In late July, the White House had just finished an official policy review on transgender individuals serving in the military and President Trump and his then-chief of staff, Reince Priebus, had agreed to meet in the Oval Office to discuss the four options awaiting the president in a decision memo.
But then Trump unexpectedly preempted the conversation and sent his entire administration scrambling, by tweeting out his own decision — that the government would not allow transgender individuals to serve — just moments later.
“ ‘Oh my God, he just tweeted this,’ ” Priebus said, according to a new book by Howard Kurtz, who hosts Fox News’s “Media Buzz.” There was, Kurtz writes, “no longer a need for the meeting.”
The White House — and the politerati diaspora — has just barely stopped reeling from author Michael Wolff’s account of life in Trump’s West Wing, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” and now another life-in-the-White-House book is about to drop, this one from Kurtz.
Like the books that came before it, and almost certainly like the ones still to come, Kurtz’s book, “Media Madness: Donald Trump, The Press, And The War Over The Truth,” offers a portrait of a White House riven by chaos, with aides scrambling to respond to the president’s impulses and writing policy to fit his tweets, according to excerpts obtained by The Washington Post.
Kurtz, who worked at The Post from 1981 to 2010, writes that Trump’s aides even privately coined a term for Trump’s behavior — “Defiance Disorder.” The phrase refers to Trump’s seeming compulsion to do whatever it is his advisers are most strongly urging against, leaving his team to handle the fallout.
The book officially hits stores Jan. 29.
Early in the administration, Kurtz describes White House aides waking up one Saturday morning in March, confused and “blindsided,” to find that Trump had — without any evidence — accused former president Barack Obama on Twitter of wiretapping him during the campaign.
“Nobody in the White House quite knew what to do,” Kurtz writes.
Priebus watched as his phone exploded with email and text messages, according to the excerpts. “Priebus knew the staff would have to fall into line to prove the tweet correct, the opposite of the usual process of vetting proposed pronouncements,” Kurtz writes. “Once the president had committed to 140 characters, he was not going to back off.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...3a3a47824e8_story.html?utm_term=.26d224bd689b
But then Trump unexpectedly preempted the conversation and sent his entire administration scrambling, by tweeting out his own decision — that the government would not allow transgender individuals to serve — just moments later.
“ ‘Oh my God, he just tweeted this,’ ” Priebus said, according to a new book by Howard Kurtz, who hosts Fox News’s “Media Buzz.” There was, Kurtz writes, “no longer a need for the meeting.”
The White House — and the politerati diaspora — has just barely stopped reeling from author Michael Wolff’s account of life in Trump’s West Wing, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” and now another life-in-the-White-House book is about to drop, this one from Kurtz.
Like the books that came before it, and almost certainly like the ones still to come, Kurtz’s book, “Media Madness: Donald Trump, The Press, And The War Over The Truth,” offers a portrait of a White House riven by chaos, with aides scrambling to respond to the president’s impulses and writing policy to fit his tweets, according to excerpts obtained by The Washington Post.
Kurtz, who worked at The Post from 1981 to 2010, writes that Trump’s aides even privately coined a term for Trump’s behavior — “Defiance Disorder.” The phrase refers to Trump’s seeming compulsion to do whatever it is his advisers are most strongly urging against, leaving his team to handle the fallout.
The book officially hits stores Jan. 29.
Early in the administration, Kurtz describes White House aides waking up one Saturday morning in March, confused and “blindsided,” to find that Trump had — without any evidence — accused former president Barack Obama on Twitter of wiretapping him during the campaign.
“Nobody in the White House quite knew what to do,” Kurtz writes.
Priebus watched as his phone exploded with email and text messages, according to the excerpts. “Priebus knew the staff would have to fall into line to prove the tweet correct, the opposite of the usual process of vetting proposed pronouncements,” Kurtz writes. “Once the president had committed to 140 characters, he was not going to back off.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...3a3a47824e8_story.html?utm_term=.26d224bd689b