Trump's narcissism and megalomania is starting to have an effect on his people.
The Washington Post writes: The worst job in Washington right now: Working for Trump
As Donald Trump has grown increasingly angry and frustrated with his White House staff, the beleaguered targets of his ire have a quietly roiling gripe of their own — their boss, the president himself.
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In his wake remain his exhausted aides and deputies, the frequent targets of Trump’s wrath as they struggle to control an uncontrollable chief executive and labor to explain away his stumbles.
Ya, think? As far as his staff goes, he has shown no loyalty at all when he demands it above all else. He's thrown every person under the bus that has given press conferences to defend an action or a new scandal that Trump has created, including his own vice president.
Privately they say that the problem is not an incompetent communications shop, as the president sometimes gripes, or an ineffectual chief of staff, as friends and outside operatives repeatedly warn, but the man in the Oval Office, whose preferred management style is one of competing factions and organized chaos.
How bad is it over there?
For many White House staffers, impromptu support groups of friends, confidants and acquaintances have materialized, calling and texting to check in, inquiring about their mental state and urging them to take care of themselves. One Republican operative in frequent contact with White House officials described them as “going through the stages of grief.”
Another said some aides have “moved to angry,” frustrated with a president who demands absolute loyalty but in recent days has publicly tarnished the credibility of his team by sending them out with one message — only to personally undercut it later with a contradicting tweet or public comment.
Trump has operated his whole life like this so you can expect nothing to change.
Read this piece by Trump's biographer Tony Schwartz, who precisely outlines his mental inner workings.
What’s clear is that he has spent his life seeking to dominate others, whatever that requires, and whatever collateral damage it creates along the way.
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Trump was equally clear with me that he didn’t value — nor even necessarily recognize — the qualities that tend to emerge as people grow more secure, such as empathy, generosity, reflectiveness, the capacity to delay gratification or, above all, a conscience, an inner sense of right and wrong. Trump simply didn’t traffic in emotions or interest in others. The life he lived was all transactional, all the time. Having never expanded his emotional, intellectual or moral universe, he has his story down, and he’s sticking to it.
A key part of that story is that facts are whatever Trump deems them to be on any given day. When he is challenged, he instinctively doubles down — even when what he has just said is demonstrably false. I saw that countless times, whether it was as trivial as exaggerating the number of floors at Trump Tower or as consequential as telling me that his casinos were performing well when they were actually going bankrupt. In the same way, Trump sees no contradiction at all in changing his story about why he fired Comey and then undermining the explanatory statements of his aides, or in any other lie he tells. His aim is never accuracy; it’s domination.
Could his first four months in office have gone any other way?
Update: (Karoli) Spicey is toast, at least in a daily on-camera press briefing kind of way, if the NY Post is to be believed.
President Trump may reshuffle of his communications team in a move that sources said could lead to fewer public appearances by beleaguered White House press secretary Sean Spicer.
