July 12, 2020

This isn't anything new for anyone who has been paying even one iota of attention to how Trump has conducted himself during his time in office, or for most of his adult life for that matter. Even in the midst of a pandemic that continues to claim the lives of hundreds of Americans on a daily basis, Trump can't stop making everything about him.

The Washington Post's Phil Rucker was asked by MSNBC's Chris Jansing this Saturday during a discussion about Roger Stone's commutation, what the mood is like in the White House these days, and Rucker elaborated on his recent column explaining that Trump is to complaining to his advisers and others in private that the real victim of this pandemic... is him.

I guess those conversations aren't so "private" after all of they're all leaking like sieves to The Washington Post. Maybe some of them could show an ounce of courage for once and say these things publicly.

Here's more from Jansing and Rucker:

JANSING: You wrote yesterday in the Post about how the president always paints himself as a victim. We certainly saw some of that in the statement that the White House put out about this decision, almost as if it was preemptively answering what they knew would be the uproar about it.

What are you hearing these days about how he is doing, the things he is saying when he's inside the White House with his advisers?

RUCKER: Well, Chris, the president is not in a very good state these days. He's in a rather sullen mood according to his advisers and the people who've speaking with him over the last few weeks.

And in particular the president has been complaining about the pandemic because he feels like it is hurting him—it's hurting him politically, it's a crisis he now has to deal with and he considers himself the great victim here.

And our reporting for this story shows that in many of his conversations with advisers and those in the White House and with friends on the phone outside the government, he begins those conversations with a preamble, a sort of woe is me monologue about how unfair all of this is, how I built the greatest economy in the world and it's been destroyed by the pandemic and how people are protesting in the streets about what happened to Floyd in Minneapolis and it's hurting me.

So he very much sees himself as a victim here and it fits the pattern of this president of feeling everything in a personal way and feeling like he's been victimized time and again.

He could resign. That would ease his pain. Or ours, at least.

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