'Melodrama, backstabbing and emotional outbursts': Second season of Trump is off the chain
Dispatch writer and former Weekly Standard senior writer Michael Warren says the best reality show isn’t on “Bravo, TLC, or streaming on Hulu.” For the finest “melodrama, backstabbing, and emotional outbursts,” you have to go to X and Truth Social.
“Oh, man, the girls are fighting, aren’t they?” posted U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) on X. And Warren says she was definitely not wrong about the recent “Trump-Musk snipefest.”
The second season of “VanderTrump Rules,” or maybe “The Secret Lives of MAGA Guys”—as Warren calls it—is just so gloriously rife with drama incidents like “Musk … trying to tie Trump to an alleged sex trafficker” because there are no calming influences in the White House this time around.
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“[I]n his first term, Trump could be swayed on policy by a single person or article in ways that would delay important decisions,” writes Warren. In the last season, Trump aides spent time “finding ways of ‘calming’ down an agitated president,” which sometimes included wheeling in old “friends from the business world.”
Warren notes Trump’s former press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, wrote in her book that one aide had the job of “Music Man.” He was tasked “to play him his favorite show tunes, including ‘Memory’ from ‘Cats,’ to pull him from the brink of rage.”
It was a sound tactic considering the president’s penchant for hurling things against walls. Former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified before the January 6 committee that Trump had thrown his lunch against the wall in December 2020 after learning his attorney general had publicly refuted Trump’s claim of widespread fraud in his loss to Biden.
Last year, attorney Roberta Kaplan told Politico that during a deposition at Mar-a-Lago, Trump “was misbehaving … like an 8-year-old having a temper tantrum,” grabbing a “pile of exhibits— which as you know … was probably a good two feet high to that point — and just threw it across the table.”
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The Washington Post also claims Trump regularly pounded tables and screamed profanities, and took turns throwing drinks, remote controls and various reports and papers across the room.
“You people never listen to me! You’re going to do this! Nobody ever does what I tell them to do!” Trump screamed, punctuating each sentence with expletives.
“Everyone was afraid of him, including me,” the Post reports Sen. Lindsey O. Graham saying at a gathering.
Warren notes Trump’s Vice President J.D. Vance admits in his book to blowing his own top at his wife, Usha, after a less-than-stellar job interview. And he credits Usha for helping him get better control of his emotions. In this, Warren says Vance “is exhibiting a level of self-reflection that might benefit others in the administration and his party.”
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“It would make the show a lot less entertaining, but Trump and Musk might want to take note,” he said.
Read the full Dispatch report at this link.
