A defensive Trump calls a Cabinet meeting and uses it to boast, deflect and distract

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.“What’s 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 president’s abrupt decision to pull U.S. forces from Syria.And Trump, who did not serve in the military and received draft 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 phone calls he made to the leaders of oil-producing nations.“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 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 administration and stymieing his agenda will take control of the House on Thursday.