For Mr. Trump, though, bringing in Mr. Bannon was the political equivalent of ordering comfort food.” Bannon tried to sit down with Trump and walk hi… - Bob Woodward

Trump liked signing. It meant he was doing things, and he had an up-and-down penmanship that looked authoritative in black Magic Marker.

The president has no moral compass,” Mattis replied. The bluntness should have shocked Coats, but he’d arrived at his own hard truths about the most powerful man in the world. “True,” Coats agreed. “To him, a lie is not a lie. It’s just what he thinks. He doesn’t know the difference between the truth and a lie.

In another discussion with the president, Cohn unveiled a Commerce Department study showing the U.S. absolutely needed to trade with China. “If you’re the Chinese and you want to really just destroy us, just stop sending us antibiotics. You know we don’t really produce antibiotics in the United States?” The study also showed that nine major antibiotics were not produced in the United States, including penicillin. China sold 96.6 percent of all antibiotics used here. “We don’t produce penicillin.” Trump looked at Cohn strangely. “Sir, so when mothers’ babies are dying of strep throat, what are you going to say to them?” Cohn asked Trump if he would tell them, “Trade deficits matter”? “We’ll buy it from another country,” Trump proposed. “So now the Chinese are going to sell it [antibiotics] to the Germans, and the Germans are going to mark it up and sell it to us. So our trade deficit will go down with the Chinese, up with the Germans.” U.S. consumers would be paying a markup. “Is that good for our economy?” Navarro said they would buy it through some country other than Germany. Same problem, Cohn said. “You’re just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.