House Speaker Paul Ryan and Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady (R-Texas) are furiously lobbying Donald Trump to scrap his trade war (https://www.politico.com/story/2018/03/05/trump-tariffs-republican-response-436382), and free traders such as National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn, who argued against the tariffs, is hoping that outsiders can turn the volatile Trump around (https://www.politico.com/story/2018/03/05/trade-tariffs-trump-white-house-438278).
Trump does whatever he wants, never thinking about the consequences, but always playing to his base. His advisers argued against his imposing tariffs on imported steel and aluminum to help Pennsylvania GOP Congressional candidate win his special election on March 13 in a District that Trump carried by 19 points in 2016. He has absolutely no impulse control. Brilliant biographer Michael D’Antonio explained all this in Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success (2015). NYSE CEO Sydney Williams III (who is also Head of School at Alma Academy in Easthampton, Massachusetts — a school founded in 1841 by a wealthy manufacturer of buttons who was intent on fostering Calvinism in a mill town only five miles away from Northampton, where Jonathan Edwards, a leader in the First Great Awakening in the early eighteenth century, fulminated against sinners in his famous sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God") was slightly peeved that D’Antonio wrote his book about Trump without consulting him.
Associate solitary reporter Johanna Jones was with Trump yesterday evening. She asked him about the huge kerfuffle he has set off on trade.
“You know, Johanna, I’m sick and tired of Congress disrespecting me and trying to tell me what to do, especially the Republicans, who wouldn’t even be there if it weren’t for me.”
When Jones pointed out that most Congressional Republicans other than then-Senator Jeff Sessions favored Florida Senator Marco Rubio, Trump went into a meltdown.
“What I’m gonna do, Johanna, is I’m leaving the GOP and I’m gonna found the America First Party.”
“My lackey, Mike Pence, is with me all the way. "I've got the evangelicals just where I want them, and I might even be able to bring Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows along with me.”
A passionate student of American history, Jones then asked him whether he envisions a 21st century remake of the Know Nothing movement of the 1850s, a nativist political movement which operated nationally. It was primarily anti-Catholic and hostile to immigration. It started as a secret society. The Know Nothings became a major political party in the form of the American Party. Adherents to the movement routinely replied “I know nothing” when asked about its specifics by outsiders.
Before calling on the Secret Service to throw Jones, once again, out the window onto the White House lawn, Trump yelled at Jones for implying that he is stupid. But the Secret Service and everybody around Trump know better.
In other news, former Trump campaign aide Sam Nunberg told CNN’s Gloria Borger, Jake Tapper and Erin Burnett that because Sarah Huckabee is a fat slob, he won’t testify in front of a Mueller grand jury about his hatred of Donald Trump, who fired him in 2015, https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/05/politics/sam-nunberg-robert-mueller/index.html; https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/05/politics/who-is-sam-nunberg/index.html. When CNN political analyst Jeffrey Toobin told Burnett on her "Out Front With Erin Burnett" show that he thinks Nunberg is a disturbed individual, Nunberg told associate solitary reporter Keith Coleman that he is suing Huckabee, Borger, Tapper, Burnett, Toobin, and Trump. “I have to make a living somehow,” Nunberg said. “All I’m trying to do is justify my racist Facebook posts and protect my hero and mentor, Roger Stone.”
CNN Editor-at-large Chris Cillizza has a good opinion piece on weird dude Nunberg: https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/05/politics/sam-nunberg-analysis/index.html.
As he left the CNN studio, Nunberg asked associate solitary reporter Susanna Sherman if she would represent him in his lawsuits. Sherman advised him to seek counseling.