President Donald Trump has had a very bad weekend.
Even as Trump was making groundless claims that his White House predecessor, Barack Obama, had wiretapped him, Trump was also fuming that Obama had achieved more during the first month-and-a-half of his presidency than Trump has pulled off in the same period of time, according to The Washington Post. This has forced Trump to focus on reimplementing his notorious Muslim travel ban, as well as concentrate on a repeal-and-replace bill for the Affordable Care Act while temporarily setting aside everything else in his legislative agenda.
The president's embattled mindset has even caused him and his allies to turn on an institution that has traditionally been embraced by the right-wing — the so-called "deep state."
"Remember what Dwight Eisenhower told us: There is a military-industrial complex. That complex still exists and has a lot of power," Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-California, told The Post. "It’s everywhere, and it doesn’t like how Trump is handling Russia. Over and over again, in article after article, it rears its head."
He referred to the constant stream of leaks, particularly those pertaining to Team Trump's ties to Russia, that have knocked Trump's nascent presidency off-kilter. Although some of Trump's suspicions about the "deep state" of intelligence communities undermining him is based on real information provided by sympathetic intelligence staffers, much of it comes from the far right-wing conspiracy theory websites on which the president seems to be quite dependent for his worldview. These are the same sites that seem to have fueled his belief that Obama wiretapped him.
This isn't to say that the president has taken much solace in his own White House staff. Not only were there reports that he blew up at them for not sufficiently defending Attorney General Jeff Sessions after the latter was forced to recuse himself from Russia investigations, but Chief of Staff Reince Priebus couldn't even kill the story when by asking reporters not to run it off the record. The next day he made his unfounded claims about the Obama administration wiretapping him, and shortly thereafter close advisers including Sessions, chief strategist Steve Bannon, Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly and White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller tried to improve the president's mood by running through their plan for implementing his travel ban.
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