Epstein Secrets

gan his campaign for president he had almost no friends in politics. The only two actual politicians with whom Trump was close were Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie, and both men were in their own way peculiar and isolated. And to say that he knew nothing— nothing at all—about the basic intellectual foundations o

The day after the election, Trump’s close advisers—suddenly eager to be part of a process that almost everybody had ignored—immediately began blaming Christie for a lack of transition preparations. Hurriedly, the bare-bones transition team moved from downtown Washington to Trump Tower. This was certainly s

political experience. Christie, like most Trump allies, fell in and out of favor. In the final weeks of the campaign, Trump contemptuously measured Christie’s increasing distance from his losing enterprise, and then, with victory, his eagerness to get back in. Trump and Christie went back to Trump’s days t

law, carefully displacing as little air as possible: the massive and domineering older man, the reedy and pliant younger one. In the revised death-of-Chris-Christie story, it is not the deferential Jared who strikes back, but—in some sense even more satisfying for the revenge fantasy—Charlie Kushner himself who h

s through their confirmation hearings,” he said of the business-and-military 1950s-type cabinet choices. “Tillerson is two days, Session is two days, Mattis is two days... .” Bannon veered from “Mad Dog” Mattis—the retired four-star general whom Trump had nominated as secretary of defense—to a long riff

to the point of discarding the entire Old Testament (as the Hebrew Bible was now known); to keep reading Jewish scriptures was to miss the point of Christ's radical newness. On the other hand, Justin Martyr, Marcion's orthodox opponent, believed that this reduction of the Old Testament to its merely

rit," as an allegory predicting the coming of Christ. Likewise, where Jews obeyed traditional laws, Christians were liberated from them by faith in Christ—which explained why Gentile converts to Christianity did not need to follow Jewish practices like circumcision. To "Judaize," to use a word Paul c

ace process would improve CENTCOM's opportunity to work with our regional partners and to support multilateral security efforts." One year earlier, Mattis' predecessor, Gen. David Petraeus, made a similar point, saying, "The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distin

City. And Mar-a-Lago. And Trump SoHo. Both Chris Christie and Rudy Giuliani—each a self-styled expert on th

as going to throw him in the soup. Manafort was going to roll. And it wasn’t just Russia. It was Atlantic City. And Mar-a-Lago. And Trump SoHo. Both Chris Christie and Rudy Giuliani—each a self-styled expert on the DOJ and the FBI, and ever assuring Trump of their inside sources—encouraged him to take the view t

fruit salad they wore, the better. The president was very pleased with the compliments he got for appointing generals who commanded the respect that Mattis and Kelly and McMaster were accorded (pay no attention to Michael Flynn). What the president did not like was /istening to generals, who, for the mos

An Obama guy will be acting attorney general. I said you’re not going to get Rudy’—Trump had again revived a wish for his loyalists Rudy Giuliani or Chris Christie to take the job—‘“because he was on the campaign and will have to recuse himself, and Chris Christie, too, so those are masturbatory fantasies, get t

2-96, 298 chemical weapons, 183-84, 190-93, 265 Cheney, Dick, 27 China, 6-8, 39, 100, 193-94, 211, 226, 228, 258, 267, 269-70, 297 Chopra, Deepak, 80 Christie, Chris, 16, 24-25, 30-31, 210, 242, 279 Christoff, Niki, 78 Churchill, Winston, 50 Circa news website, 159, 257 Clapper, James, 41, 214-15 Clinton, B

approaching the boiling point. Trump had already authorized the Pentagon to deploy the troop resources it believed were needed, but Defense Secretary Mattis refused to act without a specific authorization from the president. Trump would finally have to make the call—unless he could find a way to put it of