4.5 The Washington Post外国文学名著导读.pdf

The Washington Post Politics A defensive Trump calls a Cabinet meeting and uses it to boast, deflect and distract The Debrief: An occasional series offering a reporters insights By Anne Gearan January 2 at 8:13 PM President Trump, 12 days into a government shutdown and facing new scrutiny from emboldened Democrats, inaugurated the new year scrutiny:仔细检查;彻底审查 Wednesday with a Cabinet meeting. It quickly became a 95-minute stream-of-consciousness defense of his presidency and worldview, filled with falsehoods, revisionist history and self-aggrandizement. Trump trashed his former secretary of defense, retired four-star Marine Gen. Jim Mattis, as a failure after once holding him out as a star of his administration. “Whats he done for me?” Trump said. He claimed to have “essentially” fired Mattis, who had surprised the White House by resigning in protest last month after the presidents abrupt decision to pull U.S. forces from Syria. And Trump, who did not serve in the military and received draft draft deferment:延期草案 deferments during the Vietnam War, suggested he would have made a good military leader himself. “I think I would have been a good general, but who knows?” Trump said. He took credit for falling oil prices, arguing they were the result of take credit for...:抢功劳, phone calls he made to the leaders of oilproducing nations. 把归功给自己 “I called up certain people, and I said let that damn oil and gasoline — you let it flow, the oil,” he said. And Trump defended his push to fund his promised border wall, parrying complaints from Democrats who have called the wall immoral parry:避开 by remarking, “Then we have to do something about the Vatican, because the Vatican has the biggest wall of them all.” Trump is entering his third year in the White House with his presidency at its most challenging point. Democrats bent on investigating his administra