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garoteBest enjoyed: On a long ride
Enjoyment rating (1-10) : 8
Distraction level (1-5) : 2
Thank goodness for this book. I feel so much better after reading it. Not because of the fears it confirmed for me, but because of the suspicions and fears it has laid to rest.
All that crazy alt-right stuff? That was Bannon. Trump barely gives half a crap about it, and now Bannon is persona-non-grata to the White House. The executive order banning travel? That was Bannon failing to understand government, wanting to cause hand-wringing amongst the left and make a personal splash. Which it did. We ate it up. Was it a shot across the bow to signal a strong, rigorous follow-up? No. It was exactly what it looked like: Hilarious, half-baked incompetence, from a man in a hurry.
All those unfilled positions in cabinets? That wasn't the beginning of a big, determined, "disassemble the apparatus of the state" push. That was the fallout of the Trump campaign so thoroughly expecting to lose that they had no plans in place of any kind for a transition of power, then remaining so dysfunctional that they could not assemble a plan before day one. Or for months afterward. Can you imagine Trump sitting down, perhaps with a piece of paper and a pen, and saying "Okay, let's make a plan?" You can't. There's a reason why you can't.
It's true that Trump does not read. He is barely literate. He cannot become even halfway informed about any subject on the presidential desk, and the people around him know this, and they spend all their time "managing" him. That might seem like a threat - he would be eminently exploitable - if he wasn't thoroughly unpredictable and occasionally irrational.
All his ad-libbed speeches filled with repetitions and meaningless wandering: Yes, people do know it's garbage; even the people on his own staff. But he's the one with the power, through which they grasp their own, so they keep their expressions neutral and their mouths shut. They know there's a big baby sitting in the driver's seat grasping at the levers of power. With every lever he pulls in front of the cameras, they quickly dash behind the console and disconnect the wires.
Trump wanted the title, but not the job. He wanted to glad-hand and play golf, throw fits and fire people and lob insults, and have all cameras pointed at him all the time. That's all. The rest is bean-counting crap that he'd rather avoid. During the campaign he had to reassure his wife that he would lose the election, so she would be out of the spotlight. All those photos of her looking pissed? It's not the infidelity; it's not any sort of abuse except perhaps for the standard trophy-wife neglect. She just does not want to be there. She would rather be having lunch with her friends, raising her son, or wandering around Europe, and she is furious with her husband for actually winning the election and joining them at the hip in a way that their marriage was never about.
All that stuff you think this presidency might accomplish? All that threatening stuff that you plan to strenuously resist? If it takes hard work, or coordination, or even consistency, forget it. Trump is too old and too uninterested to care. He is not even interested in facilitating the agenda of his own political party. He is their president in the most tenuous way you can imagine. Better if Trump had not been elected, of course, but the silver lining is that any other candidate ... ANY other one ... would have given the Republican congress far more power. Trump is more interested in feuding with them in the press than conspiring with them.
Trump is not just uninformed in some correctable way - he is uninformed by design. His principles are not Republican, they are whatever the most convincing guy said in the last meeting he had. And often, that is his daughter or his son-in-law, whose politics are more Democrat than Republican. That is freaking hilarious, and a nasty punch in the eye to the Republican party. Republican pundits railed against the nepotism of the Clintons, and now they watch helplessly as nepotism drives a wedge between them and their own president. Their latest move was to try and strip his son-in-law's security clearance. How much difference do you think that will make?
This presidency ... will spin its wheels and get nothing done for another three years, and when the door hits his ass on the way out, Trump will be abandoned to auditors and lawyers like a chicken bone to dogs. He's not a new normal, he's a correction. He's the shirt-ripping self-sabotaging one night stand that the nation is having, after our steady boyfriend Obama broke up with us and tried to pawn us off on his friend Hillary and we rejected her in an angry display of pique. We don't want your boring old scraps! We want fire, and fury!!
And here it is.
This book made me laugh out loud a dozen times. It was brilliant stress relief, and had plenty of food for thought. The knowledge that the incredulity and the argument for sanity extends all the way up inside the Oval Office to the man himself is strangely reassuring. Government is too established, and full of too many sane people, for one grumpy old man to tweet it apart. I really don't have to worry so much.
I highly encourage everyone to read this book. In fact, I want to include three short excerpts from it, even though it's potentially a copyright snafu. I've boldfaced the key lines.
Excerpt 1:
In April, an email originally copied to more than a dozen people went into far wider circulation when it was forwarded and re-forwarded. Purporting to represent the views of Gary Cohn and quite succinctly summarizing the appalled sense in much of the White House, the email read:
It’s worse than you can imagine. An idiot surrounded by clowns. Trump won’t read anything - not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers; nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored. And his staff is no better. Kushner is an entitled baby who knows nothing. Bannon is an arrogant prick who thinks he’s smarter than he is. Trump is less a person than a collection of terrible traits. No one will survive the first year but his family. I hate the work, but feel I need to stay because I’m the only person there with a clue what he’s doing. The reason so few jobs have been filled is that they only accept people who pass ridiculous purity tests, even for midlevel policy-making jobs where the people will never see the light of day. I am in a constant state of shock and horror.
Excerpt 2:
Bannon was, he believed, here for a reason. And it was his firm belief - a belief he was unable to keep to himself, thus continually undermining his standing with the president - that his efforts had brought everybody else here. Even more important, he was the only person showing up for work every day who was committed to the purpose of actually changing the country. Changing it quickly, radically, and truly.
The idea of a split electorate - of blue and red states, of two opposing currents of values, of globalists and nationalists, of an establishment and populist revolt - was media shorthand for cultural angst and politically roiled times, and, to a large degree, for business as usual. But Bannon believed the split was literal. The United States had become a country of two hostile peoples. One would necessarily win and the other lose. Or one would dominate while the other would become marginal.
This was modern civil war - Bannon’s war. The country built on the virtue and the character and the strength of the American workingman circa 1955-65 was the ideal he meant to defend and restore: trade agreements, or trade wars, that supported American manufacturing; immigration policies that protected American workers (and, hence, American culture, or at least America’s identity from 1955 to 1965); and an international isolation that would conserve American resources and choke off the ruling class’s Davos sensibility (and also save working-class military lives). This was, in the view of almost everyone but Donald Trump and the alt-right, a crazy bit of voodoo economic and political nonsense. But it was, for Bannon, a revolutionary and religious idea.
For most others in the White House, it was Bannon’s pipe dream.
“Steve is . . . Steve,” became the gentle term of art for tolerating him. “A lot of stuff goes on in his head,” said the president, pursuing one of his reliable conversational themes, dismissing Bannon.
Excerpt 3:
The process of accomplishing the smallest set of tasks within the sprawling and resistant executive branch is a turtle process. The burden of the White House is the boredom of bureaucracy. All White Houses struggle to rise above that, and they succeed only on occasion. In the age of hypermedia, this has not gotten easier for the White House, it’s gotten harder.
It’s a distracted nation, fragmented and preoccupied. It was, arguably, the peculiar tragedy of Barack Obama that even as a transformational figure - and inspirational communicator - he couldn’t really command much interest. As well, it might be a central tragedy of the news media that its old-fashioned and even benighted civic-minded belief that politics is the highest form of news has helped transform it from a mass business to a narrow-cast one. Alas, politics itself has more and more become a discrete business. Its appeal is B-to-B - business-to-business. The real swamp is the swamp of insular, inbred, incestuous interests. This isn’t corruption so much as overspecialization. It’s a wonk’s life. Politics has gone one way, the culture another. The left-right junkies might pretend otherwise, but the great middle doesn’t put political concerns at the top of their minds.
And yet, contravening all cultural and media logic, Donald Trump produced on a daily basis an astonishing, can’t-stop-following-it narrative. And this was not even because he was changing or upsetting the fundamentals of American life. In six months as president, failing to master almost any aspect of the bureaucratic process, he had, beyond placing his nominee on the Supreme Court, accomplished, practically speaking, nothing. And yet, OMG!!! There almost was no other story in America - and in much of the world. That was the radical and transformational nature of the Trump presidency: it held everybody’s attention.
Inside the White House, the daily brouhaha and world’s fascination was no cause for joy. It was, in the White House staff’s bitter view, the media that turned every day into a climactic, dastardly moment. And, in a sense, this was correct: every development cannot be climactic. The fact that yesterday’s climax would soon, compared to the next climax, be piddling, rather bore out the disproportion. The media was failing to judge the relative importance of Trump events: most Trump events came to naught (arguably all of them did), and yet all were greeted with equal shock and horror. The White House staff believed that the media’s Trump coverage lacked “context” - by this, they meant that people ought to realize that Trump was mostly just huffing and puffing.
Enjoyment rating (1-10) : 8
Distraction level (1-5) : 2
Thank goodness for this book. I feel so much better after reading it. Not because of the fears it confirmed for me, but because of the suspicions and fears it has laid to rest.
All that crazy alt-right stuff? That was Bannon. Trump barely gives half a crap about it, and now Bannon is persona-non-grata to the White House. The executive order banning travel? That was Bannon failing to understand government, wanting to cause hand-wringing amongst the left and make a personal splash. Which it did. We ate it up. Was it a shot across the bow to signal a strong, rigorous follow-up? No. It was exactly what it looked like: Hilarious, half-baked incompetence, from a man in a hurry.
All those unfilled positions in cabinets? That wasn't the beginning of a big, determined, "disassemble the apparatus of the state" push. That was the fallout of the Trump campaign so thoroughly expecting to lose that they had no plans in place of any kind for a transition of power, then remaining so dysfunctional that they could not assemble a plan before day one. Or for months afterward. Can you imagine Trump sitting down, perhaps with a piece of paper and a pen, and saying "Okay, let's make a plan?" You can't. There's a reason why you can't.
It's true that Trump does not read. He is barely literate. He cannot become even halfway informed about any subject on the presidential desk, and the people around him know this, and they spend all their time "managing" him. That might seem like a threat - he would be eminently exploitable - if he wasn't thoroughly unpredictable and occasionally irrational.
All his ad-libbed speeches filled with repetitions and meaningless wandering: Yes, people do know it's garbage; even the people on his own staff. But he's the one with the power, through which they grasp their own, so they keep their expressions neutral and their mouths shut. They know there's a big baby sitting in the driver's seat grasping at the levers of power. With every lever he pulls in front of the cameras, they quickly dash behind the console and disconnect the wires.
Trump wanted the title, but not the job. He wanted to glad-hand and play golf, throw fits and fire people and lob insults, and have all cameras pointed at him all the time. That's all. The rest is bean-counting crap that he'd rather avoid. During the campaign he had to reassure his wife that he would lose the election, so she would be out of the spotlight. All those photos of her looking pissed? It's not the infidelity; it's not any sort of abuse except perhaps for the standard trophy-wife neglect. She just does not want to be there. She would rather be having lunch with her friends, raising her son, or wandering around Europe, and she is furious with her husband for actually winning the election and joining them at the hip in a way that their marriage was never about.
All that stuff you think this presidency might accomplish? All that threatening stuff that you plan to strenuously resist? If it takes hard work, or coordination, or even consistency, forget it. Trump is too old and too uninterested to care. He is not even interested in facilitating the agenda of his own political party. He is their president in the most tenuous way you can imagine. Better if Trump had not been elected, of course, but the silver lining is that any other candidate ... ANY other one ... would have given the Republican congress far more power. Trump is more interested in feuding with them in the press than conspiring with them.
Trump is not just uninformed in some correctable way - he is uninformed by design. His principles are not Republican, they are whatever the most convincing guy said in the last meeting he had. And often, that is his daughter or his son-in-law, whose politics are more Democrat than Republican. That is freaking hilarious, and a nasty punch in the eye to the Republican party. Republican pundits railed against the nepotism of the Clintons, and now they watch helplessly as nepotism drives a wedge between them and their own president. Their latest move was to try and strip his son-in-law's security clearance. How much difference do you think that will make?
This presidency ... will spin its wheels and get nothing done for another three years, and when the door hits his ass on the way out, Trump will be abandoned to auditors and lawyers like a chicken bone to dogs. He's not a new normal, he's a correction. He's the shirt-ripping self-sabotaging one night stand that the nation is having, after our steady boyfriend Obama broke up with us and tried to pawn us off on his friend Hillary and we rejected her in an angry display of pique. We don't want your boring old scraps! We want fire, and fury!!
And here it is.
This book made me laugh out loud a dozen times. It was brilliant stress relief, and had plenty of food for thought. The knowledge that the incredulity and the argument for sanity extends all the way up inside the Oval Office to the man himself is strangely reassuring. Government is too established, and full of too many sane people, for one grumpy old man to tweet it apart. I really don't have to worry so much.
I highly encourage everyone to read this book. In fact, I want to include three short excerpts from it, even though it's potentially a copyright snafu. I've boldfaced the key lines.
Excerpt 1:
In April, an email originally copied to more than a dozen people went into far wider circulation when it was forwarded and re-forwarded. Purporting to represent the views of Gary Cohn and quite succinctly summarizing the appalled sense in much of the White House, the email read:
It’s worse than you can imagine. An idiot surrounded by clowns. Trump won’t read anything - not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers; nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored. And his staff is no better. Kushner is an entitled baby who knows nothing. Bannon is an arrogant prick who thinks he’s smarter than he is. Trump is less a person than a collection of terrible traits. No one will survive the first year but his family. I hate the work, but feel I need to stay because I’m the only person there with a clue what he’s doing. The reason so few jobs have been filled is that they only accept people who pass ridiculous purity tests, even for midlevel policy-making jobs where the people will never see the light of day. I am in a constant state of shock and horror.
Excerpt 2:
Bannon was, he believed, here for a reason. And it was his firm belief - a belief he was unable to keep to himself, thus continually undermining his standing with the president - that his efforts had brought everybody else here. Even more important, he was the only person showing up for work every day who was committed to the purpose of actually changing the country. Changing it quickly, radically, and truly.
The idea of a split electorate - of blue and red states, of two opposing currents of values, of globalists and nationalists, of an establishment and populist revolt - was media shorthand for cultural angst and politically roiled times, and, to a large degree, for business as usual. But Bannon believed the split was literal. The United States had become a country of two hostile peoples. One would necessarily win and the other lose. Or one would dominate while the other would become marginal.
This was modern civil war - Bannon’s war. The country built on the virtue and the character and the strength of the American workingman circa 1955-65 was the ideal he meant to defend and restore: trade agreements, or trade wars, that supported American manufacturing; immigration policies that protected American workers (and, hence, American culture, or at least America’s identity from 1955 to 1965); and an international isolation that would conserve American resources and choke off the ruling class’s Davos sensibility (and also save working-class military lives). This was, in the view of almost everyone but Donald Trump and the alt-right, a crazy bit of voodoo economic and political nonsense. But it was, for Bannon, a revolutionary and religious idea.
For most others in the White House, it was Bannon’s pipe dream.
“Steve is . . . Steve,” became the gentle term of art for tolerating him. “A lot of stuff goes on in his head,” said the president, pursuing one of his reliable conversational themes, dismissing Bannon.
Excerpt 3:
The process of accomplishing the smallest set of tasks within the sprawling and resistant executive branch is a turtle process. The burden of the White House is the boredom of bureaucracy. All White Houses struggle to rise above that, and they succeed only on occasion. In the age of hypermedia, this has not gotten easier for the White House, it’s gotten harder.
It’s a distracted nation, fragmented and preoccupied. It was, arguably, the peculiar tragedy of Barack Obama that even as a transformational figure - and inspirational communicator - he couldn’t really command much interest. As well, it might be a central tragedy of the news media that its old-fashioned and even benighted civic-minded belief that politics is the highest form of news has helped transform it from a mass business to a narrow-cast one. Alas, politics itself has more and more become a discrete business. Its appeal is B-to-B - business-to-business. The real swamp is the swamp of insular, inbred, incestuous interests. This isn’t corruption so much as overspecialization. It’s a wonk’s life. Politics has gone one way, the culture another. The left-right junkies might pretend otherwise, but the great middle doesn’t put political concerns at the top of their minds.
And yet, contravening all cultural and media logic, Donald Trump produced on a daily basis an astonishing, can’t-stop-following-it narrative. And this was not even because he was changing or upsetting the fundamentals of American life. In six months as president, failing to master almost any aspect of the bureaucratic process, he had, beyond placing his nominee on the Supreme Court, accomplished, practically speaking, nothing. And yet, OMG!!! There almost was no other story in America - and in much of the world. That was the radical and transformational nature of the Trump presidency: it held everybody’s attention.
Inside the White House, the daily brouhaha and world’s fascination was no cause for joy. It was, in the White House staff’s bitter view, the media that turned every day into a climactic, dastardly moment. And, in a sense, this was correct: every development cannot be climactic. The fact that yesterday’s climax would soon, compared to the next climax, be piddling, rather bore out the disproportion. The media was failing to judge the relative importance of Trump events: most Trump events came to naught (arguably all of them did), and yet all were greeted with equal shock and horror. The White House staff believed that the media’s Trump coverage lacked “context” - by this, they meant that people ought to realize that Trump was mostly just huffing and puffing.
