President Donald Trump defied climate scientists, intelligence specialists and even his own defense secretary on Sunday evening, capping a week of freewheeling press engagements with a sprawling prime-time network television interview in which he portrayed himself as an isolated but eminently empowered commander in chief.
“I felt comfortable at the beginning, other than it was a little surreal to say I’m the president of the United States, but I think that’s true with everybody,” Trump told journalist Lesley Stahl during an interview on CBS’ “60 Minutes” that aired Sunday evening.
“Now I very much feel like POTUS. I do,” he said. “I feel like the president.”
But Trump also showed signs that reports from the last month — including an anonymous New York Times op-ed describing a “quiet resistance” within the Trump administration, as well as a story alleging that the deputy attorney general considered wearing a wire to record the president — have heightened his sense of loneliness and feelings of paranoia in the nation’s capital.
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