In their new bestselling book, “A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America,” Pulitzer Prize winning authors Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker provide detailed reporting on President Donald Trump’s character, his leadership, and his personal and political style.

Leonnig and Rucker recount a number of incidents that have come to shape perceptions of the Trump administration, including the infamous Tank meeting, Trump’s apparent ignorance of what happened at Pearl Harbor, and more. But Dany and Marc also press the authors on the president’s strengths and the qualities that may in fact make him “genius”—though perhaps not always stable.

Carol Leonnig is a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner and veteran investigative reporter at the Washington Post. Philip Rucker is the White House Bureau Chief at the Washington Post and part of the team of Post reporters who won the Pulitzer Prize and George Polk Award for their reporting on Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Download the transcript here.

 

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  1. milkchaser Member
    milkchaser
    @milkchaser

    It seems pretty obvious to me that Trump is not even close to stupid or even ignorant. I completely agree with Marc that Trump need not come to Washington knowing why things were being done the way they were. From time to time we need to take a fresh look. What’s amazing is that now we know, the status quo was not the only successful way to do things.

    • #1
  2. milkchaser Member
    milkchaser
    @milkchaser

    “Calling Afghanistan a ‘loser war’ in front of Mike Pence whose son was fighting there.” I’m sorry, does one thing have anything to do with the other? If anything, having a son whose life is at risk for questionably important reasons should inform one’s valuation of the effort. I recall meeting a couple in Sam’s Club who reacted bitterly to my wearing a W cap back in 2005. Their son was severely injured in Iraq. Proud as they might have been of their son’s service, they were quick to deem the war effort “stupid”.

    It boggles my mind how anyone could think that Trump should have maintained the pretense about success in Afghanistan or how it is a critical element of US national security just because it might hurt someone’s feelings.

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  3. milkchaser Member
    milkchaser
    @milkchaser

    “And that’s why he continues to talk about the [Russian collusion] hoax and continues to try to rewrite the history of the Russian interference in 2016 because it has been this cloud over his Presidency.”

    It is more accurate to say that Trump is correcting the record on Russian interference in an attempt to finally clarify the inconsequential nature and trivial effect of alleged Russian interference. No one outside a very small cabal of intelligence agencies, whose anti-Trump bias is evident and profound, has seen a scintilla of actual evidence of this Russian interference. For the most part, we are told what we should believe and to trust that the intelligence agencies are telling us the truth (despite a record of deception going back decades, but particularly a record that attempts to hide the conspiracy starting in 2015 to interfere against Trump in the 2016 election).

    It is astonishing to me that anyone could reasonably suggest, after all that we have since learned, that the Russian interference allegations were anything other than a scandalous abuse of power.

    • #3
  4. milkchaser Member
    milkchaser
    @milkchaser

    How dare these people carry water for Comey, Brennan and Clapper as they perpetuate the lie that Russia did anything remotely influential in the election? Who are they kidding? Can they quantify the number of eyeballs who saw the Facebook ads put out by the Russians? Can they compare those meager, inconsequential numbers to the number of people who heard the endless drone of false allegations of Russian collusion for two years?

    Do these authors have difficulty quantifying things? Are they completely innumerate? Or are they just carrying water for despicable, partisans who abused US gov’t power to try to defeat Trump? Try something easier, folks. Try defending Richard Nixon and the Watergate break-in.

    • #4
  5. milkchaser Member
    milkchaser
    @milkchaser

    The Steele Dossier that they presented to President-Elect Trump was the equivalent of a “slam book”. Showing him that piece of crap was something one would expect of jealous high school girls – not the heads of responsible and powerful gov’t agencies. And then we wonder why Trump freaked out? 

    • #5
  6. milkchaser Member
    milkchaser
    @milkchaser

    OMG – I can’t believe that Carol Leonnig gets paid to report facts. Well, apparently, it is too much of a challenge for her. Let’s go over the important facts here for the grossly misinformed woman (or let’s pretend for a second that she does not already know them and is not just trying to make a ridiculous partisan argument that Trump was doing anything other than joking about emails).

    Hillary Clinton’s email server had been bleach-bitted in 2015 around the time that she announced her candidacy. Those emails no longer existed on the server in the summer of 2016 when Trump made his joke addressing the Russians. It would have been 100% impossible for anyone on the planet lacking a time machine to hack that server. Hence, for Trump to invite Russia to produce the emails was not an invitation to hack the non-existent server. This could not possibly have been a public cry for Russian aid. It was a joke that assumes that Russia had already hacked the server – a real possibility created by Hillary Clinton – not Donald Trump. Did those supposedly stalwart intelligence agents who turned around and went back into the office do so to reinvestigate why Hillary might have intentionally allowed classified communication to be accessible to the Russians? Because that, not Trump’s joke, is the real and obvious evidence of a security breach.

    Just how stupid do you think we all are?

    • #6
  7. milkchaser Member
    milkchaser
    @milkchaser

    I think Ms. Pletka completely misstates the nature of the purge – which is not even a problem. It’s not that people in the Trump administration are being purged for stating minor criticisms of Trump as she suggests. He has tolerated a good number of people who were resisting him – pretty openly resisting him. So now he’s dumping them. The fact that he waited until his 4th year to dump them shows tolerance, not thin skin.

    • #7
  8. milkchaser Member
    milkchaser
    @milkchaser

    Trump emulating Stalin? Does she even hear herself? That’s TDS.

    Stalin had people killed or banished to Siberia where they were tortured, shot or died of disease and starvation.

    How can Ms. Pletka make an outlandish statement like that – so obviously hyperbolic – and then miss the hyperbole when Trump jokes about requesting Russia to cough up any emails they’d previously hacked? Willful blindness.

    • #8
  9. Leslie Watkins Inactive
    Leslie Watkins
    @LeslieWatkins

    I’ve begun to think that the level of condemnation of Trump rises in direct proportion to the speaker’s unwillingness to see, much less admit, that former administrations since Nixon were absolutely mistaken about China and that the form of globalization abetted up our government ended up helping only the elites as politicians, major business leaders, and their families all jumped to the head of the line of benefits received, and private deals made with foreign governments, all the while praising one another on their finesse and intelligence and so-called public service. Trump is not a statesman, but “the way things work” types have actually done a whole lot worse. Afghanistan (perhaps because of Bush and Obama as much as the generals Trump cussed out) is an American tragedy, and I supported it entirely, assuming our government had its citizens’ long-term interests at heart when clearly it did not. It’s almost mythic, this refusal to see that previous U.S. leaders have not been the perfect captains of government that Trump’s most vociferous critics need them to be in order to feel vindicated by their constant condemnations of him, however merited the criticisms of his style and instability.

    • #9
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