President Trump may finally be developing enough self-awareness to realize when he’s screwed up royally. That’s a major step forward for a president whose head is usually too full of self-aggrandizing delusions to admit to a mistake.
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Trump’s disastrous meeting today with the Democratic Minority Leaders of both the House and Senate, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) — along with a Vice President Pence so somnolent that he inspired an entire a Twitter thread mocking his inability to keep his eyes open during the meeting — was a major blunder for the president and he knew it as soon as it was over.
Eli Stokols, the White House correspondent for The Los Angeles Times, told MSNBC that Trump left the meeting in a rage and vented his anger over the outmaneuvering the two top Democrats managed to pull over on him during the conclave after they were forced to negotiate issues that they had initially believed would be behind closed doors but that Trump decided to have the press witness at the last minute.
“He stormed out of the Oval, walked into an anteroom just off the Oval Office and had in his hand a folder of briefing papers. And he just scattered them out of frustration — threw them across the room,” Stokols said on MSNBC’s “Hardball,” according to his own discussions with White House officials.
According to Stokols, Trump was particularly peeved with his fellow New Yorker Senator Schumer whom the president realized out-witted him by shrewdly getting Trump to bear full responsibility for any government shutdown over the president’s insistence on fully funding the border wall that he promised that Mexico would pay for during his campaign.
While out-witting Trump may not be a particularly difficult task, getting the notoriously finger-pointing president to actually accept responsibility for anything at all that doesn’t involve stroking his gargantuan ego is an accomplishment that should qualify both Schumer and Pelosi for some type of award.
Other news sources say that at least some of Trump’s anger has been directed at his own Vice President, whose silence during the meeting led some wags to speculate that Pence was too busy closing his eyes to pray his way out of the room in an early rapture to contribute to the conversation.
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BREAKING: GOP consultant tells me Trump is “absolutely enraged” by the news coverage of his meeting with Pelosi and Schumer today. Trump apparently blames Pence for not speaking up. He thinks Pence “lost it for him.” And he wishes he never held the meeting, calling it a “set up.”
— Scott Dworkin (@funder) December 11, 2018
With rumors that Trump is considering dumping Pence from his ticket on the slim chance that he survives any fallout from the increasingly grim evidence being slowly divulged in the multiple federal and state investigations against him, the vice-president may want to start seriously considering when he can invoke the 25th amendment.
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A timely implementation of that move could send Trump to prison where he belongs and save the nation from any further damage from an obviously unhinged chief executive.
Trump may want to consider that possibility before he alienates his VP any further, that is if Pence is awake enough to notice when he’s being dissed.
Meanwhile, Congresswoman Pelosi demonstrated today that she can be a powerful counterbalance to Trump when she assumes her increasingly likely post as Speaker of the House. Her double-teaming of the president with Senator Schumer is the most aggressive move the Democrats have made since Trump took office.
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What a difference winning an election makes.
Watch The Los Angeles Times White House correspondent Eli Stokols describe President Trump’s violent tantrum With MSNBC‘s Chris Matthews in the video below.
Here's @EliStokols's new reporting on how Trump "stormed out of the Oval" after his meeting with Pelosi & Schumer today #Hardball pic.twitter.com/VIR9Vq5vTW
— Hardball (@hardball) December 12, 2018
Follow Vinnie Longobardo on Twitter.
Original reporting by Michael Burke at The Hill.
