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Donald Trump on Saturday called Michael Wolff, the writer of a bestselling book about his White House, “a mentally deranged author” who “knowingly writes false information”

Wolff has said he conducted more than 200 interviews and stands by all his sourcing and reporting. News outlets have pointed to inconsistencies in Fire and Fury and in past work

For Trump, lying is central to his disturbed psyche, and to his success. The brazenness of it unbalances and stupefies sane and adjusted people, thereby constantly giving him an edge and a little breathing space while we try to absorb it, during which he proceeds to the next lie. And on it goes. It’s like swimming in choppy water. Just when you get to the surface to breathe, another wave crashes into you.

Bannon, Wolff writes, came to understand that the lies were “compulsive, persistent and without even a minimal grounding in reality.” This is not to deceive the public. This is simply the way Trump behaves — in private and public

Recall this famous passage from Ron Suskind, reporting on the Bush White House for the Times:

ust months into his presidency, a small circle of senior White House advisers met with Donald Trump about a carefully curated list containing the names of dozens of perceived political opponents, particularly leakers, working inside the government.

Three of the officials told CNN that Bannon understood Trump wanted people fired, while the fourth said that McMaster believed the President's direction was to deal with leaks in a systematic fashion, rather than a mass firing.

The existence of "deep state" lists in the early days of Trump's presidency was widely talked about in the halls of the National Security Council and the State Department, according to multiple former White House officials, although several officials named on the list tell CNN they didn't know that any such list really existed or that they were on it. The "deep state" refers to a right-wing belief that certain members of the federal bureaucracy are actively undermining the Trump presidency.

A threat so grave handed Trump a history-making opportunity that eluded many of his predecessors. He’d become a wartime president, with a chance to refashion his legacy. That moment has come and is likely gone

“This is Trump’s Churchill moment,” Steve Bannon, the president’s former chief strategist, told me. “This time will define his presidency.”

“There are times when you really need a president—and those are the ones that have forged our great presidents,”

Trump flashes anger over Sessions recusal, Russia stories in tense Oval Office meeting

Before heading off to his so-called "winter White House" in Palm Beach, Florida, on Friday, President Donald Trump summoned some of his senior staff to the Oval Office and went "ballistic," senior White House sources told ABC News.

The president erupted with anger over the latest slew of news reports connecting Russia with the new administration -- specifically the abrupt decision by Attorney General Jeff Sessions to recuse himself from investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 campaign.

the shift of the Republican base to the right that now makes the move to the center terribly risky.

Another way to say it is that Republicans moving to the center now means becoming something close to right wing social democrats. It would mean, for example, saying that okay we are going to fix Obamacare by reworking the exchanges and actually doing something about prescription drug prices. And we will revive U.S. manufacturing by building on Obama’s advanced manufacturing institutes. We will fight opioid addiction with a dramatic increase in drug treatment spending. Moreover funding these programs means that we actually have to raise some taxes so we are going to introduce a VAT. In short, they pretty much have to go all the way to being Eisenhower Republicans.

Now, of course, that is what we want to happen because if the competition is to see which party is better at devising government programs that will help solve social and economic programs, it would make it possible for the Dems to move left. But I think that conservative parties only make this kind of Christian Democratic turn when the threat from the electoral left is already very strong—and we haven’t reached that point

if there is any criminal wrongdoing, these accounts pin that on the leakers inside the “deep state,” a phrase popularized by Trump administration officials such as the chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, to describe the vast bureaucracy of federal employees seeking to undermine the president.

Mr. Stone and Mr. Jones, who made the video about their suspicions that a coup was in the offing. (Under a provision of the 25th Amendment, if a majority of the cabinet and the vice president decide that the president can no longer carry out his duties, the vice president replaces him.) In the same video, Mr. Jones urged Mr. Trump’s supporters to fight attempts to undermine him. “There is a cultural war,” Mr. Jones said. “They want to bully you into submission.”

Mr. Trump has created his own political culture, and its devotees are strongly and emotionally committed to it.

young men are being radicalized largely through the work of a popular group of new far-right internet personalities whose videos, blog posts and tweets have been consistently nudging the boundaries of acceptable conversation to the right — one of the explicit goals of racist extremists everywhere.

Hope Not Hate conclusively shows that the alt-right is itself now a global movement with regular interaction among far-right figures from Scotland to Sweden to Seattle.

This goal of mainstreaming is an abiding fixation of the far right, whose members are well aware of the problems their movement has had with attracting young people in recent decades.

few have heard the activist author Cornel West give credit to anarchists and anti-fascists for saving the lives of peacefully protesting clergy members in Charlottesville: Given the weak police response in protecting them from the neo-Nazis, West said, “We would have been crushed like cockroaches” otherwise.

There certainly was no question that the alt-right had political ties — at the highest level. Stephen K. Bannon, the chairman of Breitbart News, who would would become Trump’s chief strategist, once described his news organization as the “platform for the alt-right.”

“They have no political allies,” national political reporter David Weigel of The Post observed of antifa, asking rhetorically, “Who is the Corey Stewart of antifa?

The president and his associates mix anti-Semitic dog whistles with frank attacks on Muslims, immigrants and refugees. The paradox is that in today’s America, coded anti-Semitism is more of a political taboo than open Islamophobia. We spend a great deal of time and energy parsing the semiotics of Mr. Trump’s role in stoking anti-Jewish sentiment, while Muslims and immigrants can be defamed with impunity. The risk here is that we’ve been distracted by the anti-Semitism controversy from the ways in which other groups are being demonized as Jews once were.

In his definitive 1994 book “Anti-Semitism in America,” Leonard Dinnerstein describes American anti-Semitism reaching a high tide in the early 1940s. The country was traumatized by the Great Depression and apprehensive about war in Europe. Reactionaries imagined themselves squeezed between globalist Jewish bankers above and subversive Jewish refugee hordes below.

The America First Committee, formed to keep the United States out of World War II, was full of bigots and Nazi sympathizers; Mr. Dinnerstein quotes the chairman of the Terre Haute, Ind., chapter saying, “Jews were now in possession of our government.” There were widespread assertions that President Franklin D. Roosevelt was secretly Jewish; anti-Semites insisted his real last name was Rosenfeld.

“Just as we are seeing a step function increase in the spread of AI, something else is happening: the rise of ultra-nationalism, rightwing authoritarianism and fascism,” she said.

All of these movements have shared characteristics, including the desire to centralize power, track populations, demonize outsiders and claim authority and neutrality without being accountable. Machine intelligence can be a powerful part of the power playbook, she said.

“We should always be suspicious when machine learning systems are described as free from bias if it’s been trained on human-generated data,” Crawford said. “Our biases are built into that training data.

As he told Michael Schmidt of the Times, “When you look at the things that [the Obama administration] did, and Holder protected the president. And I have great respect for that, I’ll be honest, I have great respect for that.”

We see these attitudes as the mindset of a would-be authoritarian. And they are. But they are also the attitudes of a criminal. By this I mean not simply someone who has broken the law. I mean someone who has no inherent respect for the law or great fear of its enforcement and breaks the law more or less casually when it is convenient and relatively safe to do so. Typically, such people see the trappings of the law as little more than a mask for the exercise of power.

This is clearly Trump’s view of the world. Just as clearly he saw becoming President as essentially becoming the law. It is the ultimate power and what comes with that is legal invulnerability for him and his family. He earned it.

Michael Flynn, former President Donald Trump's first national security adviser, appeared to endorse a Myanmar-style coup in the United States on Sunday.

"I want to know why what happened in Minamar (sic)can't happen here?" a member of the audience, who identified himself as a Marine, asked Flynn.

"No reason, I mean, it should happen here. No reason. That's right," Flynn responded

The US Army said Wednesday that it will not investigate former Gen. Michael Flynn for statements he recently made in which he appeared to endorse a Myanmar-style coup occurring in the US.

"We are aware of the statements LTG (R) Flynn made May 30 and June 1. The Army is not investigating these statements further at this time," an Army spokesperson said in a statement.

Flynn is facing bipartisan criticism after appearing to endorse a Myanmar-style coup in the US during an event in Dallas on Sunday in which an audience member raised the idea.

When Rudolph W. Giuliani was treating his efforts to carry out President Trump’s wishes to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election as a payment opportunity — he proposed a daily retainer of $20,000 for his legal services from the burgeoning Trump campaign legal fund — the president dismissed it and responded by demanding to personally approve each expense.

Even as he complains about Mr. Giuliani’s latest efforts as fruitless, the president remains unusually deferential to him in public and in private. “Don’t underestimate him,” Mr. Trump has told advisers.

But only up to a point. While Mr. Trump and his advisers balked at the $20,000 request weeks ago, it is unclear whether the president will sign off on Mr. Giuliani being paid anything other than expenses.

President Donald Trump has found the parts of the job he loved replaced by cold legal warnings,

the President is playing the role of victim and not a gracious leader departing office.

And he has made clear to aides in separate conversations that mere mention of President Richard Nixon,

In online videos, the 41-year-old Texan pointed out the flimsiness of the fencing. He cheered the arrival, long before President Trump’s rally at the other end of the mall, of far-right militiamen encircling the building. Then, armed with a bullhorn, Mr. Lee called out for the mob to rush in, until his voice echoed from the dome of the Rotunda.

By far the most visible financial backer of Women for America First’s efforts was Mike Lindell, a founder of the MyPillow bedding company, identified on a now-defunct website as one of the “generous sponsors” of a bus tour promoting Mr. Trump's attempt to overturn the election. In addition, he was an important supporter of Right Side Broadcasting, an obscure pro-Trump television network that provided blanket coverage of Trump rallies after the vote, and a podcast run by the former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon that also sponsored the bus tour.

Wild Protest linked to three hotels with discounted rates and another site for coordinating travel plans. It also raised donations from thousands of individuals, according to archived versions of a web portal used to collect them. The website has since been taken down, and it is not clear what the money was used for.