The blogger doesn't know about anyone else, but he is rotten sick of everything connected with the Horse's A$$ in the Oval Office — media reports, the Horse's A$$ in TV clips, and the sound of his miserable babbling in that voice. Yuck! So, today, in attempt to ward off the nausea, this blogger thought a double-dose of snark from an unprecedented pair of essays from the same source, the NY Fishwrap, might counteract the rise of virtual bile. If this is a (fair & balanced) admission that nothing short of complete removal can alleviate this blogger's hatred of the Horse's A$$ in the Oval Office, so be it.
PS: Look at the Directory below and click on the [bracketed number] to go to that essay; click on "Back To Directory" to return to the top of the page.
Vannevar Bush hypertext — Bracketed numerics — Directory]
[1] — Mark Leibovich Examines Our National Anomie
[2] — Gail Collins (The Krait) Proclaims The Biggest Loser In Our History
[1] — Back To Directory
[x NY Fishwrap 'Zine]
On The Trump-Mood Beat — But Why?
By Mark Leibovich
TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing
“Let’s start with the state of Donald Trump,” Fox News’s Chris Wallace said at the outset of the president’s latest on-camera interview, on Nov. 17, in the manner of a support-group facilitator pausing for a little check-in before an unpacking of recent events. “How dark is your mood?”
It’s easy to forget that this is not, traditionally, how presidential interviews begin. Even in the context of saturation Trump coverage, Wallace’s willingness to lead the interview with the presidential-mood question — put directly to the president himself — was a face-to-face acknowledgment of what we’ve implicitly known for almost two years now: that much of the state of the union now rests on the moment-to-moment state of Trump.
Wallace was indirectly referring to a flare-up in coverage about how ill tempered the president had been lately. There had been a heavier-than-usual spate of Breaking Mood stories. He was “privately fuming,” went the evergreen assessment, according to multiple sources familiar with the president’s private fumes. He was alternately “bristling,” “emboldened” and “embittered”; “lashing out,” “exploding in rage” and “increasingly isolated.”
You become numb to these mood stories after a while. They’ve been with us long enough to spawn the inevitable meta-coverage: “Should Trump’s Mood Swings Be a Top Story?” was the subject of a November 18 segment on CNN’s “Reliable Sources.” In fact, the network had answered the question itself, repeatedly and affirmatively over the previous few days. “Yes, he’s pissed — at damn near everyone,” CNN reported “a White House official” saying, and concluded that “the mood in the Oval Office is darker than normal this week.” Since the midterms, the president had also been “subdued and almost sullen” (The Washington Post), “furious” and “brooding” (The Los Angeles Times) and in “one of the deepest funks of his presidency” (CNN). Someday historians will assign a definitive ranking to these funks.
In his Roosevelt Room interview, Wallace read off a bunch of these November assessments to the president. Was it true, per The Los Angeles Times, that Trump had sunk into “a cocoon of bitterness and resentment”? (“Was he listening to a lot of Radiohead?” would have been my dream follow-up.) The exchange proceeded from there as you’d expect. “Disgusting fake news,” Trump protested. He reassured Wallace that his mood was in fact “light” and that he was “extremely upbeat.” So that settled that, until next time.
The Trump-mood-story genre has, by now, acquired its own conventions. Print articles inevitably rely on several interviews with “sources close to the president” who spoke “on the condition of anonymity in exchange for their candor discussing the president.” (To state the obvious, any on-the-record source inside the White House willing to discuss the president with any meaningful level of candor would almost certainly not keep her or his job.) The emotional landscape they describe can be divided into three basic submoods: Trump is commonly described as “bristling” over unflattering assessments (often from the media); “chafing” (related to efforts to control him, e.g., Chief of Staff John Kelly’s early efforts to restrict access to the Oval Office); or “increasingly isolated” (always “increasingly,” never just “isolated”; not really a mood, but close enough).
The stories typically begin with an anecdote, often featuring the president’s being upset or defensive about something. Unsuspecting foreign leaders are frequent targets. The same themes and stories recur, with a revolving cast of Trump explainers purporting to guide us through the foggy mood maze. By reflex, Trump will take issue with these “people close to the president” when they portray him as anything short of a stable genius overseeing a well-oiled machine. If they are speaking on the condition of anonymity in exchange for their candor, Trump will maintain these “sources” do not exist.
“Some of these people do exist,” Trump’s onetime campaign manager Corey Lewandowski conceded to me. A recurring cast member of the Trump-mood series, Lewandowski has a new book, Trump’s Enemies (2018), written with a fellow Republican operative, David Bossie — Lewandowski’s second Trump’s explainer tome in less than a year. As with many of Trump’s most steadfast apologists, Lewandowski, when he is on the record, insists the president is not complicated at all. He attributes these limitations of understanding to smaller minds that have simply “not figured out Donald Trump.” The least we could do is avail ourselves of wisdom from better authorities, like him.
Lewandowski embodies a particular dilemma of the Donald-decoding enterprise: The people who seem to traffic the most in “explaining Trump” are more or less by definition the people whose main currency in Washington is their supposed closeness to him. You will be surprised to hear, I’m sure, that Lewandowski told me of Trump, “He is unbelievably magnanimous and gracious in private — much more than he ever gets credit for.” He made a point of telling me that he was with the president on election night this month and that we should not be misled by media reports. “I read all these stories that he was in a bad mood, he was not in a bad mood at all,” Lewandowski said.
Sam Nunberg, by contrast, represents a sort of cautionary tale for the professional Person Close to the President. An on-and-off resident of the Trump orbit, Nunberg used to get a lot of calls from reporters enlisting him on their latest state-of-Trump checkups. It was fun for a while: Nunberg had a flair for the cinematic and told a good story, sometimes too good to check. He once took credit for a false story about Trump’s sending Chris Christie into a McDonald’s to fetch an order for him, which made its way into The New Yorker.
But he has not spoken to Trump in over a year and fell out with many people around him. He spoke to me with a kind of pro forma monotone and a hint of boredom, which he acknowledged. That, he says, represents perhaps the larger existential dilemma around Trump. “People get sick of it,” Nunberg says. The moods pass. It becomes shock value for its own sake, without the shock or the value. “The stories get old,” he said.
Maybe a better question for these stories to ask is how knowable Donald Trump’s inner self actually is, or even whether it is worth knowing — whether anyone could really speak with authority about someone whose moment-to-moment state rests somewhere between the tweetably obvious and an incoherent jumble of boasts, rants and impulses.
I always think of the seminal Mark Singer profile of Trump from 1997 in The New Yorker. Trump, Singer concluded, was endowed “with universal recognition but with a suspicion that an interior life was an intolerable inconvenience.” He was both “a creature everywhere and nowhere, uniquely capable of inhabiting it all at once, all alone.”
The description rings true today, except that the creature is now in charge of the country. We are stuck trying to produce new insights, not because there necessarily are new insights to be had, but because he is the president, everywhere and nowhere. ###
[Mark Leibovich is the chief national correspondent for the NYT magazine. He is known for his profiles on political and media figures. Leibovich has written Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times (2018). See his other books here. He received a BA (English) from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.]
Copyright © 2018 The New York Times Company
[2] — Back To Directory
[x NY Fishwrap]
Trump Tops Tricky Dick — The Worst And The Dumbest
By The Krait (Gail Collins)
TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing
Watergate was way easier than this.
Really, Richard Nixon might have been attempting to undermine the nation’s legal system, but at least he wasn’t negotiating to build, say, a hotel in Hanoi at the same time.
You’d think that after almost half a century we could at least expect an improved quality of criminals. But it does appear that Donald Trump is surrounded by minions who would have been totally incapable of pulling off a small-bore burglary without creating a constitutional crisis.
So many plea bargains and indictments, so little time. How do you keep track of all this stuff? (Let’s follow the president’s lead and pretend that everything happening in the world is all about you.) What do you do at holiday parties when somebody asks you what you think about the Trump scandal-rama? No fair just rolling your eyes and muttering something about the merlot.
Maybe you could boil things down. Just challenge everyone to name their favorite Trump investigation indictee.
… So far.
There are plenty to choose from. Nearly three dozen if you count all the Russians we’re never going to see. And old favorites like national-security-adviser-for-a-minute turned convicted felon Michael Flynn. This would give everybody a chance to recall Flynn leading the “Lock her up!” chants at the Republican convention.
Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s bedraggled-beagle face has been everywhere. We knew he was funneling money to pay off Stormy Daniels and other assorted Trump squeezes. But now we’ve learned that he was also negotiating with the Russians about an allegedly terminated Moscow hotel deal during the presidential primaries.
You can say a lot of bad things about Cohen, but you cannot accuse him of lack of energy.
This week, after the world learned Cohen was baring his soul to the Mueller investigators, Trump said his old fixer was “a weak person and not a very smart person.” Which caused a reporter to ask, reasonably enough, why he had such a loser on his payroll for 12 years. The president vaguely explained it was because Cohen “did me a favor.”
Possible holiday dinner-table discussion: What do you think the favor was?
A) Introduced Trump to Roy Cohn
B) Bought a whole bunch of Trump apartments at a price nobody else would pay
C) Wrote The Art of the Deal [find the publication info and purchase info yourself]
The answer appears to be [B] real estate. Although mentioning Roy Cohn gives us the opportunity to point out that the president recently accused special counsel Robert Mueller of conducting a “Joseph McCarthy style Witch Hunt.” It was a tiny bit ironic given the fact that the lawyer for said witch hunts was Cohn, Trump’s great pal and mentor.
This whole saga is getting so incredibly … dense. All the Mueller indictments, all the people trying to trade information for a shorter sentence. Meanwhile Paul Manafort was double-flipping, giving Trump’s lawyers a secret briefing on what was going on while he was spilling the beans.
Manafort was supposed to be one of Trump’s cannier associates. As well as a former lobbyist for bloodthirsty dictators who had an addiction to the sort of lifestyle that included an $18,500 python skin jacket. Truly, you should always beware of flunkies wearing python skin.
Most presidents might have held it against a former campaign chairman and close associate who got convicted on multiple counts of tax and bank fraud. Even Warren Harding, that old Teapot-Domer, would have found it a tad embarrassing. But Trump still loves, loves, loves Manafort. (“I feel very badly for Paul Manafort and his wonderful family.... Such respect for a brave man!”)
One obvious reason is that Manafort was double-dealing the investigators, a tactic the president would naturally love. Particularly in an administration where the bar for loyalty is sinking lower into the swamp with every passing minute.
And maybe there’s a golf cart factor. You have to notice how frequently golf carts show up in this story. We recently learned that a former associate claimed that when Manafort was playing golf, “He’d take his cart and roll over your ball.” That might have been extremely attractive to Trump, who always likes to drive his cart onto the putting green — a serious breach of golf etiquette that might look less shocking if you were in the company of a ball-squasher.
The president has some history of preferring a golf cart ride to a walk with world leaders during important international meetings. Happily, he managed to start his visit to Argentina this week on two feet. (He did toss away his translation earpiece during a meeting with Argentine President Mauricio Macri, claiming he could understand Macri better in Spanish. Can I see a show of hands on how many people will swallow that one?)
Plans for a one-on-one meeting with Vladimir Putin were shelved — a development that the White House said had absolutely nothing to do with Michael Cohen’s revelations about negotiating for that Moscow hotel deal during the presidential primaries. Or the new story that suggested Cohen planned to sweeten the deal by offering Putin a $50 million penthouse.
It was all allegedly about Russia’s treatment of Ukrainian ships and sailors. And if you believe that one, I’ve got a Moscow hotel I can sell you. #'##
[Gail Collins joined the New York Times in 1995 as a member of the editorial board and later as an op-ed columnist. In 2001 she became the first woman ever appointed editor of the Times editorial page. At the beginning of 2007, she took a leave in order to complete America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines. Collins returned to the Times as a columnist in July 2007. She received a BA (journalism) from Marquette University and an MA (government) from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Gail Collins’s newest book is As Texas Goes...: How the Lone Star State Hijacked the American Agenda (2012).]
Copyright © 2018 The New York Times Company
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License..
Copyright © 2018 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves
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