Former Trump DHS analyst Miles Taylor and MS NOW host Michael Steele (YouTube Screengrab)
How does President Donald Trump deal with the non-stop bad news and dreadful poll numbers assaulting the White House every day? One former Trump official delivered the answer after MS NOW host Michael Steele asked him “what all the little mice around him” are doing to blunt the ugly numbers.
“Are they lying in his ear and telling him those aren't real polls? Or does he not really give a crap?” Steele demanded.
“They're lying to him like there's no tomorrow because that's the team he wanted to have in the second term,” said Miles Taylor, who worked for Trump in his first term as a DHS deputy chief of staff. “[Trump] was so irked that he spent four years in the first term hearing from people that were telling him bad news.”
Taylor said it’s the same story from every autocrat “throughout history.”
“They don't like to hear bad news. He does not have people around him who want to tell him bad news. And when he does encounter it — because you can't be in the real world right now without encountering the fact that there's a heck of a lot of bad news out there that he's responsible for — he doesn't care. He dismisses it.”
But people in this country are not just annoyed — they’re p——,” argued Steele, “and someone’s gonna pay for this.”
Taylor countered, however, that a mind like Trump’s is largely impervious to uncomfortable facts, and it is becoming even more impervious and malevolent as the deteriorating president crumbles into delirium.
“On Donald Trump's desk, there's a little wooden box with a red button,” said Taylor. “He had that installed as a prop so that people sitting in the Oval Office can see him reach for the red button and think ‘what's he going to press?’ And he presses it and the ante room swings open and a guy comes in with a Diet Coke. True story. He does it every single day. He presses that button.”
“The fact that the president of the United States likes to joke about practicing pressing the Big Red Button should tell us everything you need to know about his mental state,” warned Taylor.