Inside the White House "rival gangs"

On this week's episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour, Editor David Remnick talks with the N.Y. Times' Maggie Haberman (transcript here):

• On the White House atmosphere: "We're used to a team of rivals. We are not used to a team of the Bloods and the Crips. ... [T]hese are rival gangs. ... I need to add in some new gang names, too, because Bloods and the Crips makes it sound like there are only two teams. There's something like six."
• On Trump's mental state: "I think that he has an amazing belief in his own ability to will what he thinks into reality. And I think that he thinks of reality as something that is subjective. So I think that what people characterize as 'he's out of touch' or 'he's not understating this' or 'he seems off,' or whatever — I think he has an amazing capacity to try to draw the world as he wants it."

How Trump really feels about the press: "I think that he loves the press. I think he lives, at least loosely, by the theory that, if not all press is good press, that most press is good press. I think you find the press has been his nurturer and validator for thirty to forty years.""This is a person who courted the tabloids aggressively in New York City in the nineteen-eighties. He found a way to make himself a commodity for the gossip pages and play the tabloids off each other. He likes attention, and he likes media. He loves to manipulate the media. He's a master at it."