Trump seems a bit worried about his "beautiful beauty"
by digby
Normally I wouldn't care about this but since it's Trump whose base is made up of a formerly hyper-moral evangelical cult, it's fair game:
After two years in the White House, one former senior official said, “she thought she was a senior adviser” — one who tried recently to weigh in on drafting Mr. Trump’s tweets — rather than an aide in a secretarial role. In recent months, Ms. Westerhout had become more interested in traveling with the president, and in Bedminster, it was noticed at a campaign briefing that she was seated closer to Mr. Trump than was his chief of staff.
[...]
According to Mr. Alberta’s book, Mr. Trump would refer to Ms. Westerhout as “my beautiful beauty.” She was often at his side on trips to Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach, Fla., resort, where she would accept gifts on behalf of Mr. Trump and trade business cards with his supporters. Some of them knew that if they wanted to reach the president by phone, they could bypass his other gatekeepers and go directly to her.
But she also had a fairly large coterie of enemies, including some in the East Wing — the purview of the first lady, Melania Trump — which viewed her with suspicion. Some of the president’s friends counseled him over the past two years that she was, in the words of one, “immature,” and was blocking access to him from some people he had known for years.
Inside the faction-split White House, Trump loyalists cheered Ms. Westerhout’s departure as a move that was long overdue, and said they hoped it served as something of a wake-up call for Mr. Trump to bring in more loyalists into the West Wing. But current and former officials also expressed alarm about what information Ms. Westerhout could share down the road, not just about the president, but about her colleagues.
Adding to the concern was the fact that, unlike most other officials, Ms. Westerhout was not thought to have signed a nondisclosure agreement, a document that Mr. Trump has frequently used in effort to tamp down on leaks.
At least one publishing house on Friday had discussions about trying to approach Ms. Westerhout for a book, according to one person familiar with the discussions.
Somebody seems worried about this:
The fact that this is a big story when nobody has ever heard of this person makes it clear that there have been lots and lots of rumors about her and the president among the press corps. That innuendo in that NYT article couldn't be any more obvious.
Trump's tweet with the veiled threat about the confidentiality agreement while saying she's a good person is classic.
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