(h/t Satby)
From July 2024: Fintan O’Toole, at the New York Review of Books — “For the fixers, enablers, and vassals who surround Donald Trump, the rewards of his friendship are not worth the risks”:
… Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy gives us the fullest sense of what it’s like to be a hanger-on in the court of a capricious narcissist. A pair of courtiers compare such a life to playing chess in the dark, on a board of jelly, with chessmen made of butter. Over the course of the three novels, two dazzlingly successful servants of Henry VIII, Thomas Wolsey and his protégé, Thomas Cromwell, lose the king’s favor. They are stripped of power and then of life. This downfall, in the world Mantel conjures in such convincing detail, is inevitable. The psychopathic ruler’s ultimate expression of power is the destruction of those on whom he has relied most, the ones who have been such good servants that they have developed the temerity to imagine themselves as indispensable. In the end Cromwell is forced to reflect that “Henry has ground and ground me in the mill of his desires, and now I am fined down to dust I am no more use to him, I am powder in the wind. Princes hate those to whom they have incurred debts.”
Yet Mantel’s novels also show that where there is risk, there can be reward. We understand why Wolsey and Cromwell, who are no fools, accept the hazards implicit in the task of navigating the big boss’s whims, rages, moods, and desires. The recompense is as lavish as the danger is acute. They get to build opulent palaces for themselves. They eat the best food and wear the finest clothes. They establish their own satellite courts with their own hangers-on and loyal retainers. They shine with the reflected luster of the monarch’s power and prestige. Part of what makes the novels so gripping is that the risk seems just about worth it. Ultimately it may have been a losing game, but while it lasted it gave these consummate players immense pleasure.
This is one of the things that is so peculiar about Trump’s nexus of power: the rewards are not worth the risks. He hates those to whom he has incurred debts. In her book Confidence Man, Maggie Haberman quotes an anonymous longtime friend who says that “being close to Trump was like ‘being friends with a hurricane.’” He is more a black hole than a sun king. Mantel’s Cromwell, in serving his master, imagines that “I have had my soul flattened and pressed till it’s not the thickness of paper.” Many of Trump’s servants—even if they had souls to begin with—have been so flattened and pressed by the overwhelming density of his self-regard that one has to wonder why others continue to propel themselves into his field of gravity. The typical autocrat revels in his power to give and take; Trump takes everything but gives back only grief and shame.
On April 21, 2018, Robert Costello, acting as a go-between for Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, sent an e-mail to Cohen. Less than a fortnight earlier federal agents had raided Cohen’s office and seized documents related to the $130,000 payment Cohen had made to Daniels on Trump’s behalf. The purpose of Costello’s e-mail was to reassure Cohen that he would be protected: “I spoke with Rudy. Very, very positive. You are loved…. Sleep well tonight. You have friends in high places. Bob. P.S. Some very positive comments about you from the White House.” At Trump’s trial, Costello confirmed that “‘friends in high places’ definitely refers to President Trump.” When Cohen was asked, “What did you understand Mr. Costello to mean by ‘you are loved,’ by whom?” he answered, “By President Trump.”
This is how hierarchies of autocratic power are supposed to operate. Vassals like Cohen do their master’s bidding, and in return they have friends in high places who will protect them from the consequences of their nefarious actions and reward them for their service. But no object of Trump’s love gets to sleep well. Cohen went on to spend thirteen and a half months behind bars and a year and a half in home confinement. He is just one of hundreds of Trump’s supporters and followers who have endured humiliation and disgrace.
Giuliani filed for bankruptcy last December, has lost his license to practice law in New York, may be about to lose his license in Washington, D.C., and faces criminal indictments in Georgia and Arizona. His old age is shadowed by the knowledge that he will die broke and dishonored. The same goes for Allen Weisselberg, the former chief financial officer of the Trump Organization and perhaps Trump’s most trusted functionary. He was sentenced in April to five months in jail after pleading guilty to two counts of perjury during his boss’s civil trial for fraud. It is his second sojourn in the notorious Rikers Island jail—he served one hundred days there in 2023 for offenses committed as Trump’s right-hand man.
Political enablers like Mark Meadows, Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, George Papadopoulos, Roger Stone, Peter Navarro, and Sidney Powell have faced—or still face—various criminal charges. Even those (like Flynn, Stone, and Manafort) whom Trump pardoned had to pay large legal bills and will always bear the stamp of criminality. Lawyers who were sucked into Trump’s orbit—including Jenna Ellis, Kenneth Chesebro, Jeffrey Clark, and John Eastman—are under indictment for their parts in Trump’s schemes to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election. So are dozens of people who served as fake electors. And more than 460 Trump supporters have been imprisoned for taking part in the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Among the 244 people who received felony convictions connected to the invasion, the average sentence has been about three and a half years. These are catastrophic outcomes, destroying relationships, careers, and reputations. The prize for their devotion to Trump is a world of pain…
Or consider the pitiful fate of Chris Christie. He imagined himself to be not just a political ally of Trump but a close personal friend; as Christie wrote in his hilariously self-pitying memoir, Let Me Finish, “He told me he loved me.” In return, as governor of New Jersey, Christie became the first senior member of the Republican establishment to endorse Trump for the party’s presidential nomination in 2016—a gesture that marked Trump as a serious contender rather than a mere insurgent outsider. Christie then spent nearly six months leading a team of 140 people to draw up detailed plans for the transition to a putative Trump presidency. When Trump was duly elected and Christie arrived at Trump Tower with his thirty binders full of blueprints for the new administration, they were sent straight to the dumpster and Christie was informed by Bannon that “we do not want you to be in the building anymore.” …
NotMax
“Only the best people.”
West of the Rockies
It is utterly befuddling how so many people find this hideous, heinous toad charming, manly, competent, and honorable. Flummoxed, I am.
The Unmitigated Gaul
“Everything Trump touches, dies.”
THE epigram for the era.
Eolirin
@The Unmitigated Gaul: He’s unfortunately grabbed the whole country by its whatever, and I’m pretty sure that counts as touching, so it’s not so comforting.
Viva BrisVegas
Wolsey and Cromwell were “butcher’s boys”, they took the only road to the top available to them.
What is more interesting is why the Howards and Boleyns, who already had it all, kept ruining their lives for Henry and throwing their daughters at him.
WTFGhost
@West of the Rockies: I truly think one of the problems liberals had in 2016 was, they didn’t mock him the way he deserved to be mocked, and instead spoke of their fear of him. Well, that makes him look strong, when we needed to make him look ridiculous.
By letting him look like our worst nightmare, people who hate liberals put their hopes into him, that he would break the stranglehold liberaldom had on the US economy, so we can all sit around all day, figuring out our Alaskan whaling ship tax credit, instead of, you know, working.
kindness
When Trump finally falls from the heights, we have to make sure all his fixers & hangers-on fall with him. Most will find another overly wealthy patron to service. Others will become pundits. None will toss themselves off buildings or bridges. Liberals aren’t Putin after all.
Shalimar
It’s even worse than the author described for Christie. After the humiliation of 2016, he came back in 2020 to help Trump with debate prep again and almost died from Covid because of it.
BellyCat
To be captured in a narcissist’s orbit feels incredibly good… until it doesn’t.
hitchhiker
I love those Hilary Mantel books. The Henry VIII she conjures in them is just as much of a self-absorbed asshole as trump, but I never got the sense that he took any pleasure in watching his hangers-on and former favorites fall.
It was more like, he found it sad and felt a little sorry for himself that he’d been taken in. In trump we have a much stupider and much more cruel narcissist. Henry would agonize over whether it was really true that so many men from his inner circle had been boinking the queen.
But trump would just say they were, pretend to be indignant, throw public fits, and claim to be justified in ripping them off, sending them to prison/beheading them, and generally humiliating them and their families forever.
That’s the part he likes, really. Not the supplication and fawning, but the knowledge that he can make a fool of anybody he wants, and they won’t see it coming until it’s on them.
God, remember when he left Priebus standing on the tarmac and then fired him by tweet?
Hungry Joe
I can’t fathom how so many people who have slithered their way to the near-top, and could by this time in their lives live in relative luxury while retaining their self-respect, have become slavish lickspittles to this fatuous, cartoon-like grotesquery, humiliating themselves before him day after week after month. I mean, it’s beyond me.
Gretchen
I’ll have to reread the Wolf Hall trilogy. It’s very good.
Gretchen
@hitchhiker: Or when he claimed that Rex Tillerson was on the toilet when he fired him? He loves humiliating people who displease him.
he’d love to be able to order executions. I bet he’d attend and mock them as the ax falls.
gene108
@kindness:
From what I understand, not being a lawyer, the way Jack Smith withdrew the insurrection case means it can still be filed again. There’s an opportunity for the next Democratic AG to restart the case.
I’m not sure whether or not the documents case can be refiled, regarding how the immunity ruling affects it, and Trump has now formerly declassified those documents and sent them to Mar-a-Lago.
Some of his conspirators have fallen, like Gulliani, Lindell, and Eastmen. Problem is Trump pardoned others like Manafort, Flynn, Stone, and Bannon.
What we need to destroy is the entire right-wing propaganda and political networks that prop up unemployable racist assholes like Miller, and convince their listeners how Trump’s lies are true. I don’t know how it’s possible.
Captain C
@WTFGhost: They chose ‘Dangerous Don’ over ‘Deadbeat Donnie’, the latter of which would allowed them to mock him for bankrupting 3 casinos and running an entire football league into the ground (‘This is America, if you can’t make money on gambling and football you are a truly bad businessman…’). I guess they went with their own fears instead of trying to zap Deadbeat Donnie’s actual appeal (besides his white Christian male supremacism and general assholery).
different-church-lady
@Captain C:
And then history repeated.
gene108
@Captain C:
I have a belief that men who are naturally loud like Trump, a former co-worker of mine, and so on create a few impressions from the volume at which the declare things:
1. They know what they’re talking about. The volume conveys their confidence.
2. They’re shouty know-nothings at best, and raging assholes at worst.
Plus the way someone’s voice naturally sounds makes a big impression on people like how deep it is or nasally or how strong the local accent is, etc.
I’m convinced that if Barack Obama had a high pitched voice like Mike Tyson, he wouldn’t have done as well in politics.
There’s bunch of unconscious subtle things that attracts people to each other, which are hard to explain. The sound of someone’s voice plays a big role in this.
This is one reason Hillary and Kamala lost. Too many people do not associate women as strong authority figures, because they cannot come off like the men society has promoted as strong leaders for so long.
Edit: Also, the media propping up Trump in 2016 and savaging Hillary played an outsized role in the election no amount of sloganeering was going to fix.
Tehanu
@Hungry Joe:
Well said. I can’t figure it out either.
Baud
@WTFGhost:
IIIRC, in 2016, most people thought Hillary was going to win and the focus was on cutting her down to size and putting her in her place before she took office.
montanareddog
@Hungry Joe: I think you have fallen for survivorship bias. You are not factoring in all the rich people who have not become slavish lickspittles. Most of them are not outspoken enough, maybe, but they are not humiliating themselves in his service.
Those that do do his bidding are, by definition, people of low character who would always be acolytes for a bully. In this case, they have attracted the eye of the über-bully.
Baud
Nelle
@Gretchen: I’m rereading them now, with an online group doing a slow read. If interested in jumping in, look for “footnotesandtangents.”
Elizabelle
@Nelle: Signed up for footnotes and tangents. Gosh, I would like to read War and Peace one of these years.
Betty Cracker
I really hope Pam Bondi eventually joins the ranks of people who were destroyed and disgraced by their association with Trump. We are contemporaries from the same region, so I witnessed her rise in the baroquely corrupt and cartoonishly evil FL GOP. I remember when she first crawled from under her rock as an assistant state attorney and TV spokesmodel at the county level decades ago, then state AG under the vile Rick Scott and now U.S. AG and personal lawyer for the kleptocracy under Trump.
I’m relishing the fact that she’s been hoist with her own petard in the Epstein scandal. I’m also puzzling over what the hell she could have been thinking when she ratcheted up the expectations of the online conspiracy theory “influencer” loons AFTER the election, handing out those binders of recycled media reports labeled “Epstein Files Part 1” and teasing bombshells to come.
I mean, before the election, sure, lie about lots of shit to get votes. It’s the Trump/Republican way. But after? She’s a dumb, grasping rube, and seeing her exposed as such would be immensely satisfying.
Princess
One thing Mantel’s books argue (and this piece misses but it tracks with its larger point) is that Cromwell was doing all he did not only for personal wealth and prestige but also because he was a committed Protestant and he wanted to advance that agenda.
Princess
@Betty Cracker: Could Biondi have genuinely not believed he was involved? Did she take him at face value, assuming if he promised to make the stuff public it was because he knew he wasn’t in it. And then was she shocked to find out he was all over it?
Betty Cracker
@Princess: Maybe? It’s difficult to imagine being so credulous, dumb and sloppy, especially since copious visual evidence of Trump and Epstein’s friendship has been in the public domain for years. I assume she has plenty of legal connections here in FL who could have clued her in, but maybe she didn’t ask, or maybe they can’t stand her and didn’t offer?
Bondi’s state level career was pockmarked with episodes where she did something stupid or breathtakingly tacky and/or illegal and got publicly exposed. Only in the Republican Party could such an idiot steadily fail upwards like Bondi has.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@gene108: Even better is if we could get that propaganda network to turn on Republicans. That’s essentially what’s terrifying them about the Epstein blow-up. Parts of that apparatus are turning on them over it.
It’s enjoyable for us but as I said a few days back it also once again proves that the entire news media dances to whatever tune the MAGA base calls, which thoroughly sucks. If Trump’s supporters had all followed his lead and just accepted that there’s no there there it wouldn’t have turned into a multi-week political controversy.
We really need to find a way to change that dynamic because having everything covered through the lense of MAGA framing and spin is problematic for us but also just awful in general because they’re awful people with awful takes and having everything discussed from their point of view sucks.
Baud
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
I don’t link to the NYT, but saw this headline.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: Uthmeier is every bit as corrupt and evil as Bondi and possibly even more inept. I’m hoping his career will become a casualty of the simmering lower-level feud between the Trump and DeSantis factions in the FL GOP.
Baud
Josh Johnson has such smooth skin. It’s like a baby.
Shalimar
Finally looked at the video of Trump cheating at golf that is going around. I knew he has no integrity, which is why I didn’t bother to look at it until now. What strikes me is how little exercise he gets from a sport that could be lots of walking each day. Drives golf cart to within 5 feet of ball that caddy dropped for him. Has 2 caddies to go in front of him and do whatever he needs so he only has to get out to swing the clubs. I have never seen anyone play with 2 caddies before, and I lived in a condo on a golf course for 2 decades. 7th hole literally 50 feet from my 2nd-story balcony.
karensky
Awesome post. Thanks for a good Monday start.
Betty Cracker
@Shalimar: Did you catch a lot of stray drives? We lived a block over from a golf course when I was a teen and would frequently find errant balls in our yard. Some kids would recover balls from water hazards to resell, and you could make pretty good money doing that, as long as you remembered to check for gators before diving in.
satby
@Baud: He’s a really handsome kid (he’s 35) and I think his comedy gets a little boost by the surprise that such a young looking kid produces really profound monologues.
Nelle
@Elizabelle: I galloped through War and Peace a couple of decades ago, skimming most of the war chapters (because I was young and being a busy anti-war activist). Now, a chapter a day since January 1, I see so much more, liking it so much more.
vigilhorn
@Baud: The Christianists are not going to be happy about this.
zhena gogolia
@Gretchen: I just finally finished the last book. It’s true that it paints a terrifying picture of being in thrall to a narcissistic, sadistic king. And Lewis and Rylance performed it so well.
Geminid
Media slut Lindsey Graham showed up on Meet The Press yesterday, in his favorite role of foreign policy maven. Host Kristen Welker asked Graham what he thought would happen in Gaza since ceasefire talks deadlocked last week.
Jerusalem Post correspondent Amichai Stein posted a one and a half minute clip of Graham’s remarks, with an excerpt:
Barak Ravid reposted Stein’s comment with his own:
Barack Ravid writes for Washigton-based Axios and also reports for Israel’s Channel 12 TV, which prints a lot of news stories. I follow Ravid’s Twitter account for the links to his own reporting, but also because he reposts plenty of other good Israeli and Middle Eastern journalists.
artem1s
Because daughters are expendable. Fathers, uncles, and brothers use them to buy access or a connection. They either stay in the mistress/whore role or get a marriage proposal. Either way they reproduce and solidify the connection or they don’t. It was the hubris of men that made them believe Henry’s inability to produce an heir was the fault of their daughters, and not the King’s syphilitic body. The Boleyn’s likely thought they could put a cuckold on the throne and in the end may have with Elisabeth. But they had to keep reaching for that male heir and sealed their fate. The only smart wife was the one who decided not being ‘a ten’ was the best possible outcome for her as outliving him didn’t seem likely at the time. She was smart enough to extricate herself from that circle of hell.
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone 😊 😊 😊
artem1s
Good God. Sanders is the reason. He was the distraction that kept the spotlight off Trump until it was too late. THE GOP FAILED to mock him as the clown he was. They could have kept him from the nomination but somehow couldn’t keep shivving each other long enough to see the corner they were backing themselves into.
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
lowtechcyclist
@artem1s:
They didn’t take his candidacy seriously until it was too late for them.
Gvg
@gene108: from what I understand, anything related to nuclear secrets can only be unclassified by Congress because of Cold War era laws. So if he had anything related to that, he is still on the hook, with a resolute Congress. I think a few of the docs were rumored to be. I wouldn’t want a clear answer to be published since it’s supposed to be secret.
There has been a lot of detail about classification rules I didn’t know, or had forgotten. Probably we need to update some things although I don’t know what you do about bad faith and stupidity in multiple branches of government at the same time. Which comes from the electorate. We have had it safe for generations and are not thinking about true priorities. This current crisis supposedly over a loss of white male prestige is petty trivia emotion. They could loose the wealth of generations and safety that our ancestors built by not understanding foundations of democracy, economics and seriously ignoring the rest of the world.
satby
@lowtechcyclist: the GOP and the media. No one took his chances seriously, Clinton was “inevitable” so weakening her before she got into office was the M.O. of all of them.
And nothing has been learned since by a lot of the previous offenders.
Baud
@satby:
I think they learned that it works.
Geminid
@lowtechcyclist: Yesterday we were talking about media coversge of the Gaza war and it occurred to me that you might appreciate 972 Magazine. It’s produced by Israeli and Palestinian journalists.
JML
@lowtechcyclist: The GOP primaries in 2016 were absolutely insane when you consider the level of tactical and strategic malpractice that went on; the Orange Idiot was leading from the jump and they all acted like they could just wait him out rather than take him on. Rubio’s literal strategy to the nomination involved him not winning any primaries (ludicrous), and the entire pack of them spent all their time attacking whomever was in 2nd or 3rd place, not tearing down the leader.
As a result, they handed the GOP over to the Trump Crime Family, which has been utterly and probably irretrievably infected by it.
Geminid
@lowtechcyclist: What impressed me about Trump’s 2016 nomination was the collapse of the Republican establishment. I think Bush’s stupid and destructive Iraq war contributed to this by discrediting the establishment that the Bushes represented
Ed. That war had far-reaching effects. I think much of the conflict in the Middle East today stems from that destabilizing project.
stinger
I love O’Toole’s writing.
What I’d really like to see hammered on, everywhere and loudly, is that Trump’s supporters and followers, like Wolsey and Cromwell in their day, must commit crimes in order to be “loved”. It’s one thing to vote for him, to hang signs for him. But to commit vote fraud, to use your signs to assault police officers, to pay off a hooker using campaign funds — you become a criminal at that moment. It’s a problem not just with Henry’s or Trump’s psychopathology; it’s not just one evil guy at the top. It’s the hundreds and thousands of people willing to do evil themselves. The Republicans I know are so self-righteous. At bottom do they all have a hole in their morality?
Shalimar
@Betty Cracker: Lots and lots. 1-2 balls on the balcony each week and an endless number in the bushes that people didn’t bother to look for. I have never paid for a golf ball in my life
They cleared the gators out when I was young (parents bought the place when I was 9), but snakes were always a hazard.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: We have also given the media a veto over our nominee for the presidency.
evodevo
@vigilhorn:
Yes. This. With all the talibangelicals currently serving in various agencies, along with anti-vaxx BrainWorm heading HHS, I’m wondering how much sand will be thrown in the gears regarding this. Or how it will make it overseas to places like Africa where it could be a game-changer. Fingers crossed that the Xtian right won’t notice until it’s firmly established.
Dorothy A. Winsor
The comparison to Henry VIII’s followers is enlightening. As O’Toole points, the reward for Trump followers isn’t worth it. That they take the risk anyway says something bad about them. Like Bondi.
Also, if Bondi goes down, can she take that press secretary with her? They look so much alike, maybe karma won’t be able to tell them apart
Princess
@Dorothy A. Winsor: That’ll teach them all to use the same plastic surgeon.
stinger
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Glad I’m not the only one!
David Collier-Brown
@zhena gogolia:
I wonder if there are any historians who wrote about how to survive rulers like “Prince John”. Sort of the inverse of Machiavelli.
Maybe en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiero_(Xenophon) ?
Moondoggus
@Betty Cracker:
Wasn’t Bottle Blondi FL AG during the Epstein plea deal? I’m pretty sure she knew exactly what was going on and who was involved. When a billionaire is indicted, people notice.
what Bondi didn’t count on was Patel and Bongino being true believers in the Epstein conspiracy. Part 2 was supposed to be a quickly manufactured list of the supposed conspiracy, instead the FBI had the actual documents and those 2 idiots wanted to know the real truth.
which is, of course, that there are tapes of Trump raping minors
stinger
@Baud:
@Baud:
Thanks for these bits of good news!
stinger
@stinger:
I guess the point I’m trying to feel my way to, like getting fingertips all the way to the end of the glove, is that what men like Trump and Henry want is not just a “favor”, it’s a crime they want you to commit on their behalf; you yourself will gain nothing from it. Then and only then will they “love” you. Until, of course, they don’t.
Scout211
Alexander Acosta
Betty
@Betty Cracker: I saw that he is being investigated as part of a corruption inquiry DeSantis and his buddies ran. Hope they get the whole gang. Sorry I don’t recall the details offhand.
Betty
@Geminid: When do we start calling these guys baby killers? Netanyahu and his bombing/ starvation tactics and Trump/Musk/Republicans destroying USAID and cutting Medicaid and SNAP benefits. They are deliberately killing babies. We need to say that.
UncleEbeneezer
@artem1s: Sanders is only a symptom not the cancer itself. The cancer is the fact that a significant chunk of our coalition exists only to bash Dems and eagerly embrace obvious attempts to throw elections to Republicans. The cancer is the fact that so many of the people we need to come together to keep Republicans out of power are always more interested in pushing Dems to the Left, holding Dems “accountable” etc., even if it means destroying everything good we’ve fought for and accomplished over decades. They sabotaged Gore in 2000, Hillary in 2016 and then Biden/Harris in 2023-4. And here we are…
Eyeroller
Henry VIII might have had an excuse of sorts, since he almost certainly suffered from some form of CTE and possibly an explicit TBI in 1536. He had four well-documented serious concussions (of course, they didn’t know what that was at the time), including the 1536 incident, and probably several smaller ones, mostly due to jousting and pole vaulting. Trump has no such excuse.
Soprano2
@stinger: It’s like being in the mob, except there’s no loyalty to anyone except the leader. The leader has no loyalty to you at all.
Eyeroller
@UncleEbeneezer: A while ago, somebody here linked to an article in Slate about how the Democratic Party became dominated by consultants. I am intereted in that topic so I started to read it, but noped out immediately when the author(s) claimed that the party and IIRC the consultants “put their thumbs on the scale” for Hillary in 2016. The next clause was about how they’d also “covered up Biden’s decline” but by that point they’d outed themselves as Berners and lost all credibility to me, so I didn’t care to read what they had to say about that controversy.
On the rather rare occasions when we do get a “left” voice in the media it so often seems to be these Berner-type white males.
Geminid
@Princess: I’ll give the plastic surgeon worked on Rubio credit. Rubio’s face used to look kind of soft, but now it looks chiseled.
Albatrossity
I live for the day when the ultimate TACO remora, Stephen Miller, feels the revenge of the shark he has so dutifully served. And that day will come.
zhena gogolia
@Elizabelle: You should. I recommend the Maude translation edited by Amy Mandelker, Oxford World Classics.
frosty
It’s like organized crime. Once you’re a Made Man, you’re part of the inner circle.
Miss Bianca
@Eyeroller: “pole vaulting”? Henry? I mean, the jousting I knew about – he was a mighty man in the tiltyard, from everything I’ve read – but by 1536 he was already pretty large…//
On a somewhat more serious note, I mentioned last night, speaking of Wolf Hall, that I’ve been reading this book called The Man on a Donkey, which covers a lot of the same time period and events as the Wolf Hall trilogy, and which probably influenced Hilary Mantel. The view we get of Cromwell from Prescott is…quite a bit different from Mantel’s. On the other hand, the view of Henry as a terrifyingly self-absorbed, raging narcissist is quite consonant with Mantel’s.
Elizabelle
@zhena gogolia: Thank you. The Internet Archive has that version. May commit to a paper copy once I see how it goes.
Geminid
@Miss Bianca: One aspect of Henry VIII’s upbringing that likely helped form his personality was that he was the second son of Henry VII. Henry grew up in the shadow of his older brother Arthur, who was five years older and much praised. Then Arthur died unexpectedly in 1502, when Henry was eleven years old.
So Henry inherited his brother’s position, and became King in 1509. But he also ended up inheriting Arthur’s wife, Catherine of Aragon. That was a constant source of frustration throughout Henry’s early years as King.
zhena gogolia
@Elizabelle: Let me know if you have any questions!
Miss Bianca
@Geminid: Henry is a fascinating and repellent character. Emblematic of the problems invested in giving anyone “Soo-preme Executive Power”, as Dennis the Peasant would put it.
Lord Darcy, one of the characters in the Prescott book, reflects on the fact that he’s old enough to have lived through Richard III’s reign and death and seen that monarch stripped naked and thrown across the back of a horse. “How times have changed” is kind of the underlying theme of those musings.
zhena gogolia
@Miss Bianca: “Pole vaulting” gave me pause as well! Hard to picture! But I guess he was skinnier then.
Citizen_X
Melania: “What, are you a fuckeeng eediot?”
artem1s
Bullshit. They wanted the MAGAts votes. They didn’t want to be seen as the one who knocked him out. All they had to do was make deal between the 7-8 of them and then go Ides of March on him. Whoever the voters picked as the bad guy to punish would get a cabinet seat of his choice.
Only Santorum and Christie had the guts to call him what he was to his face during those sham debates. Hell the NeverTrump GQP could have kept him out of the debates from the beginning when he was still in single digits. They were afraid of Faux News making them the bad guy who was a DC insider knocking out the guy who would finally drain the swamp. And those debates brought the GQP loads of money. But as we all know, the GQP cannot play nice with one another while they fighting over who gets to be the head grifter and in control of the party money.
ETtheLibrarian
Mantel’s Bringing up the Bodies had an interesting description of Henry VII that seems like she wrote it about trump (emphasis mine).
Miss Bianca
@ETtheLibrarian: This seems to be a description of universal traits of the authoritarian leader.
Another Scott
@artem1s: I think the GQP ended up being rudderless when JEB! (“please clap!”) imploded. They thought that he was going to run away with it.
There’s no coincidence that Donnie announced he was running on June 16, 2015 – a day after JEB! He wanted to punish JEB because he didn’t let him build a stupid casino.
It’s petty vindictiveness all the way down with 47.
And the GQP is brittle. If things don’t go the way they plan, they don’t know what to do – except throw everything at the wall (Herman 9-9-9 Cain was leading for a while, remember!??) to hope something will stick and let them gain/hold power.
Grr…
Best wishes,
Scott.
Paul in KY
@Viva BrisVegas: The Howards felt (IMO) as they were on thin ice with both Henry VII and Henry VII. It was not a secret that once Edward IV shanghaied the Dukedom of Norfolk for his son Richard (thus disinheriting the Howard family), the Howards worked and funded Richard III and reaped the benefits (the Duchy of Norfolk), when Richard usurped the throne and had Edward’s sons judged bastards, etc. etc.
The wife of Henry VII and the mother of Henry VII was young Richard’s older sister.
Paul in KY
@Princess: Good point on Cromwell’s motivations. He ran up continuously on the fact that Henry VIII didn’t mind much of Catholicism, just hated that the pope had authority over him.
Paul in KY
@artem1s: There was no knowledge of genetics back then. Man supplying the sex, etc. etc.
If Ann was really boffing all those guys, it was only because she was desperate to get pregnant again, and Henry couldn’t do the job. I assume she was going to pass off the kid as his. If she’d lucked out and had a boy, he probably would have gone along as he was frantic to have a male heir.
Paul in KY
@artem1s: Heard the GQP had boatloads of oppo for him had he won the nom. I think they thought (rightly or wrongly) that he’d be easier to beat than Hillary.
Paul in KY
@Eyeroller: Good points. They did think he’d died in 1536. His other physical ailments also did him no favours (personalitywise).
MrPug
The gist of the post about Trump’s lack of loyalty really is the eternal mystery to me about him, or more correctly, the sycophants that surround, enable and take punishment for him. I know even some Democratic politicians and liberal pundits acknowledge Trump’s charisma, but I just don’t even understand that. For me he is one of the least charismatic celebrities in the history of the known universe (if negative charisma is a thing, then, well, Trump is easily the GOAT of that).
The man simply possesses not a single admirable or redeemable quality and on top of that throws the people who commit his crimes to the wolves and yet he never seems to have a shortage of willing sycophants willing to sacrifice everything to a man who wouldn’t piss on them if they were on fire.
Geminid
@Paul in KY: Oh my Goodness, did the Republicans ever have a lot of oppo research on Sanders! I read as much as I could about Sanders in the runup to the 2020 primaries. There was a lot to read once I got into state and local reporting about his life before he became Mayor of Burlington– which was the first job Sanders ever held more than few months in his entire adult life. I could just hear Karl Rove licking his chops.
Paul in KY
@Geminid: He had some unusual free-love ideas back in the 70s I heard.
dnfree
@Nelle: I read War and Peace (just for fun ) in high school. Pretty sure I missed a lot.
Kayla Rudbek
@Betty Cracker: I feel a similar way about Coathanger Barrett.
Kayla Rudbek
@stinger: in my opinion and experience, yes, they do have a hole, the whole “god and the king can do nothing wrong” hole.