Today's Must-Read: How to Run an Administration

Advice from Obama to Trump, as reported by Brian Beutler:

“[H]ow you put a team together to make sure that they’re getting you the best information and they are teeing up the options from which you will ultimately make decisions, that’s probably the most useful advice, the most constructive advice that I’ve been able to give him,” he said. “That if you find yourself isolated because the process breaks down, or if you’re only hearing from people who agree with you on everything, or if you haven’t created a process that is fact-checking and probing and asking hard questions about policies or promises that you’ve made, that’s when you start making mistakes. And as I indicated in some of my previous remarks, reality has a way of biting back if you’re not paying attention to it.”

Trump ignored it. Given what we know of Trump's personality, Obama might as well have been talking to the wall. What he put together is just the opposite:

Heeding Obama’s advice might have helped Trump avoid making an obvious and monumental error, but Trump either lacks the capacity to run the government in an orderly fashion or intentionally discarded Obama’s recommendations, or both. When reality quickly asserted itself, as Obama promised it would, Trump claimed (out of ignorance or malicious dishonesty) that he was merely reprising “ what President Obama did in 2011 when he banned visas for refugees from Iraq for six months”—a “ban” that quite literally never happened.

Of course, the author assumes that Trump wants to run an administration that actually functions to the benefit of the country. I've seen no evidence of that. He thinks it's a reality show, and is acting accordingly.

Read the whole thing, needless to say.

Via Balloon Juice, which has some interesting additional information.