Posted on 01/04/2018 9:12:34 PM PST by Oshkalaboomboom
There are plenty of shocking bombshells in Michael Wolff's new book, "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House," but is there anything actually new?
I haven't read it yet, but I have been following the crowdsourced effort by other journalists to recount every salacious tidbit. The quotes from staffers and Cabinet secretaries are indeed shocking by the standards of your typical "inside account" of an administration's first year. I don't recall so many White House luminaries competing to out-insult the commander in chief before.
"For [Treasury Secretary] Steve Mnuchin and [then-Chief of Staff] Reince Priebus, he was an 'idiot,'" Wolff writes. "For Gary Cohn, he was 'dumb as s--t.' For H.R. McMaster he was a 'dope.'"
Wolff's sourcing methods leave much to be desired, and it seems likely that some of the quotes and incidents were fed to him at best secondhand. Some flatly deny saying what Wolff ascribes to them. Others do not dispute their damning statements. Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon doesn't dispute the myriad statements he made about Trump, his family and -- his word -- the campaign's "treasonous" meeting with a Russian emissary.
As for Trump himself, Wolff describes the president as an easily bored narcissist with a hair-trigger attention span and a thin-skinned ego.
But this has been reported countless times already. Last month, The New York Times described a president who spends, daily, somewhere between four and eight hours "in front of a television," albeit sometimes with it muted.
You can call such things "fake news" -- as the president himself often does. But even a normal citizen can follow Trump's Twitter feed or listen to him speak and see that he is, by any conventional standard, obsessed with TV coverage. We've known for years -- and the White House has never denied -- that the only print news clips the president regularly reads are the curated stories about himself.
Similarly, if you've watched or read virtually any interview with the president -- never mind listened to him at a rally -- you've observed how the president struggles to complete a line of thought without being distracted. Diagramming his sentences often requires a grammatical Rube Goldberg machine to connect verbs and nouns, subjects and predicates.
In short, even discounting for hearsay and exaggeration, the Trump in "Fire and Fury" seems utterly plausible save for those who have chosen not to believe their own lying eyes.
Trump has benefitted from a tendency among both his biggest fans and his biggest foes to see more than meets the eye. For the true believers, there must be a method behind the madness. The Trump we see on Twitter and TV conceals a strategic thinker who keeps his enemies off balance by "controlling the narrative" or some such treacle.
When Trump says he understands tax policy "better than anybody. Better than the greatest CPA," his fans want to believe that's true, or at least that there's some truth to it. Likewise all of his other bizarre boasts ("I know more about renewables than any human being on Earth"; "Nobody in the history of this country has ever known so much about infrastructure as Donald Trump"; "Because nobody knows the [immigration] system better than me. I know the H1B. I know the H2B. Nobody knows it better than me").
And yet, not once in hundreds of speeches and interviews has the president ever slipped and actually talked expertly for more than a minute on any public policy without the benefit of a teleprompter. For a president not known to avoid showing off, it's a remarkable accomplishment to keep his policy chops so well hidden.
Trump's biggest enemies have something of a mirror-image delusion. In order to justify perpetual "resistance," they must believe that the president has some long-term evil scheme in mind for overthrowing the democratic order. It's a cartoonish exaggeration of the hysteria some on the left once had with regard to George W. Bush. They simultaneously believed he was a criminal mastermind and a dunce. When you want to dedicate your life to opposing some villain, it's only human to want to believe the villain is worth the effort.
The truth may not be as horrifying as Wolff and others describe, nor as terrifying as "the resistance" fears. All it takes is a willingness to see the obvious: The president is a man out of his depth, propped up by a staff and a party that needs to believe more than what the facts will support.
The other theory is better.
Let Bannon get rich while my DOJ goes after Clintoon.
LOL! Jonah is always soooo helpful and friendly.
Jonah, the always #NEVERTRUMPER, is a moron!
Jonah is, always has been, and likely always will be a neverTrump hack. Maybe he knows how to diagram a sentence but his thoughts are consistently vacuous, unoriginal, condescending and unimportant. He’s a rube. He writes like a rube, sounds like a rube, looks like a rube and probably eats like a rube.
Generally, a worthless piece of Beltway folderol.
Where has this guy been for the past year?
Hey, Jonah, I am a grammar nut. I hate when the nominative case is used in place of the objective case of a personal pronoun or when someone splits an infinitive, but guess what, I LOVE listening to President Trump in his impromptu gaggles or when he just talks about his accomplishments. I love it. I could listen to him all day.
We are blessed.
Really? I haven't noticed that, no.
Jonah, the always #NEVERTRUMPER, is a moron!
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Absolutely agree!
Took the words from my keyboard ;)
And many thousands of us agree completely with you!
Thanks! :-)
I can remember a time - long, long ago - when I enjoyed reading Jonah and others. But I believe I have my priorities straight, and they’re completely with Trump. Now I turn my back on these people who show that they share the characteristics of liberals - the lack of a sense of humor, the lack of self-awareness to realize that arrogance and putting yourself above the common person is not an attractive trait, and the reluctance to admit that they are wrong when events prove it over and over again.
Jonah and his cohorts are dead to me.
“All it takes is a willingness to see the obvious: The president is a man out of his depth, propped up by a staff and a party that needs to believe more than what the facts will support.”
BS! Jonah is the definition of the Intellectual Yet Idiot (IYI).
What drives these types insane is the fact that Trump is anything but an intellectual.
Trump runs on instinct, and common sense. Most Americans share his instinctual urges and common sense and appreciate the fact that he follows through with them. He doesn’t have to contemplate his navel for hours to make a decision.
He knows where he wants to go and is steadfast and consistent in his quest. His positions on issues are simple and direct and common sensical.
1. Immigration - totally out of control, must be stopped by what ever mean at our disposal, including a wall.
2. A country is not a country if it doesn’t have a border it controls. We the citizens want to decide who gets in and how many.
3. Reducing taxes on consumers and businesses will grow the economy
4. Global warming is a fraud. Believe your eyes not the lies of pseudo-scientists paid to tell lies.
5. Obamacare is a disaster. Get rid of it.
6. He sees most environmentalists as holier than thou elite jerks who elevate their precious sensibilities and aesthetics above that of normal people. He also sees environmentalism as a global wealth redestribution scheme with the US being the major sucker. He does not like being a sucker.
7. He believes as strongly as as anything else that the media is very powerful in shaping public opinion, and our current media is totally biased and an enemy of the US and wants to eviscerate it.
8. He believes excessive regulations severely throttle the economy. So he wants to get rid of many of them.
These are the obvious things that Jonah, the IYI, doesn’t see, and is incapable of seeing. When it comes to common sense it is precisely people like him who are out of their depth.
There’s nothing about Trump’s common sense instincts that I disapprove of. The fact that he doesn’t derivethem out of endless philosophical masturbation, the type Jonah and his ilk engage in, doesn’t bother me one bit, in fact it makes me like it more. Trump is a doer not a thinker.
Wolff and Goldberg
Same cloth
Who was an early freeper...
There’s nothing new in what Jonah writes either. The same Never-Trump drivel. If Jonah were to shadow Trump daily for a week he wouldn’t last out the third day. Trump didn’t become a multi-millionaire, control a multi-billion dollar real estate empire and defeat the smartest woman in the world by watching TV 8 hours a day. What a load of crap!
Goldberg, talking about a man out of his depth? If Lucianne wasn't his Mom, he'd be making pastrami sandwiches at the local deli.
Pompous little prick.
Jonah is a #NeverTrumper, he can’t help himself but bash the president
Thank you, no.
I used to think that Jonah was semi-intelligent, but he is a semi-complete nutjob.
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