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These are such dangerous days. Everyone is edgy. A moronic, semiliterate, senile toddler sits in the Oval Office and no one in the GOP will do anything about it. Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House is setting off explosions in Washington and beyond. It’s the moment where the fragile veneer has been ripped away: Donald Trump is exactly who you think he is. He is exactly the petty, juvenile, disgusting, ill-tempered, dangerous moron you thought he was. What’s worse is that everyone has known it all along, including his staffers, including GOP leadership, including the entire GOP caucus. Here are some quotes from Wolff:

“The one description that everyone gave, everyone has in common: They all say he is like a child. And what they mean by that is he has a need for immediate gratification. It’s all about him… He just has to be satisfied in the moment.”

“It was during Trump’s early intelligence briefings … that alarm signals first went off among his new campaign staff: he seemed to lack the ability to take in third-party information…Or maybe he lacked the interest; whichever, he seemed almost phobic about having formal demands on his attention.”

“Trump didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. … [H]e could read headlines and articles about himself, or at least headlines on articles about himself, and the gossip squibs on the New York Post’s Page Six….Some … concluded that he didn’t read because he just didn’t have to, and that in fact this was one of his key attributes as a populist. He was postliterate — total television.”

“[H]e trusted his own expertise — no matter how paltry or irrelevant — more than anyone else’s. What’s more, he had an extremely short attention span, even when he thought you were worthy of attention.”

“The organization … needed a set of internal rationalizations that would allow it to trust a man who, while he knew little, was entirely confident of his own gut instincts and reflexive opinions, however frequently they might change.”

“Here was a key Trump White House rationale: expertise, that liberal virtue, was overrated.”

“[T]he president’s views of foreign policy and the world at large were among [his White House’s] most random, uninformed, and seemingly capricious aspects. His advisers didn’t know whether he was an isolationist or a militarist, or whether he could distinguish between the two.”

“He was enamored with generals and determined that people with military command experience take the lead in foreign policy, but he hated to be told what to do.”

“He spoke obliviously and happily, believing himself to be a perfect pitch raconteur and public performer, while everyone with him held their breath.

“If a wackadoo moment occurred on the occasions … when his remarks careened in no clear direction, his staff had to go into intense method-acting response. It took absolute discipline not to acknowledge what everyone could see…At points on the day’s spectrum of adverse political developments, he could have moments of, almost everyone would admit, irrationality. When that happened, he was alone in his anger and not approachable by anyone…His senior staff largely dealt with these dark hours by agreeing with him, no matter what he said.”

[From Axios]

Axios notes at the end of that piece that “more than a half dozen” of the careerist, skilled White House employees are considering leaving the WH in the next few weeks, mostly out of fear of what is coming next for Trump and this White House. Meanwhile, the New York Times published a story last night in which – duh – Trump was apparently explicitly lobbying Jeff Sessions to refuse to recuse himself on the Russia investigation because Trump knew he “needed protection.”

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