ELECTIONS/MEDIA/ROBERT MUELLER/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “With special counsel Robert Mueller and his associates quietly and methodically doing their investigatory work, with November’s midterms looking for Republicans like a mixed bag at best, and with Bob Woodward’s new book Fear painting the president as ‘an idiot’ and his White House as ‘Crazytown,’ Donald Trump seems to be on the precipice of disaster like never before in his administration and even his life. He might succumb, or he might not. But what’s inarguably true is that he’s not unused to this sort of moment. He’s not even uncomfortable with it. At his previous point of maximum peril—his financial collapse and the detonation of his marriage in 1990—Trump came out with a book of his own. It was called Surviving at the Top. The title at the time was presumptuous to the point of preposterous. ‘Surviving’ was a premature claim that only he believed. The front-cover boast is actually far truer now than it was back then—he is, after all, the president of the United States—and the takeaway from Surviving at the Top is not even so much that he’s good at skirting calamity. It’s that a crisis is something he actually enjoys.”
–Michael Kruse, “Trump Has No Fear: ‘Makes Nixon Look Like a Cream Puff’,” Politico, September 5, 2018