PRESIDENTING IS HARD!

In The Washington Post today, Robert Costa portrays House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy as a Trump bootlicker, the kind of man who gives the president a jar containing just cherry and strawberry Starbursts because he's learned that the president prefers those particular flavors.

Also, we learn some more about the president's need to have information presented to him in visual form:

While at Camp David last weekend, McCarthy took up the task of explaining the obstacles facing Republicans ahead of the midterm elections in November, walking through the financial hurdles and bleak prospects in various races. He urged the president to do everything he could to raise money for vulnerable Republicans.

According to two people familiar with the presentation, Trump appreciated McCarthy’s use of pictures and charts rather than a memo.

We know from more than one media report that Trump wants his intelligence briefings to be full of pictures and maps. I can imagine that even for someone who reads more readily than Trump does, it might be easier to absorb complex geopolitical information by means of maps. And on other subjects -- the healthcare system, for instance -- it's possible that a flowchart or two might make the complexities easier to absorb.

But how difficult are the midterms to comprehend? A traditional memo on the midterms would probably be full of bullet points -- that's not good enough for Trump? He needs huge graphs with 64-point bold type before he can take in the fact that he's unpopular in many districts and states where Republican candidates are running for reelection?

We're told that McCarthy provided "a basic and 'foundational' presentation that explained midterm politics to Trump, in the words of one senior official." I know Trump was a political outsider before the 2016 campaign -- but he lives in America and has access to political news, doesn't he? Is the nature of the 2018 elections an arcane secret known only to experts? Can't anyone with a newspaper subscription or Internet connection understand the state of play and the stakes?

We knew Trump was an uninformed simpleton. This suggests just how little he really comprehends.