“A Republic, if you can keep it.”
* “Mar-a-Lago-Elba”: A sign we should anticipate seeing.
* Trump’s “silent majority.” Neither silent, alas, nor a majority, yes.
* “I did something good: I made Juneteenth very famous. … Nobody had ever heard of it.” Whatever. African-Americans in Tulsa surely appreciated the heads up. Surely.
* “When you do testing to that extent … you’re going to find more cases, so I said to my people, ‘slow the testing down, please.‘” According to the White House, that was a Trump joke. According to what we’ve seen the past three and a half years, it’s a nightmare–not a joke.
* “A disgruntled, boring fool. … What a dope!” That was President Nuance, referring to John Bolton. Imagine, hiring someone like that for national security adviser? What a dope!
* “The city is burning, and Trump is Nero.”–Timothy Naftali, New York University history professor and former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library.
* According to the Bolton book, “The Room Where It Happened,” Trump once asked Chief-of-Staff John Kelly if Finland is part of Russia. But in fairness, it’s pretty close.
* “He didn’t hire very well.” That was former chief-of-staff Mark Mulvaney, who would know.
* We know why Trump wanted his Tulsa rally, public-health-jeopardizing circumstances notwithstanding. He’s fueled by fealty, and Trump rallies put him center stage for a national show. And timing is everything. He’s not been on a roll: the battered economy, racial unrest, the military pushback, defeats in the Supreme Court (over DACA and LGBTQ issues), unfavorable polls that favor Biden and, oh yeah, the Bolton book. In the words of John Dean, former Nixon White House counsel, “Trump is becoming what he hates most, which is being a loser.”
* Waiver reality: “By attending the Rally, you and any guests voluntarily assume all risks related to Trump bombast and exposure to COVID-19.”
* Trump’s Attorney General William Barr: This is what it took to miss Nixon’s AG, John Mitchell.
* Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri is president of the Florida Sheriffs Association and serves on the board of the Major County Sheriffs of America. As such, it was appropriate that he be part of a White House ceremony featuring the president signing an executive order encouraging reform, however modest, in police policies. But the Rose Garden/Trump-prop optics were awful.