the White House said. “There is a coup, and it’s not slow-rolling or concealed,” Bannon told me. “Trump believes there’s a coup,” a person familiar with his thinking said. Trump’s relationship with Secretary of Defense James Mattis, which was already strained, has become almost nonexistent, a former official said.

The West Wing is bracing for the climate to worsen. The increasing likelihood that Democrats will make big gains in the midterms is frustrating the White House’s efforts to get nominations confirmed in the Senate. 

According to a source, Johnny DeStefano,who’s in charge of personnel, has complained that Mitch McConnell’s staff will only focus on confirming judges before the midterms, leaving many important appointments, such as ones in the Export-Import Bank, unfilled. 

Ivanka and Jared Kushner, meanwhile, continue to agitate for Trump to replace Chief of Staff John Kelly with a more pliable manager. 

Ivanka recently asked a friend about Republican political adviser and former lobbyist Wayne Berman, a source briefed on the conversation said. 

Another name Ivanka has discussed is former federal prosecutor Matt Whitaker, who’s serving as Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s chief of staff (Axios reported Whitaker is also a candidate to replace White House counsel Don McGahn).