I don’t want to oversell this, but this Time Magazine cover story is literally one of the most insane things I’ve ever read. It easily jumps into a Top-Five position. Time went to the White House to basically spend an evening with Emperor Bigly. It was Bigly: After Dark. Barf, right? What Time gets right is that they document every single thing, even the smallest detail, like how many scoops of ice cream the Emperor is served by White House staff. You can read the full piece here at People Magazine (Time’s sister publication), and I would absolutely recommend it. It will BLOW YOUR MIND how f–king unhinged, petty, stupid and corrupt this man is. Also: this went down on Monday evening, the night before Bigly fired James Comey.
Various details about his work habits: He likes to work surrounded by a crowd (or audience). He signs official papers with a Sharpie. He invites anyone and everyone into the Oval, unlike Obama who usually only allowed elite visitors and senior staff into the Oval. Time says that Trump treats the Oval “as something like a royal court or meeting hall, with open doors that senior aides and distinguished visitors flock through when he is in the building.” Trump references Obama, saying: “Never had people.” As in, never had people in the room. Trump says,“I use the room. I use it a lot. I had the biggest people in the country here.”
His taste in artwork & interior design: The modern art favored by the Obama family is mostly gone, replaced with classic oils, including portraits of Trump’s favorite predecessors, like Andrew Jackson and Teddy Roosevelt. Gold curtains have replaced the maroon ones in the Oval Office… But few rooms have changed so much so fast as his dining room, where he often eats his lunch amid stacks of newspapers and briefing sheets. A few weeks back, the President ordered a gutting of the room. “We found gold behind the walls, which I always knew. Renovations are grand,” he says, boasting that contractors from the General Services Administration resurfaced the walls and redid the moldings in two days. “Remember how hard they worked? They wanted to make me happy.” Trump says he used his own money to pay for the enormous crystal chandelier that now hangs from the ceiling. “I made a contribution to the White House,” he jokes. But the thing he wants to show is on the opposite wall, above the fireplace, a new 60-plus-inch flat-screen television that he has cued up with clips from the day’s Senate hearing on Russia. Since at least as far back as Richard Nixon, Presidents have kept televisions in this room, usually small ones, no larger than a bread box, tucked away on a sideboard shelf. That’s not the Trump way.
He always thinks he’s being vindicated. He forces the Time reporters to watch the testimonies of Clapper & Yates as he does commentary about how they both “choked.” He seems to believe that their testimony proved that Obama surveilled him.
How he treats the White House residence: He invites “staff up regularly for meetings; hosting dinners for old friends, staff and supporters; giving tours; calling foreign leaders from Lincoln’s old desk in the Treaty Room, where he will also stay late into the night doing work with his longtime personal aide and bodyguard Keith Schiller. “The phone system is so amazing here,” Trump confides as he enters the space. “This one phone, it splits the words”—a reference to scrambling technology meant to disrupt eavesdropping.
His eating habits: The waiters know well Trump’s personal preferences. As he settles down, they bring him a Diet Coke, while the rest of us are served water, with the Vice President sitting at one end of the table. With the salad course, Trump is served what appears to be Thousand Island dressing instead of the creamy vinaigrette for his guests. When the chicken arrives, he is the only one given an extra dish of sauce. At the dessert course, he gets two scoops of vanilla ice cream with his chocolate cream pie, instead of the single scoop for everyone else. The tastes of Pence are also tended to. Instead of the pie, he gets a fruit plate.
On Colbert: “You see a no-talent guy like Colbert. There’s nothing funny about what he says. And what he says is filthy. And you have kids watching. And it only builds up my base. It only helps me, people like him. The guy was dying. By the way they were going to take him off television, then he started attacking me and he started doing better. But his show was dying. I’ve done his show. But when I did his show, which by the way was very highly rated. It was high highest rating. The highest rating he’s ever had.”
Throughout the piece, Mike Pence trails around behind Trump like a bad shadow, wordless and compliant, like Trump’s full-time nurse’s aid. Pence is treated like he’s the guy who has to handle all of Trump’s poopy diapers and so no one wants to make eye contact with him. As for the rest of it… the two scoops of ice cream, the Diet Coke, the Colbert diss, the absolutely insane part when he cues up the footage of Sally Yates’ testimony. It’s all so… disgusting. It’s not that he’s just wrong, it’s not that he’s trying to be manipulative. It’s that he’s really too f–king stupid to EVEN UNDERSTAND WHAT’S HAPPENING.
Photos courtesy of Getty, cover courtesy of Time Magazine.
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