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The president has repeatedly forced people around him to make painful choices between their loyalties.

He is a “whack job,” a “husband from hell,” and a “stone cold LOSER.” Those were just some of the insults President Donald Trump hurled on Wednesday at a once little-known corporate litigator who happens to be married to one of his top White House aides, Kellyanne Conway.

With a single insult-filled morning tweet, tapped out from the White House residence before 8:00 a.m., the president extended his dispute with Conway’s anti-Trump spouse, George, into a bewildering second day. By the afternoon, Trump had complemented it with new attacks on a dead man: the late Republican Senator and war hero John McCain. Speaking in Ohio, Trump declared that he “never liked [McCain] much … [and] probably never will.”

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As the lurid disputes dominated cable news for several more hours, it was unclear whether Trump had any strategy in mind. Some people close to Trump speculated that he might be consciously trying to remake the news environment — creating a bizarre spectacle to displace criticism of his tepid response to the massacre of dozens of Muslims in New Zealand, the timing of the administration’s decision to ground Boeing’s 737 Max jets, and frenzied anticipation around the imminent release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report.

But the saga has left even White House aides accustomed to a president who bucks convention feeling uncomfortable. While the controversies may have pushed aside some bad news, they also trampled on Trump’s Wednesday visit to an army tank manufacturing plant in swing-state Ohio.

“For the most part, most people internally don’t want to touch this with a 10-foot pole,” said one former senior White House official. A current senior White House official said White House aides are making an effort “not to discuss it in polite company.” Another current White House official bemoaned the tawdry distraction. “It does not appear to be a great use of our time to talk about George Conway or dead John McCain. … Why are we doing this?”

While multiple sources said Kellyanne Conway’s standing with Trump appears to remain solid, some worried that the ongoing controversy could compromise her effectiveness if she is confronted in every one of her frequent television interviews with her husband’s scathing commentary about the president.

“It makes it very, very, very difficult” for her to do her job, said the former senior White House official.

The Conway and McCain feuds nonetheless revealed a handful of truths about the president and his White House, starting with the president’s hair-trigger sensitivity over accusations of mental instability. After the author Michael Wolff raised questions about Trump’s mental health in a 2018 book, the president lashed out — despite warnings that he was only inflating Wolff’s book sales — and insisted that he was a “stable genius.” Those who know him say these barbs are a point of particular sensitivity, and his dispute with Conway appears to have originated from the attorney’s recent suggestions that Trump is mentally ill.

After tweeting images from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — the text medical professionals use to diagnose mental illness — listing the characteristic of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Conway charged that Trump is “unfit and incompetent for the esteemed office you temporarily hold.”

“I don’t think that Trump is laughing at that,” said Jack O’Donnell, a former Trump casino executive who has become a critic of the president. “He takes that stuff pretty personally.”

The two disputes also highlight Trump’s inclination to personalize disagreements and disputes, roping in family members and friends and working to divide them against each other to inflict maximum damage.

The Conway-Trump grudge match grew even more heated midday on Wednesday when Trump stopped to take questions from reporters before boarding Air Force One en route to Ohio and described George Conway as “a tremendous disservice to a wife and family.”

The accusation mirrored the president’s response through the winter to the cooperation of his former lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, with federal prosecutors. The president took aim at Cohen’s father-in-law, retweeting a conservative author who had suggested he was a “loan shark” and telling Fox News host Jeanine Pirro in mid-January that rather than provide investigators with information on him, Cohen should “give information maybe on his father-in-law, because that’s the one that people want to look at.”

“He makes it personal so that it hurts a little bit more. That’s when he enjoys it,” O’Donnell said. “He’s very calculating in that way.”

Kellyanne Conway was drawn into the dispute on Wednesday, seemingly forced to choose between her husband and her boss. She chose the latter, perhaps one reason White House aides say her standing with Trump has not been diminished by her husband’s bitter exchanges with the president.

“You think he shouldn’t respond when somebody, a non-medical professional, accuses him of having a mental disorder? You think he should just take that sitting down?” Conway told POLITICO.

The running controversy over Trump’s attacks on McCain have also confronted his political allies with painful choices. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina has been pressed in recent days to respond to the president’s repeated denigration of McCain, whom Graham has described as being like a father to him. Graham, who has carefully cultivated a close relationship with Trump, praised McCain on Twitter — without mentioning the president by name.

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas endorsed — and then embraced — Trump during the 2016 campaign even after the president unfavorably compared the appearance of Cruz’s wife, Heidi, to that of his own wife Melania. Trump also suggested Cruz’s father participated in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

After insisting that he was “not in the habit of supporting candidates who attack my wife and who attack my father,” as Cruz put it at the 2016 GOP convention, he soon changed his tune.

“After many months of careful consideration, of prayer and searching my own conscience, I have decided that on Election Day, I will vote for the Republican nominee,” he said a few months later.

Conway, for her part, delivered remarks at the White House’s South Court auditorium on Wednesday afternoon in honor of International Women’s History Month.

“It just goes to show that her stature is in the place that it’s always been. She’s somebody who’s highly respected throughout the building and everybody just stands by her,” said a senior White House official. “Her role is seen as invaluable.”

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Departing from wonky tradition, economic aides — echoing Trump campaign themes — are spotlighting what they call socialism’s potentially disastrous impact.

President Donald Trump has enlisted his senior economic advisers to flesh out one of his early 2020 presidential campaign themes: socialism is coming.

In recent months, traditionally staid official White House economic reports and briefings have begun to emphasize the potentially massive costs of an ambitious socialist agenda and warn that America could transform into a Cold War dystopia.

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While last year’s Economic Report to the President, a congressionally mandated annual summary of the state of the economy, didn’t once mention “socialism,” the word appears more than 100 times in this year’s 700-page-plus tome. The 2019 report, released earlier this week, features an entire chapter on the subject, which includes a recounting of the economic fallout from socialist experiments in China, the Soviet Union and Cuba.

At the beginning of a briefing this week, staff with the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers distributed to reporters a set of slides that summarized the report. The last slide plastered the Soviet, Cuban, Venezuelan and Chinese flags on a graph detailing decreases in the production of livestock, crops, crude oil and cotton.

“Production declines substantially when socialist regimes take over— sometimes by more than 50 percent,” the slide said. “In contrast, capitalism spurs growth.”

The messaging — which Democrats call preposterously exaggerated — marks a remarkable synergy in the themes being discussed among both Trump’s economic and campaign teams. Campaign officials say the socialism issue resonates deeply with Trump’s conservative base, as well as more moderate Republicans — and the president’s advisers have encouraged him to continue talking about it in speeches, arguing that one of his best avenues for reelection is painting Democrats as out-of-touch radicals. “It’s going to be a huge focus,” a Trump campaign official told POLITICO.

It also marks a compromise between Trump advisers who have long wanted him to spend more time touting positive economic news and Trump’s fear-based rhetoric about his rivals. During last fall’s midterm election campaign, some Trump advisers wanted him to talk less about immigration and more about job growth, low unemployment numbers or manufacturing.

The new economic approach will be central to Trump’s 2020 re-election bid, according to a half dozen White House officials, allies, and campaign advisers, and made all the easier by progressive causes like the “Green New Deal” championed by the likes of freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).

“The socialism versus capitalism message is a home run with every group apart from millennials,” said one informal adviser to the campaign. “The campaign will cast 2020 through the prism of socialism versus freedom.”

It’s unclear how seriously Americans might take the prospect of Washington adopting a state-run socialist economy, but a recent CNN poll showed 71 percent of Americans believe the current U.S. economy is in good shape.

Democrats and liberal groups accuse the Trump administration of wildly stretching the truth to discredit ideas, like raising taxes on wealthy Americans or expanding health care, that might otherwise pose a political threat.

“Obviously, this is an absurd political tactic,” said Emily Gee, a health economist at the Center for American Progress. “The Trump administration clearly thinks that high-level fear-mongering on socialism is better than talking about actual policy.”

Among the Democratic candidates running for president, only one, Sen. Bernie Sanders, identifies as a Democratic socialist.

While Trump’s fixation with socialism is now familiar from his speeches and tweets, the increasing involvement of his economic team is less visible, and reflects the degree to which the Trump White House is steadily moving to war footing for the 2020 campaign.

“I ask you to join President Trump and me and the rest to put socialism on trial and convict it,” Larry Kudlow, the head of the White House National Economic Council, said during a February speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference. In a C-Span interview last Friday, Kudlow predicted the Green New Deal — which calls for huge government spending programs to address climate change and inequality — could reduce economic growth by as much as 10 percent. White House aides said Kudlow is planning to continue hammering away at that message.

In addition to name-checking authoritarian communist nations, this week’s White House economic report also takes aim at Democrats’ “Medicare for All” proposals, claiming that, if the measure was funded through higher taxes, U.S. gross domestic product would plunge by 9 percent — or about $7,000 per American — in 2022.

The report even takes pains to knock down the common leftist retort that Nordic countries have fared well economically despite their socialist-minded political traditions.

“Participants in the American policy discourse sometimes cite the Nordic countries as socialist success stories,” the report says. “However, in many respects, the Nordic countries’ policies now differ significantly from policies that economists view as characteristic of socialism.”

During a briefing this week with a small group of reporters, Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Kevin Hassett, who oversaw the report, defended the decision to devote so much of the report to socialism, arguing, “We as a council judged that there’s lots of confusion out there, and the confusion is on both sides.”

“We’ve got college students approving of socialism without perhaps understanding what its record is,” he added.

It’s not the first time that Hassett — who had an apolitical reputation before coming to the Trump White House — has targeted socialism. Last year, the CEA published a report outlining the economic costs of socialism. (“Coincident with the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth, socialism is making a comeback in American political discourse,” the report began.)

People close to the president also believe the focus on socialism will put pressure on more moderate Democratic primary candidates reluctant to embrace their party’s left wing. “As we run up to this presidential [election], we need to show that Democrats, as a whole, are not socialists,” Rep. Katie Hill, a freshman Democrat from a traditionally Republican-held district in California, told POLITICO recently.

An ancillary part of the president’s economic message will include a told-you-so approach, said a second informal adviser to the campaign. The campaign intends to highlight the way voters feel about the economy now versus the way people talked about it in 2016 to showcase how much economic growth has improved over the last two years under Trump’s leadership.

“We look forward to sharing President Trump’s undeniable record of success,” said the Trump campaign’s national press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany. “Because of President Trump, unemployment rates have hit generational lows; 466,000 manufacturing jobs have been created, reversing the disastrous Obama-era decline; and paychecks have risen for Americans in the bottom half of the income spectrum. It’s no wonder 71% of Americans rate the economy as ‘in good shape,’ according to the latest CNN poll.”

2020 Elections

With no day job, the Texas Democrat’s breakneck pace of campaign stops is driving some of his competitors nuts.

PLYMOUTH, N.H. — By Thursday afternoon, Beto O’Rourke will have campaigned in all 10 counties in New Hampshire — a sprint that will take him all of 48 hours. Last week he was all over Iowa, and in between, he traversed the upper Midwest.

With no job tying him to Washington or a state capital — and a genuine zeal for the open road — O’Rourke is rallying college students, bounding onto café countertops and pressing himself into the news cycle in different media markets by the hour.

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“We’re setting the pace,” O’Rourke said in Iowa over the weekend, after running a 5K race at the start of a frenzied day of campaigning in the first-in-the-nation caucus state. He then traveled to Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, before driving his rented Dodge Grand Caravan more than 430 miles east to New Hampshire.

In less than a week since announcing his campaign, the Texas Democrat has singlehandedly quickened the clip of the early presidential primary, annoying some of his competitors — and driving others nuts.

O’Rourke is hardly the first presidential candidate this year to arrive in Iowa or New Hampshire, states that presidential contenders have been visiting since the midterm elections last year. But O’Rourke is benefitting from large crowds and a protracted run of media attention following the announcement of his campaign last week.

His first-day fundraising of $6.1 million, which he reported Monday, surpassed all of his competitors. And by waiting until Wednesday to announce his average donation of $47, O’Rourke generated another batch of stories. Later, as O’Rourke dashed from an event in Plymouth, an elderly woman craning her neck to see him climbed shakily onto a bench.

“Hey,” she said, “he stands on furniture.”

Aides to other top Democrats running for president granted in recent days they’ve inescapably been pulled into the “Beto Show,” texting quips about his wild arm gestures and his table-top campaigning — while acknowledging he’s giving voters and reporters an up-close view that they, by and large, are not.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, for one, gives nearly the same speech at every event. He eschews coffee counters for his podium and rarely takes questions from the audience, let alone the news media.

Rival aides have used Twitter as a kind of tracking device, privately taking shots at O’Rourke’s thin operation and noting though wry retorts each time he stumbles or borrows a policy or talking point from their candidate.

With O’Rourke unemployed and free to roam the country in his minivan, other campaigns have begun discussing how to maximize their exposure when they travel.

Yet none of the advisers to other Democrats said they’re planning wholesale changes to their approaches, with each insisting they are going to run their own races and one predicting O’Rourke will eventually fade.

As one senior official for a 2020 Democrat put it to POLITICO, “When you’re in a race of 20 people, you can’t change everything for one person.”

“He could still be in Congress, but he quit,” another senior official said of O’Rourke. “He’s decided that this is his big adventure now, and he’s going to do what he’s going to do.”

Eventually, however, some who work for those with day jobs concede, they’ll have to amend their work schedules to accommodate the anticipated faster pace of the campaign.

O’Rourke’s frenetic pace is largely an effort to replicate the closer-than-expected Texas Senate campaign he ran against Ted Cruz, when he visited all 254 counties in the Republican-heavy state.

When asked about his strategy, he says repeatedly, “You’ve got to show up.”

For O’Rourke’s supporters, the candidate’s efforts to get there are half the appeal. When several hundred students awaiting O’Rourke at Keene State College on Tuesday night heard that he would be late, they emitted a low groan, but recovered when organizers told them to turn on Facebook, where O’Rourke was streaming himself live from the car. When he arrived, he lingered long after the event to pose for photographs with anyone who wanted.

But O’Rourke is also attempting in his go-everywhere-fast campaign to establish himself as a course-correction from Hillary Clinton’s losing effort in 2016. Many Democrats remain bitter that Clinton did not campaign at all in Wisconsin in the general election — a critical state ultimately carried by President Donald Trump. Asked recently to assess the Democratic Party’s failure in the last presidential election, O’Rourke said, “You’ve got to show up, and you’ve got to come back.”

Robert Wolf, a venture capitalist who raised money for and advised former President Barack Obama, said, “If someone told me that their first stop was going to be Iowa and their second stop was going to be a road trip through the Blue Wall, considering our last candidate missed badly on the Blue Wall, I would say that’s a pretty thoughtful strategy.”

He said, “From what I am watching and hearing, the excitement around Beto is real and the grass roots following is growing exponentially on each and every stop. We have learned from the past that instead of a candidate who’s behind rope lines all the time, those who are taking selfies, shaking hands and kissing babies draw bigger crowds and support.”

Despite his fundraising and crowd-drawing ability, O’Rourke is still running far behind Sanders and former Vice President Joe Biden and about even with Sen. Kamala Harris of California in the latest CNN poll, released Tuesday. O’Rourke will travel to South Carolina after New Hampshire, and he will draw another media convulsion on March 30, when he holds a campaign kickoff in his hometown of El Paso.

In his typical fashion, O’Rourke announced Wednesday that he will not only hold an event in El Paso that day, but also in Houston and Austin.

Still, it is so early in the year that O’Rourke almost certainly cannot maintain the constant crush of media attention that has accompanied his first week. Sitting lawmakers running for president can — and do — drive coverage by introducing bills, and debates starting this summer will offer abundant break-out opportunities. Biden, who is widely expected to run, will likely draw significant attention from O’Rourke following any announcement of a campaign.

Asked if he could maintain his own pace, O’Rourke said, “We’ll see. It is extraordinarily energizing to be doing this … It’s thrilling to me.”

For Jeff Roe, who was Cruz’s chief strategist, O’Rourke’s early run is familiar. He said that if O’Rourke remains tied to the road, it will prevent him from advancing any public storyline other than that he is a road warrior — a narrative that will eventually grow old.

“Coming out of the gate, for the first couple weeks, it’s probably OK,” Roe said. “But this is all he has … he’s in a constant sprint to find himself.”