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This-—with all your qualifications, which are accurate-—speaks to Trump’s greatest weakness as president, his personnel selection.

I’m a little surprised, but it suggests he ran the Trump org with one right-hand man and the kids. His picks at AG, SecState, FBI, CIA, Chief of Staff, NSA, and White House spokesman (til Sanders and McElenny (sp) were flat horrible. Pompeo was great, but he had to go through Tillerson first. Barrstool was as bad, if not worse than Sessions-—with the exception that they really did a great deal on child trafficking. De Vos was ok, Zincke and Ross were great, but SecDefs were bad. Omarosa was a joke. He shouldn’t have kept Ronna McDaniel the first time, let alone the second.

You wonder how he achieved so much in private business without being able to read people better.

Some of it is explainable by wanting to rally Republicans behind him; maybe some is that he thought they’d see how quickly he was succeeding and pitch in for America. Maybe he couldn’t afford to put someone like Cruz in a key position (maybe Cruz didn’t want it) and maybe some senators were afraid of costing Rs the majority. But whatever the explanation, the jury is still out on the USSC justices and the “must have” control positions in gubment were for the most part bad choices.

I understand completely the compulsion, especially at the Executive level, to put trust chiefly in the guys from the neighborhood. It happens in bands (Townshend didn't want to fire Moon - Daltrey did - even though he was a mess at the end) and sports (the Phillies stayed with their ace reliief pitcher in the WS against Toronto even though the Blue Jays ate him alive) and corporations always see new C-suite people lay waste to existing management in favor of buddies. It's a thing.

My speculation, is Rudy told Trump "it's 14th Amendment or bust, and this lady doesn't know what she's saying." It's also possible, Rudy wanted to go down in history as The Lawyer Who Saved Trump...we ARE dealing with huge egos, and NY egos at that.

Trump is sitting there thinking "who am I to believe...America's Mayor/Mr 9/11 or the Kracken-lady quoting Benford's Law whatever that is?"

It's not that much of a stretch. Everyone has an Achilles heel. And I bet after 3 years, with a raging pandemic occupying the President, the left used their knowdge of his Achilles heel in setting the trap. That's probably giving them too much credit, and I don't believe they got it all right. But I suspect they expected Trump to go nuclear legally with Rudy in the driver's seat vs a hungry, younger, sharper, more tech-savvy pit bull Esq. The irony, is Trump did the same thing to Hillary in 2016...he/Bannon knew she was not going to MI or WI or PA as much, and he attacked the Blue Wall while she wasted time elsewhere.

The teachable moment here, is that we need to do better on this stuff. We have time and we are learning like with Super Bowl advertisers and hedge funds. All isn't lost. But it is sad how we got here.