THIS is what Durbin and the Dems and the Pravdas are looking to disrupt:
From Jan 10
By Daniel Henninger
Jan 10, 2018 6:46 p.m. ET
By putting it out there that the U.S. president is an “idiot,” a “dope,” “dumb as sh—” and basically insane, Michael Wolff may have ensured the success and continuation of Donald J. Trump’s improbable presidency. That’s right, Michael Wolff, who admitted on “Meet the Press” that “this is 25th Amendment kind of stuff,” did President Trump a favor.
It’s impossible to know which half of Mr. Wolff’s book is more-or-less true and which half is second-level hearsay (similar to many of the Russian collusion stories). So it follows that among those uncertain about what’s fake is Donald Trump. After all, someone did allow Mr. Wolff, a well-known stab-in-the-back specialist, to hang around the White House for six months. A lot of White House courtiers, including the exiled Steve Bannon, seem to have spent most of their working hours the first six months speed-dialing dirt to White House reporters. We all watched the muck leak into the Oval Office.
So if you are Donald Trump, and like any normal person don’t want the world to think you’re cuckoo, what do you do? You prove they are wrong. Which is what Mr. Trump did twice this week with conscious intent in public forums. Both events not only showed the president acting, in his word, “stable,” both also offered a successful model for a post-Bannon, post-Wolff presidency.
People who have a job that requires them to make a living by doing something other than watch Donald Trump in real time most likely didn’t see either of these events. The first was Mr. Trump’s speech Monday to the American Farm Bureau in Nashville, Tenn. The other, which is worth a look if you didn’t see it, was a nearly hour-long session on immigration legislation Mr. Trump held at the White House with about 24 members of Congress, TV cameras rolling and the press taking notes.
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What struck me most about the farm speech was how relaxed Mr. Trump was. Most Trump speeches to large audiences are generally delivered in a simmering anger, the president gripping both sides of the podium and launching words like grenades at a still-doubting world. Not this one. He was at ease throughout.
That would have been about as noteworthy as a passing cloud if not for the next day’s immigration meeting on the Dreamers and DACA legislation. Mr. Trump presided over this meeting like some previously undiscovered Buddha. He talked but didn’t dominate. He methodically elicited views from Republicans (among them Lindsey Graham, Kevin McCarthy, David Perdue and Carlos Curbelo ) and Democrats (Dick Durbin, Steny Hoyer, Dianne Feinstein ).
Once you realized it wasn’t a brief photo-op before the doors closed, the meeting was sort of weird, with reporters and their notebooks looming over the legislators’ backs, but it was also weirdly impressive. They looked like politicians doing real work, and afterward the White House announced the framework of a deal on the Dreamers.
Contrast this with how Barack Obama invited congressional Republicans and Democrats to a public, televised forum on health-care reform at Blair House in early 2010, listened to a series of GOP policy proposals from serious people such as Lamar Alexander and Tom Coburn, and then smirked it all away as nothing new. It was a setup that poisoned the well.
Or how in 2011 Mr. Obama blew up the deficit-reduction deal Joe Biden had worked out in meetings and dinners with a bipartisan supercommittee. Mr. Obama then descended on the group to lecture it on his demand that they raise taxes on “the wealthy” and corporations. “I will not support any plan that puts all of the burden for closing our deficit on ordinary Americans,” Mr. Obama magisterially intoned. The bipartisan deal collapsed.
The Trump-Republican-Democratic DACA deal, if it succeeds, will be a major bipartisan accomplishment.
But back to the Trump-is-Dr. Strangelove thesis. Mr. Trump himself contributed to the mania with a tweet, days before the Wolff book’s release, about his nuclear button being bigger than Kim Jong Un’s . That tweet put the president’s mental capacity in play, even among supporters, which is not where he should want it to be.
Instead, the Trump immigration negotiation session with Congress is the sort of public presidential face the world should see more of. In fact, that meeting’s productive content is a template for broadening the president’s Twitter account, an underutilized asset.
The morning after the immigration summit, a grudging consensus formed that Mr. Trump had confounded critics of his basic competence. A parallel consensus snorted that this positive moment won’t last.
And maybe it won’t. If this week’s impressive Trump performance gets buried beneath petty feuds, Mr. Wolff’s dumpster diving inside the Bannon-era White House will be seen as prescient and accurate enough.
But if the president running that meeting is the one seen by voters going forward, Mr. Trump should invite Mr. Wolff to the second inauguration.
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http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/368954-gop-sen-trump-did-not-make-shithole-comment?rnd=1515941970http://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/368963-cotton-attacks-durbin-for-claims-of-trumps-shithole-countries?rnd=1515947330