There’s a telling scene in Mark Meadows’s new book about his time as Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff. It comes just after Meadows had pulled aside reporters to inform them that, despite the vague claims made by doctors from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center about the president’s coronavirus infection, Trump’s health was in bad shape. Meadows had asked to be unnamed in news reports, but he’d been caught on camera asking to do so. In other words, it wasn’t hard to figure out the source for the information — accurate information, but not what Trump wanted Americans to hear.
“President Trump was not happy when he read the original anonymous quote, and he was even less happy when he found out that it was me, his chief of staff, who had let the press know what rough shape he was in,” Meadows writes. Trump called him in to his hospital room. “Although he didn’t have much to say about the incident,” Meadows says, “he pointed out that the stories were all about my comments” — what he says Trump called a “rookie mistake.”
The tone of Meadows's book is universally fawning, with nearly every section eventually transitioning into some acclaim for Trump's handling of events or some excoriation of his critics. So it's safe to assume that in that hospital room that day, Trump might have done a bit more than offer Meadows job performance feedback. That the release of the book has led to multiple reports about Trump's anger over Meadows's general openness tends to...
The League clarified that its forums are intended to give voters a side-by-side look at candidates’ platforms, not to endorse contenders. The League of Women Voters of the St. Petersburg Area (LWVS...