Beyond Pathetic

Are there even words for this sort of thing?

Trump and Hannity don’t usually speak in the morning, which the president spends alone, watching TV and tweeting. During the first months of the administration in particular, the tweets launched at the beginning of the day landed like bitchy little grenades directed at the programming and personalities that angered him on MSNBC and CNN. “Early on, usually we could count on the president watching Morning Joe first thing, at 6 a.m.,” one White House official told me. “He’d watch an hour of that. Then he’d move on to New Day for a segment or two. Then he’d move on to Fox.”

Senior staffers worried about this pattern of behavior: By the time his day was formally under way with the daily intelligence briefing in the Oval Office — scheduled as late as 11 a.m. — the whole world was often thrown off course, wondering whether there were “tapes” of his conversations with a fired FBI director (May 12, 2017, 8:26 a.m.) or if a TV host had been “bleeding badly from a face-lift” at Mar-a-Lago (June 29, 2017, 8:58 a.m.).

With the hope of calming him down, then–chief of staff Reince Priebus and then–press secretary Sean Spicer began a subtle campaign. “It got to the point that they were just like, ‘We need to get him off these channels and onto Fox & Friends or else we’re going to be chasing down this crazy-train bullshit from MSNBC and CNN all day,’ ” one former White House official said.

Like all other ideas, this had the highest chance of implementation if Trump believed he’d thought of it on his own. Priebus and Spicer worked talking points about the network’s high ratings and importance to his base of supporters into conversation until, eventually, it stuck, so that the president’s television consumption is today what the current White House official called “mainly a complete dosage of Fox.” The former official added, “Trump’s someone who loves praise more than he likes hate-watching Morning Joe.”

But the current official acknowledged that it has created a different set of problems: “Sometimes on Fox, a lot of stories are embellished, and they don’t necessarily cover the big news stories of the day. When they cover the smaller stories, if that gets the president riled up, then that becomes an issue. Whenever he tweets, all of us do a mad dash or mad scramble to find out as much information about that random topic as possible. We’re used to it in a lot of ways, so it’s part of our morning routine.”

Can you imagine any (other) gargantuan zillion dollar operation being run by a chief executive who sat on his lard ass until 1100 watching television & spraying & arranging his damn hair-weave every day? Let alone that his flunkies have to trick him into not hate-watching something that may raise his blood pressure &/or start WWIII, but have steered him to Fox, like every other wretched, demented & almost (14 June, if he lives that long) 72-yr. old honkie.

One is reminded of Howard Hughes. Is germophobia part of the aging idiot package?

Read the whole interminable thing; besides Trump being the easiest-to-manipulate dimbulb one could imagine, one can learn more than one wants about Sean Hannity (Born to the thug life; both his parents were state-sanctioned bullies: "They were born 15 years apart — Trump at Jamaica Hospital to rich parents and Hannity at Metropolitan Medical in upper Manhattan to a county-jail official and a family-court officer".) & his junior-high-BFFs relationship w/ Lumpy.

Have I ever mentioned just how damn much I fucking hate this shithole country, & welcome everything Trump does to make it more of a shithole? I only hope the whole shithouse goes w/ a bang rather than a whimper.