Speaking of behavior that is not at all weird or creepy, here’s a new report from Olivia Nuzzi, in GQ, on “Donald Trump’s Right-Hand Woman“:
… Hicks is a product not of Washington but of the Trump Organization, a marble-walled universe where one’s delightful agreeability and ferocious loyalty are worth more than conventional experience. She is a hugger and a people pleaser, with long brown hair and green eyes, a young woman of distinctly all-American flavor — the sort that inspires Tom Petty songs, not riots. And yet Hicks has, almost by accident, helped architect the strangest and least polite campaign in modern American history.
I wanted Hicks to help me understand just how all this had come to pass, how a person who’d never worked in politics had nonetheless become the most improbably important operative in this election. But she declined my request to talk. Instead, she arranged something more surreal: I could talk about her with Donald Trump, in front of her.
Trump, of course, has little experience with subjects other than Trump, which he made clear when I asked him about Hicks’s quick ascent to his inner circle. “Bill O’Reilly last night said it is the greatest political event in his lifetime,” Trump said, exaggerating O’Reilly’s point. “The most incredible political event in his lifetime! That’s pretty big. You know, who knew this was going to happen? So…” He pivoted, reluctantly, to the topic at hand. “Hope’s been involved from the beginning, and she has been absolutely terrific.”
Hicks’s job—a sui generis role of outsize importance that she half invents on the fly—involves keeping the media at bay and operating as Trump’s chief gatekeeper. But she’s also summoned in critical moments of confusion to play instigator and score-settler. It was her job to facilitate Trump’s rebuke of the Pope after His Holiness questioned the Christianity of anybody who would build a border wall (kind of Trump’s thing). And it was she who helped malign a female reporter who’d been manhandled by Trump’s campaign manager, immediately claiming she was a lying attention hound. Hicks was also called on this spring to explain why Trump, over the course of three days, advocated four positions on abortion. She tried without success to quell the confusion, declaring, finally, that President Trump would end abortion, simple as that: “He will change the law through his judicial appointments and allow the states to protect the unborn.”…
Hicks’s big job in politics started—not that long ago—with a comparatively tiny gig in Trump Tower. In 2012, two years after she’d graduated from Southern Methodist, Hicks was working for a New York PR shop when she was dispatched to help one of the firm’s major clients: Ivanka Trump. At the time, Trump’s daughter was expanding her fashion line, and Hicks was enlisted to pitch in—and even do a bit of modeling, appearing online in a practical mint-colored dress, black clutch, and heels, all from the Ivanka Trump collection.
Hicks grew close to Ivanka and began dressing like the heiress, who seemed worthy of the emulation. Ivanka was that rare female corporate leader who is also kind to other women, and she affected an air of competence that seemed to temper the boorishness of the Trump brand. Conveniently, as Hicks ingratiated herself to Ivanka, she won over The Donald as well—helped by the eager-to-please disposition she’d displayed since childhood…As for what arrives in Hicks’s in-box, a typical day brings upwards of 250 media requests. Usually, she alone decides who gets in and who’s kept out. But sometimes it’s Trump who plays bouncer for his own private party. “She sees the tantrums, and there are tantrums,” a source who’s been with Trump and Hicks told me. “He reads something he doesn’t like by a reporter, and it’s like, ‘This motherfucker! All right, fine. Hope?’ He circles it. ‘This guy’s banned! He’s banned for a while.’ That’s exactly how it works.” Hicks plays parole officer to an extensive and expanding blacklist of outlets and reporters (your correspondent once included) no longer welcome at his events.
While Hicks is often eager to please, she doesn’t mind upsetting the media and harbors no reverence for the civic duties of a free press. When reporters send her questions, she’s often irked—convinced they’re playing detective merely to irritate the campaign. She’s seemingly unaware that they might just be vetting a potential United States president. Often she doesn’t respond.
None of this has earned her many enemies, however. Like Ivanka, Hicks has managed to float above it all. For now. “I have always found Hope to be great to deal with,” Maggie Haberman of The New York Times told me, “especially given the volume of requests she must be getting.”…
He’s addicted to cable news (just like a lot of elderly shut-ins), but Trump remains mostly interested in news about Donald Trump — he’s still spending a chunk of every day reading print-outs of every story about The Great Man, marking them up with attaboys or rebuttals to be mailed back to the reporters in question. So perhaps he is the perfect candidate for today’s GOP.
Apart from Ivanka (and sometimes Melania) Hicks is the only woman in Trump’s inner circle — but then, she certainly looks better in heels than Paul Manafort, so she’s got that going for her. Read the whole thing; there’s lots of juicy/terrifying details about Trump World, Brand Politics.
Nuzzi reinforces the general impression that the best way to rise in the Trump scampaign has less to do with professionalism per one’s job title than with proficiency at the dishonorable business art of brown-nosing. Just what we want to hear, about the people surrounding the man who would be leader of the last remaining superpower. Sure, there are 70-year-olds who’ve kept growing and changing — even ‘pivoting’ when new information impacts their lives — but that’s very seldom true of legacy quasi-billionaires who’ve spent their entire span insulating themselves in a cocoon of privilege surrounded by thugs and enablers.
rikyrah
Which is the entire point of all the public sector firings from the GOP Governors.
…………………….
TWIN THREATS: HOW DISAPPEARING PUBLIC PENSIONS HURT BLACK WORKERS
June 30, 2016
Robert Hiltonsmith
rikyrah
Uh Huh
Uh Huh
Hallie JacksonVerified account
@HallieJackson
Spotted at Trump’s New Hampshire event. fired former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski
Chip Daniels
Trump’s campaign- hell, the entire GOP right now resembles a longer, sadder, weirder and more ruthless version of Game Of Thrones.
redshirt
I forget where I saw it, but the idea was the concept of getting as many guns into the population and the mass shootings that follow are part of the Conservative game plan because it makes people less trusting of other people, and thus more amenable to the Republican Party’s plans.
Think of it. Literal death and murder are part of their political calculus. If that’s not Evil with a capital E, nothing is.
trollhattan
@Chip Daniels:
And all the boobs are on full display.
nutella
This only seem weird because you’re not Hope Hicks and you don’t know what it’s like reporting to Trump. She could either 100% defer to him or be fired. No other choices. He does not like competition for press attention from anybody and particularly from (gasp!) women. She’s smart and observant enough to know that. She’d never have lasted so long in Trumpland if she did crazy things like conduct her own press interviews.
Gin & Tonic
@rikyrah: I said in another thread, he is as fired as I am on Trump’s payroll.
Gotta hand it to Il Donaldo, though. This was brilliant. You’re running low on cash, so you sucker CNN into paying at least one staff member’s salary. They’re probably stupid enough to think Lewandowski was actually fired.
aimai
@Chip Daniels: Sure, if game of thrones were being played by drunken, maudlin, sad clowns.
Ultraviolet Thunder
@Chip Daniels:
The rot goes to the core. I’ve said it before: Trump is not the GOP’s problem, he’s a symptom of it. A toadstool on the surface showing that the whole thing is decayed.
Roger Moore
@Chip Daniels:
Except the wall is in the south instead of the north.
Mary G
p.m. carpenter cracks me up:
SiubhanDuinne
@rikyrah:
Hallie Jackson really should have put “fired” in quotation marks.
Mary G
Proud to be a Californian today
Betty Cracker
Really, Nuzzi and GQ editors?
Thoughtful David
Hicks is the one who accidentally emailed, what was it, Trump’s speech?, to a bunch of reporters. Not hugely competent.
I really would like to see someone from the D side start attacking Trump for his incompetent campaign management. One of the major points he uses to sell himself is that he “hires the best people and gets things done.” A lot of his supporters are there because of that. Go after him on it. Show how badly his campaign is being run, how it’s flailing, and how incompetent his staff is. It goes right at his “strength.”
And has the advantage of being true so it’s harder to deny.
Trump delenda est
Keith G
I never pictured Anne Laurie being much of a GQ reader.
As for Ms Hicks, her boss is a bigoted, bullying, demogogic fraud. Thus I have no fucks to give about her.
schrodinger's cat
New York Times had a fawning article too on this Hope Hicks person.
SFAW
“Maria Guadalupe Ramirez, her soft brown eyes filled with wonder at the beauty of her surroundings, walks the 137 stone steps down to the Pendejo River, where she will do her family’s laundry, as she has done every other day for the last 17 years, in her little village of Chupacabra.”
I blame Roone Arledge for these types of “stories” — the kind where Bulwer-Lytton Prize aspirants can hone their “skills.”
ETA: The prose sucks, BTW.
SiubhanDuinne
When the hell did “architect” become a verb?
Gin & Tonic
@SiubhanDuinne: *Long* time ago.
SFAW
@SiubhanDuinne:
Consultants and management “gurus” have been verbing nouns and adjectives for a long time.
Corner Stone
@SiubhanDuinne: The next time I see someone use “effort” as a verb…grrr.
Yes, sir. We are efforting that now sir.
divF
@SiubhanDuinne:
It’s common usage in software design, for what that’s worth.
Major Major Major Major
Hey, look, the military lifted the ban on transgender people.
Omnes Omnibus
@SiubhanDuinne: 1813.
Iowa Old Lady
@Corner Stone: “Gift” as a verb still drives me insane and it’s everywhere. What’s wrong with “give”?
JPL
@Corner Stone: Effort too…. When will it end?
Thoughtful David
@SFAW:
Exactly what I thought of when I read that. Not Maria Guadalupe, but the Bulwer-Lytton competition.
Mingobat f/k/a Karen in GA
@SiubhanDuinne: Around the same time “learning” and “spend” became nouns, is my guess.
Major Major Major Major
“Verbing weirds language.”
–Calvin & Hobbes
reality-based (the original, not the troll)
@nutella:
kinda reminds me of this brilliant piece
Ok, i couldn’t make the link work, here’s the url
http://the-toast.net/2015/05/13/reasons-why-i-would-make-an-excellent-tudor-era-lady-in-waiting-and-you-should-consider-me-for-the-position/
Aleta
@Betty Cracker: That sentence leapt out and tried to claw me in the face. What a bunch of strung together cliches.
This article seems to be softening the ground up in preparation for some lovely stories about Ivanka’s good hearted charm and dazzling competance. Which keep Donald leveled out, so we really can trust him after all.
SiubhanDuinne
@Iowa Old Lady:
Yes, that’s another one that drives me round the bend. And “invite” as a noun.
J R in WV
@Mingobat f/k/a Karen in GA:
Yes, and I got really good learning back in High School!! The best learning you could get! How to spel and everything like that.
//
SiubhanDuinne
@Omnes Omnibus:
Well, but Keats! I ask you. Keats schmeats, I say.
Baud
You don’t even want to know what it means “to Balloon Juice” someone.
Ruckus
@Chip Daniels:
Which is why I don’t watch GoT. Why do you need to when life
givesshits out more ridiculous and ruthless drama every day.Omnes Omnibus
@SiubhanDuinne: So are you a Shelleyite or a Byronian?
reality-based (the original, not the troll)
@divF:
But here’s one i like. When I moved back to ND for eldercare duties – i discovered that in my 30 year absence, “doctoring” had become a verb here. As in, “She’s doctoring in Grand Forks” – it implies the whole running-back-and-forth for more tests and consultations thing.
Grand Forks, closest major city, is 65 miles away – if she’s “doctoring in Grand Forks”, instead of with our excellent local GP and 15-bed hospital, you know it’s bad.
It’s the only noun-to-verb of which I approve/.
gogol's wife
@SFAW:
Absolutely — every article in the NYTimes begins with one of these horrible sentences. Just tell me what the damn article is about! What ever happened to the concept of the “lede”?
ThresherK (GPad)
Only in Canadian Football is there Objectionable Conduct to go with the Unsportsmanlike Behaviour. The idea that you can be tagged for 15 yards for something that bothers people, folks who aren’t even sportsmen, is just a hoot.
JPL
@SiubhanDuinne: How is invite a noun? I’ll send you an invite, just sounds like a lazy person not wanting to type the entire word
SoupCatcher
@Baud: Was Bernie bauded or was Baud bernied?
Mike J
@gogol’s wife:
It died with the news.
Anne Laurie
@nutella:
Hell, I’m not blaming Hicks — under her circumstances, I’d do the same thing, although not nearly as well. The weird part, as always, is that a guy who is the actual presidential candidate for one of our beleaguered nation’s only two political parties runs his “campaign” along the same lines as a third-rate warlord in some Central Asian backwater. SAD!
@Keith G:
I’m not; I got the link the same way I got the link to Julia Ioffe’s Melania profile — off the reporter’s Twitter feed.
@SFAW:
Did you read about the response to the last big GQ Trump profile by a female reporter? Of course Nuzzi’s prose here “sucks”, in a way I suspect is quite deliberate; she’s using the same reportorial style as a tv reporter given exclusive access to Kim Jong Un or some notorious Sub-Saharan warlord. Think of it as ‘tongue so severely in cheek as to protrude from the vulgar bodily orifice’!
Miss Bianca
@SiubhanDuinne: About the time we began “growing our businesses!”
SiubhanDuinne
@JPL:
Exactly. Happens all the time, and makes me crazy.
SiubhanDuinne
@Miss Bianca:
Yup, there’s another one.
Misterpuff
@JPL: But that’s he point, they are too lazy to write an invitation so they send an email.
Adam L Silverman
@redshirt: You saw it here:
https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/newtown/
But to be honest, if you go back to the immediate post Great Rebellion, now doing business as the Civil War, period the firearm companies at the time were running advertisements explaining why one needed a gun for protection. Some of this marketing was to the freed slaves, which was true – they did need guns to protect themselves once Reconstruction was failed and gave way to Jim Crow. But most were marketed to whites as protection from carpet baggers and other unsavory folks migrating South or North or West.
ETA: This advertising was done in order to try to maintain demand after the war ended. While the Union Army needed to do some replenishment, most Confederate arms had been privately held. You fought with what you brought with you or took off fallen comrades or enemies. A lot of those weapons wound up confiscated as part of various Army of Northern Virginia or Army of Tennessee surrenders or they were so damaged they needed to be replaced. So there was a natural opportunity to maintain sales and profits. The biggest issue, as always, with firearms, is that those made by most of the companies will outlast the lives of their owners – and I mean that in terms of living out the natural lifespan. With proper maintenance even today’s composite polymer-metal firearms will last a very long time. For instance, I’ve mentioned that the one firearm I have is a Remington 1858 .44 caliber cap and ball revolver used in the Civil War by a Lieutenant Colonel from Missouri. I bought it from the estate sales folks who did my estate sale in CO. They were selling it from a previous client. They had been unable to sell it, I recognized the history behind it, purchased it, and have to have it restored by a specialist so I can mount it in a locked case and display it as a historical item. I have no intention of ever shooting it. But even poorly maintained, as this 158 year old revolver is, its still in good enough shape that with a little TLC and about $500.00 or so, it can be returned into proper working order. So fear induced sales are nothing new and, given how long lasting the product, necessary to ensure revenue.
Adam L Silverman
@aimai: with unattractive 30 (junior and the one that looks like Odo from Deep Space 9) to 70 something (the Old Man, Manafort, etc) man boobs.
divF
@Anne Laurie:
More R.A.L. from AL.
Is there anyone else around here that appreciates this ?
ETA: I’m off to watch the Giants-A’s game on TV. An historic occasion – the first time in 40 years that a starting pitcher is batting in an American League park (Bumgarner, for the Giants). Nonetheless, still hoping for an A’s sweep.
rikyrah
@Mary G:
that is all kinds of truth from carpenter.
Pogonip
@Major Major Major Major: this is excellent news for John McCain and Corporal Klinger.
Adam L Silverman
@SoupCatcher: Star Trek transporter accident. They’re now a composite Baurnie.
Miss Bianca
@SiubhanDuinne: I must not be as much of a language coot as I used to be, because “growing our businesses” almost sounds normal to me these days.
Now, “townhomes” as opposed to “townhouses” will always remain an abomination and a hissing shame. So there.
Miss Bianca
@Adam L Silverman: Or would that be a “Berdie”?
(Come on. You knew someone had to go there).
Gin & Tonic
@Adam L Silverman: Hey, I’m thinking you might find it intriguing to poke around some bushes to get background on this Chechen Ahmed/Akhmed Chataev/Chatayev, suspected of planning the Istanbul airport attack. For a fellow who can’t blend into a crowd all that well, and who is on a lot of radar screens, he sure seems to have had a lot of freedom to travel, if you get my drift.
NotMax
On BJ, at least, may as well title this as follows:
Clicks Nix Hicks Shticks
Adam L Silverman
@Gin & Tonic: I do. Way outside of my professional lane.
Matt McIrvin
@redshirt: The strategy’s inherent in “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”. With the understanding that bad people are the problem, and we all know what kind of people are bad. Not people like you, oh no…
Mnemosyne
@Gin & Tonic:
The NPR expert was explaining yesterday that basically everyone knows ISIS was behind the attack, but ISIS won’t admit it publicly because they want plausible deniability in front of their supporters in Turkey. Which made me realize that, yes, every country has political supporters just as dumb as Trump supporters.
Pogonip
@Adam L Silverman: Worse. Their behavior is scandalously Baudie. Running all over the Enterprise re-enacting Bennie Hill skits. Quelle horreur!
Keith P.
Trump once had a female executive get a lot of attention on “The Apprentice”. Donald does not like sharing attention, unless it’s with one of his kids, so no way is Donald Trump taking a back seat to Hope Hicks, even for a magazine interview.
Miss Bianca
@Adam L Silverman: OMG! Thank you for linking to that article – I was going crazy trying to remember the title and author of a book I read a couple years ago on mass shootings in the US, which I remember really – well, “liking” isn’t the word I want, but which I found really thought-provoking – and I just couldn’t do it. Now I do – it was “Going Postal”, by Mark Ames.
Adam L Silverman
@Gin & Tonic: Here he is:
https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/OFAC-Enforcement/Pages/20151020.aspx
Counterterrorism Designations and Updates
10/20/2015
OFFICE OF FOREIGN ASSETS CONTROL
Specially Designated Nationals Update
The following changes have been made to OFAC’s SDN List:
CHATAYEV, Akhmed (a.k.a. CHATAEV, Ahmed; a.k.a. CHATAEV, Akhmed Rajapovich; a.k.a. CHATAEV, Akhmet; a.k.a. CHATAYEV, Akhmad; a.k.a. CHATAYEV, Akhmet; a.k.a. MAYER, David; a.k.a. SENE, Elmir; a.k.a. TSCHATAJEV, Achmed Radschapovitsch; a.k.a. TSCHATAJEV, Ahmed Radschapovitsch; a.k.a. TSCHATAYEV, Achmed Radschapovitsch; a.k.a. TSCHATAYEV, Ahmed Radschapovitsch; a.k.a. “Akhmed Odnorukiy”; a.k.a. “Akhmed the One-Armed”; a.k.a. “AL-SHISHANI, Akhmed”; a.k.a. “CHATAEV, A.R.”; a.k.a. “Odnorukiy”; a.k.a. “SHISHANI, Akhmad”); DOB 14 Jul 1980; POB Vedeno Village, Vedenskiy District, the Republic of Chechnya, Russia; citizen Russia; Passport 96001331958 (Russia) (individual) [SDGT] (Linked To: JAM’AT AL TAWHID WA’AL-JIHAD). -to- CHATAYEV, Akhmed (a.k.a. CHATAEV, Ahmed; a.k.a. CHATAEV, Akhmed Rajapovich; a.k.a. CHATAEV, Akhmet; a.k.a. CHATAYEV, Akhmad; a.k.a. CHATAYEV, Akhmet; a.k.a. MAYER, David; a.k.a. SENE, Elmir; a.k.a. TSCHATAJEV, Achmed Radschapovitsch; a.k.a. TSCHATAJEV, Ahmed Radschapovitsch; a.k.a. TSCHATAYEV, Achmed Radschapovitsch; a.k.a. TSCHATAYEV, Ahmed Radschapovitsch; a.k.a. “Akhmed Odnorukiy”; a.k.a. “Akhmed the One-Armed”; a.k.a. “AL-SHISHANI, Akhmed”; a.k.a. “CHATAEV, A.R.”; a.k.a. “Odnorukiy”; a.k.a. “SHISHANI, Akhmad”); DOB 14 Jul 1980; POB Vedeno Village, Vedenskiy District, the Republic of Chechnya, Russia; citizen Russia; Passport 96001331958 (Russia) (individual) [SDGT] (|Linked To: ISLAMIC STATE OF IRAQ AND THE LEVANT|).
According to news reports there are plenty of places along the Turkish-Syrian border that he could have crossed. He’s highly trained and he’s committed. The Chechens have always been the cadre within ISIS that worries me the most.
Adam L Silverman
@Miss Bianca: You’re welcome.
NotMax
@Adam L. Silverman
Tuvix was a more interesting, more personable, more fleshed out character in one episode than Tuvak or Neelix during the entire run of the series.
Gin & Tonic
It’s not just the Turkish-Syrian border. He seems to have traveled pretty freely in Central and Eastern Europe. I’ll bet the farm he’s on more than one agency’s payroll.
Adam L Silverman
@NotMax: This is very true. I almost put up the youtube clip, but its been a long day.
Adam L Silverman
@Gin & Tonic: Wouldn’t surprise me at all.
Gin & Tonic
@Adam L Silverman: And Russia’s protestations about how he was a wanted man there, but nobody would hand him over, also ring really false. They know when he crossed the Turkish-Bulgarian border for instance – you think they can’t reach into Bulgaria to nab him? Come on. They’ll do wetwork openly in London, FFS.
Regine Touchon
@Mary G: amen brother
Adam L Silverman
@Gin & Tonic: Given that IS hasn’t taken credit, and neither has anyone else, anything is possible here. Given Putin’s stated goals, having a double agent inside IS also wouldn’t surprise me.
ThresherK (GPad)
@NotMax: Nicely done. And they say Variety’s dead.
(Well, the print version,anyway.)
Mnemosyne
So, is Treat Williams wearing a wig in this movie, or what?
Anne Laurie
@Gin & Tonic:
Did you read the long Boston Globe report on the Tsarnaev brothers’ background? I am the opposite of an expert on Balkan politics, but as soon as the news reports on the Turkey suicide bombers mentioned Chechen/Uzibekistan, I assumed this will turn out to be a different story from the same saga. There’s some thousands of angry otherwise-unemployed young men from that long-suffering region running around with PTSD and a historical tradition of violent revenge; the Saudi royal family and the Soviet hard men and the anti-Kurd Turks and even our very own CIA, at different times for (putatively) different reasons, have given them money and arms and military training and then abandoned them. They want to make a mark on the world, and they’ve been given only dangerous ways to do so…
Main difference, in this instance, is that I very much doubt the Turkish authorities are going to give their media the kind of freedoms the Globe used so ably. There will be all sorts of dead ends & ‘no records’ & ‘that information has been classified’. Maybe our descendents will be able to retroactively assemble the pieces of this specific puzzle in fifty or sixty years, like we’re doing now with some of the Cold War records — assuming there are descendents, and that they have leisure for low-reward pastimes like historical research.
Adam L Silverman
@Anne Laurie: It was well reported in Spring 2014 that around 1,000 hardened radicalized Chechen fighters had gone to Syria and joined ISIS. They are the true fighting cadre of ISIS as they have significant experience fighting against Russia’s backed Chechen government and strongman. Large numbers were trained by al Qaeda for this in Afghanistan. This is also why ISIS issued an anti-Putin threat in May or June of 2014.
At the same time it has been well reported that pro Russian hardened Chechen fighters have gone to fight as irregulars in both Eastern Ukraine and in Syria. So a lot of these guys, from both sides of the conflict, are bouncing around.
Gin & Tonic
@Anne Laurie:
I did. I also know people who’ve traveled and done research in that area, but I’d rather not pursue that line here right now.
pseudonymous in nc
That GQ profile is deeply weird: no quotes from Hicks herself.
The “next Mrs Donald Trump” line from snarkier types feels harsh and a bit misogynistic right now, but you can’t help but see a lot of heavy subtext in those pieces, not least about “what does she do next?”
Martha from Augusta
@SiubhanDuinne: As a systems engineer, I can say we were using the term twenty years ago.
seaboogie
@Thoughtful David: The only ones who will be swayed by repeated evidence of Trump’s incompetence are the GOP pols and regular habitual GOP voters who have some sort of nausea threshold – Trump’s actual supporters are solidly behind him, and beyond raping their daughters or shooting Gran in the head (assuming there is not a large inheritance at stake) right in front of them – nothing will persuade them to vote otherwise.
Martha from Augusta
@pseudonymous in nc: I think it’s because she refused to be interviewed for the story and offered up the interview with Trump with her present in lieu.
SFAW
@Anne Laurie:
No, nor do I plan to.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. In other words: I think you’re over-thinking this, and she’s not really that good a writer. [Disclaimer: Don’t recall ever reading anything by her, so she may be a latter-day Jonathan Swift. But that’s not the sense I get from what I read in the OP.]
You’re a good person, cutting her so much slack. The general tenor of the piece is fluffery, not irony, to my eyes. The “rare woman CEO” BS may be ironic (or whatever), but if so, it’s somewhat more subtle than GQ readers would (presumably) pick up on.
Anne Laurie
@pseudonymous in nc:
Dunno. Since everything about Hicks in this piece is second-hand, all we can be sure of is that she’s good at people-pleasing.
Trump’s at an age where even the horniest dogs tend to be reachable more through their vanity than their gonads — Rupert Murdoch, for instance, traded in long-term wife #2 for a ChiCom MBA who worked really hard at selling the media on her vast awe at his enormous business acumen. And when that business partnership went south — apparently because she got bored, not him — Rupe rummaged around the global talent available, and settled on an aging but still aggressively “hot” D-list celebrity for wife #4.
Hicks is pretty enough, and young enough, but she doesn’t seem to be working as hard as some of Trump’s male subordinates (paging Corey Lewinski) at selling her personal allegiance to The Donald. I think she’s aware that she can do better for herself, after the implosion, by going back to work for Ivanka or accepting an offer as a political analyst on one of the cable channels.
And remember, she’s close enough to the heart of the Trump empire that she probably has a real good idea of how much the old man is actually worth. After another divorce, with one kid not yet in high school & who-knows-what in Melania’s pre-nup / the older kids’ & grandkids trust fund arrangements, that probably doesn’t come to much compared to what she can make without having to knock booties with a man old enough to be her grandfather.
Anne Laurie
@SFAW:
Nuzzi’s the woman who got her first media job when Anthony Weiner made an unsolicited pass at her. Snark is her metier — imagine a new-gen Maureen Dowd, but without the wear & the drinking problem. She’s not writing for GQ readers as much as she’s writing for people (like me) who follow Olivia Nuzzi’s work.
Ioffe’s a much better reporter, and a better writer, but she still got assaulted by waves of Trump-loving neo-Nazis for “attacking” Melania. I’m quite sure Nuzzi saw that, and wrapped an extra layer of “who, little me? I don’t even know the meaning of ‘snark'” around this piece… for plausible deniability, if nothing else.
Paul in KY
@Adam L Silverman: I have a 1915 P08 Lugar, made by Mauser & it still works fine.
SFAW
@Anne Laurie:
OK, I’ll try to re-read it with my “Anne Laurie goggles” on. (No, that’s not snark nor wiseassery. It’s an expression of the high regard in which I hold you. After all, you steered me to “The Unknown Ajax” and Lois McMaster Bujold.)
But I gotta tell ya, writing like that — snark or not — makes me reach for the Maalox. Or a loaded pistol (for use on myself).
gorram
@Iowa Old Lady: I think there’s actually some weird distinction people are drawing there. People “gifting” something are being showy, doing something symbolic. People “giving” something are usually literally handing it to someone, or otherwise more in the original intent of the verb.