MEDIA/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT/TRUMP PEOPLE: “President Donald Trump, showing his outrage over Bob Woodward’s explosive new book, is ordering a real witch hunt in the West Wing and throughout his administration, asking loyal aides to help determine who cooperated with the book. ‘The book is fiction,’ Trump said Wednesday [9-5-18] in the Oval Office alongside the Emir of Kuwait. Even as the President publicly fumes, he’s privately on a mission to determine who did — and didn’t — talk to Woodward, CNN has learned. But no sooner had the search for Woodward’s sources begun than yet another devastating portrait of the President emerged, this time via a New York Times op-ed written by an unnamed senior Trump administration official…The official says ‘the root of the problem is the President’s amorality’ and paints a damning picture of Trump’s ‘reckless decisions,’ ‘erratic behavior’ and his ‘impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective’ leadership style…The President is directing the response strategy personally, officials say, in consultation with top communications official Bill Shine and other aides. At this point, it seems unlikely that anyone is immediately fired because of the book, one official says, because that would ‘lend credence to a book he is trying to discredit.'”
–Jeff Zeleny and Jeremy Diamond, “Woodward book prompts West Wing witch hunt, sources say,” CNN Politics, CNN.com, September 5, 2018 2:27 am