A powerful summation of the case against Trump from @ezraklein: Here is the question Democrats have floundered in answering this year: If Donald Trump is so dangerous, then how come the consequences of his presidency weren’t worse? ... There is an answer to this question: It’s that as president, Trump was surrounded by inhibitors. In 2020 the political scientist Daniel Drezner published a book titled “The Toddler in Chief.” The core of the book was over 1,000 instances Drezner collected in which Trump is described by those around him in terms befitting an impetuous child. ... In 2017 his deputy chief of staff Katie Walsh described working with President Trump as “trying to figure out what a child wants.” Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, said — quote — “I’m sick of being a wet nurse for a 71-year-old.” James Mattis, Trump’s first secretary of defense, and John Kelly, later his chief of staff, often described themselves like babysitters; they made a pact to never be overseas at the same time, lest Trump do something truly deranged. Here’s the title of a 2017 article in Politico: “White House aides lean on delays and distraction to manage Trump.” The first paragraph reads, “As White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus mused to associates that telling President Donald Trump no was usually not an effective strategy. Telling him ‘next week’ was often the better idea.” In 2018, The New York Times published a bombshell Op-Ed by an anonymous member of the Trump administration who said he, a Republican, was part of the internal resistance to Donald Trump, in which — quote — “many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.” That author later revealed himself to be Miles Taylor, the chief of staff of the Department of Homeland Security. In a 2020 interview with ABC, he described the lengths he and others took to shield America — to shield their own staff — from the commander in chief’s whims and rages: Miles Taylor: The president at the time would get into these phone rants with us, the secretary, myself, about Jerry Brown, and how frustrated he was with Jerry Brown and later Gavin Newsom, because they didn’t support him. And he didn’t have a base of supporters in California. So as wildfires were burning down houses in the state, the president basically said to us, “I don’t care. These people haven’t done enough to deserve it. Cut off the money.”In fact, that phone call that I referenced with FEMA officials, the secretary and I were so concerned because we didn’t want our senior leadership to be exposed to how undisciplined and tumultuous the White House was, because it made it harder for them to do their jobs. So after that call, FEMA officials said: “What do we do? The president has just told us to cut off money to people whose homes are burning down.”Our answer was: We’re not going to do it. Don’t worry. We’ll go back to the president. But then, George, months after, again in January 2019, the president said he wanted to do it. And again, I think subsequently, he tweeted about doing it. Fortunately, it never happened. FEMA didn’t follow through on it because I think because they determined from their lawyers that a tweet wasn’t an official order. The Trump administration was rife with this sort of thing. In 2019 a senior national security official told CNN’s Jake Tapper: “Everyone at this point ignores what the president says and just does their job. The American people should take some measure of confidence in that.” open.spotify.com/episode/5Vr…