In a brutal look at the how the fortunes of President Donald Trump's administration have taken a drastic turn for the worse this past week, the author of 'TrumpNation: The Art of Being The Donald,' claims it was inevitable because the New York businessman has always surrounded himself with third-rate opportunist not up to the task.
Writing for Bloomberg, author Tim O'Brien said the president brought his misfortunes upon himself with his poor judgment in hiring, including a personal lawyer who flipped on him and a former campaign manager found guilty of financial fraud.
Noting Trump famously claimed, “I’m going to surround myself only with the best and most serious people. We want top-of-the-line professionals,” O'Brien claimed that has never been the case because Trump sees loyalty as a one-way street -- with him receiving all the benefits.
"That formula allowed the Trump Organization to float along as a marketing and development boutique built around Donald Trump himself, but also ensured that it would never evolve into a Fortune 500 enterprise manned by capable professionals," O'Brien wrote. "As long as he stayed out of legal trouble, Trump also could spend decades tearing through people and propositions willy-nilly, dismissing naysayers with a leak to the gossip pages, an appearance on a talk show or a vicious tweet."
With the whole world focusing on his every move and utterance, Trump as president is facing scrutiny every minute of the day and, according to O'Brien, his history as a businessman has made competent people shy away from him.
"By the time Trump began running for president in 2015 and 2016, anyone who had been paying attention knew exactly what Trump’s game amounted to and avoided him," the author explained. " any of the folks who chose to sign on back then — Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn, Carter Page, Boris Epshteyn, Steve Bannon, Donald McGahn, Omarosa Manigault Newman, Sarah Sanders and Kellyanne Conway, for example — were second- or third-rate opportunists content to hitch their stars to the Trump train in exchange for visibility."
"Some of them were also criminals, as it turns out," O'Brien added for emphasis.
Reviewing Manafort's conviction on 8 of 18 counts of fraud, Cohen's plea deal with prosecutors where he pointed the finger at Trump over possible illegal hush money payments and White House attorney Doug McGahn speaking with special counsel Robert Mueller, O'Brien said Trump's chickens are coming home to roost.
"All of this may well mean that at the age of 72, Trump’s self-absorption and lack of loyalty may finally come back to haunt him," he explained, adding, "We now know that Trump rubbed up against felons and felonies during his campaign and transition into the White House, which leaves him surrounded by flagrant wrongdoing and a perilous legal vise."
"As remarkable as Cohen-Manafort Day was, however, we are also still in the early stages of the Mueller investigation. We still don’t have a full grasp of what Trump knew or did during a career, a campaign and a presidency that have skirted the limits of the law and may well have leapt well beyond them," O'Brien wrote. "Tuesday’s events may end up being remembered as warm-up acts to more devastating revelations — and Trump, the disloyalist-in-chief, may discover that he has few people left who are willing to help him break his fall."
