This is quite the Michael Lewis paragraph. pic.twitter.com/BWHQvsHNUE
— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) September 27, 2018
So Michael Lewis has a new book https://t.co/QJY9pegvJZ pic.twitter.com/5XaEDpyS6a
— Shane Goldmacher (@ShaneGoldmacher) September 27, 2018
… Christie volunteered himself for the job: head of the Donald Trump presidential transition team. “It’s the next best thing to being president,” he told friends. “You get to plan the presidency.” He went to see Trump about it. Trump said he didn’t want a presidential transition team. Why did anyone need to plan anything before he actually became president? It’s legally required, said Christie. Trump asked where the money was going to come from to pay for the transition team. Christie explained that Trump could either pay for it himself or take it out of campaign funds. Trump didn’t want to pay for it himself. He didn’t want to take it out of campaign funds, either, but he agreed, grudgingly, that Christie should go ahead and raise a separate fund to pay for his transition team. “But not too much!” he said.
And so Christie set out to prepare for the unlikely event that Donald Trump would one day be elected president of the United States. Not everyone in Trump’s campaign was happy to see him on the job. In June, Christie received a call from Trump adviser Paul Manafort. “The kid is paranoid about you,” Manafort said. The kid was Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law… The Kushners apparently took their grudges seriously, and Christie sensed that Jared still harboured one against him. On the other hand, Trump, whom Christie considered almost a friend, could not have cared less.
Christie viewed Kushner as one of those people who thinks that, because he is rich, he must also be smart. Still, he had a certain cunning about him. And Christie soon found himself reporting everything he did to prepare for a Trump administration to an “executive committee”. The committee consisted of Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr, Eric Trump, Manafort, Steve Mnuchin and Jeff Sessions. “I’m kind of like the church elder who double-counts the collection plate every Sunday for the pastor,” said Sessions, who appeared uncomfortable with the entire situation. The elder’s job became more complicated in July 2016, when Trump was formally named the Republican nominee. The transition team now moved into an office in downtown Washington DC, and went looking for people to occupy the top 500 jobs in the federal government. They needed to fill all the cabinet positions, of course, but also a whole bunch of others that no one in the Trump campaign even knew existed. It is not obvious how you find the next secretary of state, much less the next secretary of transportation – never mind who should sit on the board of trustees of the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation…
The first time Trump paid attention to any of this was when he read about it in the newspaper. The story revealed that Trump’s very own transition team had raised several million dollars to pay the staff. The moment he saw it, Trump called Steve Bannon, the chief executive of his campaign, from his office on the 26th floor of Trump Tower, and told him to come immediately to his residence, many floors above. Bannon stepped off the elevator to find Christie seated on a sofa, being hollered at. Trump was apoplectic, yelling: You’re stealing my money! You’re stealing my fucking money! What the fuck is this?
Seeing Bannon, Trump turned on him and screamed: Why are you letting him steal my fucking money? Bannon and Christie together set out to explain to Trump federal law. Months before the election, the law said, the nominees of the two major parties were expected to prepare to take control of the government. The government supplied them with office space in downtown DC, along with computers and rubbish bins and so on, but the campaigns paid their people. To which Trump replied: Fuck the law. I don’t give a fuck about the law. I want my fucking money. Bannon and Christie tried to explain that Trump couldn’t have both his money and a transition.Shut it down, said Trump. Shut down the transition…
Gabriel Debenedetti, at NYMag, has a supplementary interview:
… With almost everyone you talked to, you asked about their biggest concern, the biggest risk. After all this, what’s yours?
Sacrificing the long term for the short term. Trump’s such a myopic creature and so much of his behavior is driven by short-term rewards. If you look at the institution I was trying to describe, it’s a mess. I mean, the people are great, but they’re all old. Here’s an incredible one: there are five times more people working for the government over the age of 60 than under the age of 30. And you can find analogous situations with the technology. It feels like this old machine has been starved, neglected, shat upon for three decades, and it’s waiting for someone to come take a sledgehammer to the side of it, and he’s doing it.Short-termism isn’t a new problem, though. You’re saying Trump’s just the one taking advantage of it?
Well, true. He’s much more of a short-termist. In the book you can see other presidents doing things that aren’t going to pay off for them. Think about it this way. An awful lot of what an administration does is invest for the distant future. All the basic science. None of that pays off for the current president. None of it. That pays off for like two generations on. Trump has no interest in any of it. Bush had a big interest in it. He created the [research funding agency] in the Energy Department: ARPA-E. So everywhere [Trump] can pull in resources to make his little moment seem good, and screw future generations, he will.In the book you refer a few times to “willful ignorance” that created this moment, of which Trump is the ultimate manifestation.
It’s easier to behave the way he behaves if you don’t know anything. If you actually collide with some piece of information then you have a problem, and I think he moves through the world avoiding colliding with the information…
SFAW
Maybe the 1418 (EDT) message will say “A very large meteor(ite) has wiped out most of the Administration. This is not a test.”
Were that the case, then I’d turn on my cell ‘phone.
Emma
I think I am finally anesthetized to the crazy because I’m not crawling under my desk into a fetal position.
Ben Cisco
In this regard, he’s not much different from the rest of the GOP. He’s simply more blatant, more “ME ME ME MINE MINE MINE DOWN DOWN DOWN!” about it.
Mike in NC
A fit quote for Fat Bastard’s tombstone/public urinal.
Gin & Tonic
Chris Christie is a fucking douchebag who bet his entire stake on one spin, and came up wrong. He should STFU and take up knitting or baking cookies or something. If I never see or hear from him again that will be perfectly fine.
Mike in DC
@Ben Cisco: They literally admitted that global warming is real, then shrugged and said, “eh, whattaya gonna do?”
jl
Some of the ‘problematic’ issues make sense to me. The spouses’ reactions to the wins. I remember hearing and interview with with Michelle Obama saying that she was getting impatient with Barack’s political ambitions, and how much time it was taking out their lives. So, Barack was, it seems, running against an informal, but understandable clock. That is understandable and human tension about the cost of national level politics. But, FLOTUS-elect breaks down and sobs, and not with joy, when she realizes that her husband wins. Pence’s wife-mother, whatever she is, acts like she knew the whole thing was a stinking mess, and her husband had jumped from frying pan into the fire, with this miserable and unexpected win. OK, at least she is operating on a somewhat higher level of awareness than he is.
I guess I am slow, but I don’t get the point about the transition money. Says these mooks ‘raised’ money FOR the transition, but Trump thinks it is ‘his’ money and it’s his right to decide whatever the hell he can do with it, simply because, well, there is this money there now, no matter how or why it got there, and Trump can grab it for himself.
Hard to understand unless, with Trump, it’s crooks and swindlers all the way down inside him. Then it makes sense. Every new book reveals a vile sickness in Trump that pushes the envelope of what we previously imagined.
rumpole
this is Chris Christie’s revenge, but he comes out of it looking even dumber than he did going in (which is saying a lot). And had he been nominated AG instead of Sessions, all would have been forgiven.
Adam L Silverman
This is a major problem. Several years ago a lot of us were expecting that these folks approaching retirement would be finally moving out allowing us to finally stop from bouncing from term appointment to term appointment and contract to contract. What actually happened, driven in a lot of cases by the sequester, is that this hasn’t happened. Rather a large amount of the Federal government went through reductions in force even though no reductions in force were authorized/required. If you go to USAJOBS you’ll now see a lot of positions that are not open to all Americans. Rather, they’re coded for existing Federal employees and former Federal employees and military retirees and veterans. This is being done to protect people who are facing one of these Reductions in Force, have already fallen victims to it, and to provide them, as well as those facing mandatory retirement in the military, which is also undergoing its own Reductions in Force, and veterans a safe landing pad. This isn’t bringing new blood into the government. It isn’t rejuvenating the civil service. It is moving the deck chairs around on the Titanic.
Major Major Major Major
@Emma: yeah, at this point I’m hardly even perturbed ?
Ben Cisco
@Mike in DC: Because it won’t affect them directly. They don’t even care about what happens to their own children – narcissism at its worst. 45 is the logical outcome of the GOP mindset.
SiubhanDuinne
I had preordered The Fifth Risk and it downloaded shortly after midnight yesterday, as scheduled. Turns out it was a very quick read for me, because a few days earlier I had read the book’s lengthy Prologue as a Guardian article, and in the last few months had read another 60+% of the book as long-form articles in (I think) Vanity Fair.
As always with Michael Lewis, the reporting is solid, the personal anecdotes are compelling, and for anyone coming to it fresh it should prove to be a more than worthwhile read. But because so much of it had already been published elsewhere — with nary a word in any of the promotional blurbs indicating this — I’ll admit to feeling a bit cheated that I paid for a whole book but received only about 25% new content.
Ah, well. Caveat emptor.
Martin
@jl:
[Narrator voice]: Of course it was crooks and swindlers all the way down.
Major Major Major Major
@Adam L Silverman: Yep.
Ella in New Mexico
@jl:
Yeah, what the ever-loving FUCK is up with their reactions? Given the stories that Melania was this fucking close to a divorce if he lost, her tears make sense. I’m actually more alarmed at “devoted like a good Christian wife to her almost preacher husband” Karen Pence’s reaction for some reason.
Seriously, anyone else wonder if the two spouses are being quietly interviewed by Mueller? THEY KNEW SOMETHING.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@SiubhanDuinne: Thanks for the warning. I was considering buying it.
FlipYrWhig
Trump is SO WEIRD about quantities of money. I can NOT figure out what he thinks is too expensive and what he thinks is just right.
HAL
Yikes at the Karen Pence bit. Have we even seen her out in public since the election?
germy
I wish there was tape. And I wish it could be played over every loudspeaker at every rally. So that all sheriffs, cops and military can hear.
West of the Rockies
So does Mother Pence hate her husband? I’ve not heard such noises, but that exchange above seems weirdly harsh.
Cheryl Rofer
Somewhat pedantic point: This is not entirely true.
There has always been an Office of Science in the DOE. Plus basic research is a part of many of its other programs. It is true that Bush created ARPA-E and that it is supposed to be some sort of blue-sky outfit. But I suspect, like similar organizations before it, it’s settled down to more routine things. Still, it’s basic research, and all this is for the long term, which is the point being made.
West of the Rockies
@jl:
The voracious, rapacious Trump hunger for money befuddles me. Obama said (about money) there’s only so many vacations you can take. Just how damn many gold toilets does Clump need to shit in to feel good about himself?
jl
@Adam L Silverman: I’ve noticed when watching clips of UK Parliament, Australia leg, Canada, how much older and male the US Congress is. And a particular type of old male: rich and white. It really stands out.
People can argue about the reasons, but during a the 2007-2009 recession, which could have turned into another Great Depression, total government fiscal fiscal support for the economy was about average for post-WWII recession. The federal government did just enough to avoid complete disaster, but not a penny more. But what really stands out is that during the expansion, total government spending (local, state and federal) fell through the floor, by a long shot, really amazing drop, compared to anything seen before. And keeping that operational expenditure and public investment up to post-WWII par was something only federal government had power to do.
Obama and his team largely repaired the 30-year (since the great Reagan fraud) of far lower than average total private net investment in the US economy. But, in large part due to GOP obstruction, and mistaken Dem opinion that GOP would do anything in good faith, one reason the recovery was unsatisfactory was bottom fell out of total government spending and public investment.
The US is now a corrupt oligarchy run by rich elderly white men who are pursuing policies that have starved public and private investment in the economy, to a greater or lesser extent, but to a harmful extent, ever since Reagan. While the Dems were in charge, there was pushback, but not nearly enough to make up for the ground lost under GOP rule.
Uncle Cosmo
I propose the term “knowledge neutrino” or nottrino for someone who can pass through a parsec’s worth of superdense information & remain the same ignorant imbecile.
L85NJGT
@jl:
Citizens United has unleashed the grifters on the GOP donor class. Trump figured he could run all the campaign spend through his kids, they’d shake down the vendors for kickbacks, and no one would say much because he was sure to lose.
Major Major Major Major
@jl: when the republicans shrieked that Obama was pursuing the “never let a crisis go to waste” philosophy, it was as usual projection; they were doing everything they could to complete the bleed-states-dry project.
Mnemosyne
@West of the Rockies:
There is no number of gold toilets in the world that will make him feel better about himself, because he’s a giant sucking black hole of neediness and self-loathing.
jl
@jl: And now it should be clear to everyone, these elderly rich white oligarchs have starved the US economy of that badly needed public and private investment for the sole purpose of enriching those who are just like them.
There is an complete rottenness in US governance that has to be fixed. I remember during Katrina that some news person, from UK or Australia, or someplace, I forget, trying toe explain the unbelievable things his audience was seeing. IIRC, he said that there was an aspect to the US that was like an immense and very wealthy third world country. Some correction to that under Obama, but now we are back on that immense rich (though getting less rich due to lack of investment) third world country track, except in triple time compared to GW and Reagan.
Brachiator
Kind of a Brainless Trust.
germy
@West of the Rockies:
I think more likely she hates tRump for leading her good husband down a path that may not end well.
West of the Rockies
@Mnemosyne:
Good heavens, how exhausting would it be to know such a person?
Martin
@Mnemosyne: Yeah, that’s basically what narcissm is – a permanent, futile exercise to prove you aren’t the loser/shitty person you believe deep down that you really are.
SiubhanDuinne
@HAL:
Not often, certainly. I do have a recollection that she accompanied her husband to that football game he went to for the sole purpose of being able to leave in a mist of self-righteousness.
SiubhanDuinne
@Brachiator:
Good one.
glory b
@Adam L Silverman: This is happening, albeit to a lesser extent, at the state and local levels too.
Mnemosyne
@West of the Rockies:
It’s super exhausting. I’m lucky that the one real narcissist in my family is a sister-in-law on the other side of the country, so I rarely have to deal with her. Some unlucky people here have either been married to narcissists or had them as parents. ?
jl
@SiubhanDuinne: At least the first and second spouses have slightly more common sense than their miserable partners, though I wouldn’t venture much more credit than that. Maybe a constitutional amendment that give power to the spouse to force a resignation? Add spouse clause to the 25th amendment?
different-church-lady
It just reinforces my view that his voters are the disease and Trump is just the symptom. Even he didn’t think they were going to bite on his act as hard as they did.
LeeM
@jl: This has been his nuveau riche modus operandi his whole life: “What’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is soon mine.” He sees this through a business lens, where inflow and outflow of money defines his value. This government gig is another means to enrich him and expand his lame brand – any money collected must add into his assets. He has no concept of serving others, at least not others who don’t adore him.
different-church-lady
@Martin:
One little fix there.
jl
@different-church-lady: Need to remember Trump lost popular vote by around 3 million. Less than 100,000 votes in three states gave that miserable bigot swindler the electoral college win.
Fixing electoral college has to be high on list of priorities. California has signed on to a plan to force its electoral votes to be split by popular vote once a critical number of states also sign on. I hope more state sign on.
SiubhanDuinne
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Don’t get me wrong. It’s a very worthwhile book, and I’m not trying to warn anyone away from it. But if you have previously read those VF pieces (they may well have been linked from this very blog!) you will recognise great swaths of the book and end up skimming through 2/3 – 3/4 of it very quickly.
SiubhanDuinne
@SiubhanDuinne:
Note to Inner Editor: Try to find intensifiers other than “very.”
PJ
@jl: That’s it, we are well on our way to being a very wealthy Third World country. That’s what you get when all the wealth is concentrated in a relatively small number of people, and they control the policies. The only thing Trump has been successful at is getting a huge tax cut for these people and sitting one (and probably two) Supreme Court justices who will work to ensure that progressive legislation is nullified for the next 30 years. So he’s earned his keep, and, outside of something unforeseen happening, they’ll push for him to win in 2020.
VOR
@Mnemosyne: Look at what the Times tax story revealed. Trump was losing money all through the 80s and early 90s. He only survived because of a series of credit and cash injections from his father’s empire. I’m guessing the patter has continued with him doing high profile but losing projects. That is why he was so grasping for money with ventures like Trump Steaks, Trump University, and more. He needed the cash flow to keep juggling the bills.
Another recent report, also sourced from digging into public records, found a change in financing from debt to cash for his golf resorts and other projects. Where did that cash come from once the subsidies from his father went away?
WereBear
90% of those Fundy Christian marriages where the wife is commanded by god to submit. I swear if these guys fell off a cliff and were hanging by a root I wouldn’t even blame the wives for just standing there.
SiubhanDuinne
@SiubhanDuinne:
Or omit them entirely!
West of the Rockies
@Mnemosyne:
Good heavens, how exhausting would it be to know such a person?@Mnemosyne:
I was in a relationship with a BPD (leaning towards Narcissism) woman for a year and a half. It was pure, sustained misery after about the first three months. Never, EVER would I do it again.
Mnemosyne
@different-church-lady:
Nah, Martin had it right — narcissists are so full of self-loathing that they can’t admit even for a second that they could be wrong or have a flaw, because it would cause their entire façade to collapse in on itself. They know that they’re terrible people, so they build defenses to try and conceal that even from themselves.
Normal people fear that they’re actually losers/shitty people; narcissists know they are.
Major Major Major Major
@SiubhanDuinne: As Twain said,
jl
@VOR: The one problem I have with that reporter’s explanation is that it was unfair to many third world (lower income) countries. He should have said ‘an immense, rich, very corrupt third world country, run by a tiny oligarchy of very greedy and sociopathic rich old white men.
To some extent it is a corrupt system that turns some bad, So we are governed by the bad to the bone, and turned bad through horrible dysfunctional incentives.
Snarki, child of Loki
OBL didn’t expect his 9/11 plan to bring down the twin towers, either.
different-church-lady
@jl: 64 million people willing to vote for an overt racist who is is obviously unqualified for the job would still be a huge problem, even if Trump hadn’t been seated on the technicalities.
HeleninEire
@SiubhanDuinne: “Don’t say you are ‘very tired’. Say you are ‘exhausted.'”
/Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society
lollipopguild
@West of the Rockies: There is a large hole in trump that he tries to fill with sex/money and bragging about both. No matter how much he gets it is never enough. He keeps trying anyway because he must keep moving/attacking in order to stay alive.
Joe Falco
@Brachiator:
A dumber but no less evil Legion of Doom.
Mnemosyne
@VOR:
It sure would have been nice for the MSM to get curious about those sudden infusions of cash BEFORE the 2016 election. ?
I still want to know where Brett Kavanaugh’s $200K to pay off his credit card bills came from. “Baseball tickets” is an obvious lie.
@West of the Rockies:
BPD and NPD are related personality disorders — the DSM calls them “Cluster B” disorders. I ended up doing a fair amount of research trying to figure out WTF I was dealing with when it came to my sister-in-law and her bizarre, shitty actions while my brother (her estranged husband) was dying of cancer.
BPD is actually the only one of the Cluster B disorders that can (sometimes) be treated successfully, because they’re the only ones in that cluster with enough self-awareness to realize that their actions are negatively affecting other people. IIRC, the therapy protocol is called Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) and the patient has to stick with it in a group setting for at least a year in order to see results.
Chet
That election night anecdote comports with the ones from Michael Wolff’s book. But Wolff goes on to say that Trump transformed that night from assuming that he wouldn’t win to believing he deserved to win.
Ruckus
@jl:
Always, always, always expect 1000% worse than the worst that you can imagine with shitgibbon. The stupidest, most criminal, most devient thing you can possibly imagine, multiply by 1000 and you might be close. Been this way for decades.
MoxieM
@West of the Rockies: Infinite. Malignant narcissists never actually feel good about themselves. Their insides are a black hole of need and despair.
Brachiator
@Joe Falco:
Legion of Dope.
MoxieM
@Mnemosyne: oh–hi I responded too, re: Cluster Bs. I was married to one, my mother was one … I have also done lots of research, because fuuuuck these people are awful. Estimates are between 5-10% of the population is on the scale, mostly Narcissism.
[I’m now doing EMDR therapy to recover from the abuse of decades with this shit. It’s very effective–for the victim/person on the receiving end/traumatized one. EMDR works on PTSD, c-PTSD, trauma of all types, including long-ago traumas.. Highly relevant right now, given our public discourse.]
SiubhanDuinne
@HeleninEire:
Exactly. I’m capable of writing well, and recognise my overuse of “very” is sheer laziness.
An edit function would have allowed me to make quiet changes :-)
jl
@Mnemosyne: ” I still want to know where Brett Kavanaugh’s $200K to pay off his credit card bills came from. “Baseball tickets” is an obvious lie.”
Impossible to escape the BK fiasco.. I heard on news this morning that there are text messages showing BK coordinating the defense against the harassment accusations from early July, before they came up at the hearings, before they came up in the press. BK testified he knew nothing about them, but he was scheming with his cronies what to do if they came up days or weeks before. I wonder if they’ll be any follow-up at all on this.
I guess the GOP and corporate media will find ways to explain why even more perjury from this lying dudebro is no big deal.
TenguPhule
@West of the Rockies:
it is widely suspected that Trump is in serious hock to the Russians for loans unpaid.
And these are people who respond to non-payment with collection of body parts.
Amir Khalid
@SiubhanDuinne:
Or better, never use an intensifier unless the sentence needs it to make sense. You’ll be surprised how rare that is. You’ll also be surprised how much more intense your intensifiers become when you do have use for them.
dnfree
@Amir Khalid: I saw an article once that claimed overuse of “really”, in the sense of “really fun” or “really great” was reflective of being a first child. As a first child, I realized I am prone to doing that. I don’t think the article explained why.
FelonyGovt
Am I the only one who finds these tales of Election night 2016 reactions vaguely depressing? Almost besides the point now? The current shitshow is just so all-consuming.
John M. Burt
@TenguPhule: The collection of body parts, or worse yet, the release of photographs of body parts.
As candidate and as “President”, donald was never even holding a pair of deuces. His hand has always been more like a trey of spades, a Jack of clubs, a five of diamonds, a nine of hearts and a seven of spades — what we call, around the house, a “toilet flush”. #ITMFA #TrumpResign
Captain C
This reminds me of Morrie from Goodfellas, when Jimmy wouldn’t pay him his cut from the Lufthansa robbery.
Mnemosyne
@MoxieM:
Yeah, I’m lucky that my experience with narcs is mostly with more distant relatives. While doing the research, I realized that my long-deceased paternal grandfather was almost certainly a narcissist, which explains a WHOLE LOT about my late dad. He consciously tried to do better than his parents had, but he would sometimes fall back into those old patterns.
WereBear
@dnfree: Dang. I’m a first child. And I do that.
waspuppet
I repeat my prediction: Sometime before Donald Trump dies, unless he dies in office and maybe even then, he will come out and say he never intended to win.
Mind you, it will not come in the form of an admission: It’ll be more along the lines of a bratty 12-year-old who screams “I didn’t ASK to be born!” before slamming the door to his room.
Manyakitty
@Mnemosyne: I think Pete Davidson from SNL got a BPD diagnosis. He’s been pretty open about it, and about his treatment.
waspuppet
@TenguPhule: I only semi-kiddingly believe Donald Trump has no more actual money in the bank than I do.
Captain C
@John M. Burt: I wouldn’t be surprised if there was an Uno card in there.
boatboy_srq
@jlIt was a grift. It was ALWAYS a grift. Lord Dampnut ran for office to get rubes to send him “campaign contributions” that he could squirrel away. Obligations – staff, equipment, actual work required for the campaign – were never factored in because the win was never the goal.
So, when this obligation became real, rather than accept them Lord Dampnut went nuts trying to keep the funds for himself.
What Pence wanted is still not clear. Perhaps he thinks he can outlast Lord Dampnut and be the “kinder, gentler” alternative once Lord Dampnut is 25th’d.
James E Powell
They would still vote RW because that’s who they are. They hate us more than than they love their own.
Manyakitty
@boatboy_srq: Pence is still Russia’s man. Remember that Manafort forced him in as VP.
Amir Khalid
@dnfree:
Really?
jl
@FelonyGovt: I am often foolishly hopeful, but even a fool like myself think more like alarm bells. I remember trying to reassure my friends that when GW was elected, he would be what he said he’d be during the campaign, even if the ‘compassionate conservative’ line was slim pickings.
But I remember Trump giving interviews during the campaign that he was just putting on an act to get the GOP nomination, He would be much more ‘presidential’ in office. Trump said he was a protean being, and he could be whatever he needed or wanted to be in order to get the job done, and do so ‘very easily’. So, OK, I’ll donate and work to beat this guy, but, oh, maybe 1 percent, 10 percent, oh, let’s go crazy and say 50 percent chance that might be true.
But right after the election I saw a pic of Trump and his wife at some supposed victory dinner. The look of horrified despair on Melania’s face, and a weird unfocused look of confused frustration, aggression and anger on Trump’s set off alarm bells. And I though ‘OMFG, this is going to be bad.’
SC54HI
Re: Mother Pence. If she actually believes the fundie stuff that she & Mike push*, that outburst on election night 2016 was bizarre indeed. Totally at odds with the “keeping sweet” behavior that fundie Christian women are supposed to model.
*Fundie Christians, especially ones on the A-lists (like the Pences), are great ones for following the “Do as I say, not as I do” policy. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if the Pences made all kinds of exceptions for themselves and their family & friends that would never be part of the theocracy they hope to establish over the rest of us.
jl
@jl: I think the word I was looking for was ‘resentment’ Trump had a look of deep resentment at this victory dinner. Resentment that he’s won(??) I still don’t understand it.
Only educated guess I can come up with is that his plan to grift off campaign money and lose didn’t work out. And he was pissed he’d won. But, really, I don’t understand it.
Mnemosyne
@Manyakitty:
I’m pretty convinced that my other sister-in-law (G’s sister) has BPD. She has juuuuust enough self-awareness to stop herself from doing things that would permanently piss people off and cause them to stop speaking to her. When we got married, we took precautions to make sure she couldn’t call and interrupt in the middle of the wedding (she couldn’t come out to CA for the wedding because she was pregnant, which is a whole OTHER story). That call never came, but we found out later that she had gone to the ER the night before claiming she was feeling light-headed, so we’re pretty sure she was laying the groundwork to demand on our wedding day that her mother fly home immediately to take care of her. Fortunately, she decided not to.
Tenar Arha
@FlipYrWhig: Maybe it’s simply that DJT is really nothing but the grasping avarice of one of the seagulls from Finding Nemo.
VOR
@boatboy_srq: It has also been rumored that the campaign began as a way to increase his salary on The Apprentice and Celebrity Apprentice.
I keep thinking about what a cesspool Trump’s charitable foundation turned out to be. And how he charged Eric’s foundation full freight to use Trump properties. That story came out because of old-fashioned research through public records. But it shows the character of the man. Or lack of character.
Mnemosyne
@boatboy_srq:
Pence thinks he’s been chosen by Gawd to end abortion and lead us into the promised land of a Christian Dominionist dictatorship, He would be really fucking dangerous if he got any real power.
Manyakitty
@Mnemosyne: Yikes. Just…yikes.
Soprano2
@SiubhanDuinne: I had a high school English teacher who forbade us from using “very” or “really” in our writing, because she said they didn’t mean anything. It made me learn to find better adjectives. Now my personal hobby horse to fix is to quit using “just” so much.
prufrock
@Uncle Cosmo:
Glad I read through this thread before posting something similar.
Uncle Cosmo
@different-church-lady:
Even better fix. Because no one is ever going to convince a narcissist otherwise – their only way out of self-shittiness is Trump’s way: unload the shittiness on everyone else,
Uncle Cosmo
@prufrock: I pondered a few other candidates (knowtrino, nitwitrino, nuttrino) before I posted. Which one do you like? What was yours?
Brachiator
Well, 11:18 came around and sure enough, my smartphone exploded. Actually, no. An alert popped up, but fortunately it did not include Trump’s smiling face.
burnspbesq
As the quotes earlier in these comments attest, Trump is equal parts Sonny Corleone and Daffy Duck.
Fortunately, there is a one-day Duck Season coming up on 11/6.
KSinMA
@Mike in NC: Sums him in 13 words.
Gelflinh 545
@lollipopguild: On FB today somebody was querying what Trump’s motivation would have been for his revolting remarks on Dr. Blasey Ford. It occurs to me tha Trump’s motivation is soley the cheers of the crowd and he will become more and more outrageous as the crowd becomes accustomed to his current level and demands new outrage for their entertainment. He quite literally will do or say anything to keep the cheers coming. I will not be surprised if the day comes when he strips naked and defecates on the stage.
trollhattan
As a rotating banner, it seldom gets better than this.
Gelfling 545
Damn. In moderation for misspelling!
trollhattan
@waspuppet:
His long-time accountant knows. I’m hoping the dude is spelling it all out for Bobby Three-Sticks.
Leto
Conservative/GoP strategy since 1980. Grover Norquists tax pledge. Reagan’s, “I’m here from the government.” This is the end result of conservative governing philosophy, and yet 43% of the country is fine with this? I don’t know how many still self identify as conservative, but this is what they want: dysfunction, incompetence, corruption… racism too. They were perfectly fine to fund the government when it was just white people who were benefiting, but as soon as POC started to benefit, STARVE THE FUCKER! SHUT IT ALL DOWN! BURN IT TO THE GROUND! I hate these people.
I know this is dead thread but I felt like I needed to say that. I know most of you know that, but I still feel like I had to say it. I will always bring this up when idiots talk about a slow functioning, ill equipped government. Most of you fucks did this to yourselves and you’re honestly too stupid to understand what you did.
boatboy_srq
@Mnemosyne: Agreed. But hitching his wagon to tRump was hardly a sinecure to achieve that, so why take that risk? Especially as it became clear that Lord Dampnut was in it, not to win, but to scam all the campaign contributors?
boatboy_srq
@Manyakitty: Don’t know who would be more POd by Pence’s motivations: Putin and FSB discovering his Xtianistism, or FundiEvangelical Xtianists discovering his closet Orthodoxy.
J R in WV
@MoxieM:
Speaking of Trump:
This makes me glad !! I want him to have despair and black hole of depression inside his head, and for his heart to be continuously broken in his chest ~!!~ I take joy in his misery also, too!
I heard Mr Lewis beging interviewed on Fresh Air yesterday, it was a dumbfounding thing to hear about, especially the guy who turned up at the Energy dept, expecting it to be all about fossil fuel, and not being interested at all in the nuclear weapons infrastructure that consumes 90% of its budget and 100% of its worry. And wanting a long list of every government employee who ever even attended a meeting about global climate change — how stupid was that?
And putting a lawyer who runs Accuweather in charge of NOAA, a guy who’s spent a career trying to demolish the agency in charge of protecting us from hurricanes, blizzards, tornadoes, in order to profit from the data NOAA obtains at taxpayer expense. I hear that he hasn’t succeeded in being confirmed for is utter incompetence, which was also good to hear.
I think the book would be fascinating, a total reveal of the humiliating incompetence of the whole Trump administration from top to bottom, a distance of perhaps 3 mm or so.
artem1s
@Martin: Yeah, that’s basically what narcissm is – a permanent, futile exercise to prove you aren’t the loser/shitty person
you believe deep downthat you really are.mad citizen
@FelonyGovt: I’m right there with you on all three of guy your points. I read whatever gets posted here, but would rather not relive that awful night.
Vhh
@VOR: от русских олигарxов
BruceJ
This isn’t actually surprising, and has the same root as the complaint that the average salary of government jobs is so much higher than the national average: much of the work done by younger and lower paid workers has been contracted out to private companies: the federal government doesn’t hire janitors…they contract with a company to provide them, etc.
maryQ
This is such an indictment of the GOP establishment. That they fucking put us through this sick joke. Fuck them forever.
SiubhanDuinne
@Amir Khalid:
I agree! See my #47.
MomSense
@West of the Rockies:
It’s hell. I don’t think I’ll ever fully recover from it.
Sherparick
@Emma: I have been in the fetal position since 8 November 2016. With a bottle o single malt.
SRW1
So Trump/Pence was the real life version of “The Producer”?
Makes sense, hopefully the ending is the same.
Anne Laurie
@boatboy_srq:
In the short term, Pence just wanted to escape from Indiana before his outraged constituents fully caught up on how he’d grifted them.
In the longer term, he’s from a branch of Catholic revanchism that’s convinced each other he’s the figurehead “true Christian” who will step in to retrieve the “decency” of the Oval Office once the Anti-Christ has outed all the Lie-brals and Demon-rats for destruction. True
storypathology!