You know the drill: recent allegations only make Trump superfans love him more.
A former Trump World Tower doorman who says he has knowledge of an alleged affair President Donald Trump had with an ex-housekeeper, which resulted in a child, is now able to talk about a contract he entered with American Media Inc. that had prohibited him from discussing the matter with anyone, according to his attorney.
Can you imagine if a story like this, with money exchanging hands and a contract (whether or not the underlying allegations are true), hit a Democratic president?
But…all that matters are the races this fall. Let’s raise some more for Gary Trauner, who’s running for Senate in Wyoming, a cheap market where a dollar goes a long way. AND he’s a Balloon Juice reader.
Platonailedit
He better not be tom-toming that. #Jackals
Baud
There was a story that Bill had a child through one of his affairs but IIRC DNA testing disproved it.
Baud
The question is, why aren’t all the Dem candidates reading Balloon Juice.
OzarkHillbilly
Shhhhhh…. If that gets out his campaign will be sunk.
Doug!
@Baud:
There was no hush agreement involving it.
Bobby Thomson
@Baud: they know we’re all in the tank for Baud!
Baud
@Bobby Thomson: Yeah, you right.
Amir Khalid
@Gary Trauner:
If you’re a jackal, leave a comment. Better yet, link to some pet pics. You know we’re suckers for pet pics.
Schlemazel
When it turns out Dump has an illegitimate son his Xtian base will claim it as further proof he is gawds annointed. “After all” they will say “our entire religion is based on an illegitimate son”
Geoduck
At this point, it’s not The Base we need to reach, they’re gone. It’s everyone else. Hammer on the point, again and again and again, every day, this is what happens if you don’t get out and vote.
OzarkHillbilly
I am crying. Robin Williams doing a Shakespearean actor in a pron flick.
cleek
isn’t this doorman story the same one that was going around last year? and isn’t it a bit wacky? like too wacky to possibly be true?
Gvg
@cleek: trump is President. What is too wacky?
It is actually 2 stories. The story, and then the story about suppressing the story.
Frankensteinbeck
@Baud:
Good morning, Mr. Trauner.
MagdaInBlack
@cleek:
A year ago I would have agreed it’s “too wacky.”
Now…….who the f knows ?
Calouste
@cleek: I think the bigger part of the story is that this guy sold his story to the National Enquirer and they no longer hold him to the contract.
If they do that with him, why would they hold on to all the other stories they also paid for but never published? They will be forced to testify about them anyway in exchange for the immunity they got.
MagdaInBlack
Can this saga get much more sordid?
(Hold my beer, said the saga)
Suzanne
@Geoduck:
We can—and should—demoralize them enough that they stay home. Make them feel terrible.
Voting for many people is an important expression of self. I think this is bullshit, but it is. So we want the Trump voters who will never come to the side of right to feel shame for voting for Trump, so they at least just don’t vote.
hueyplong
@Suzanne: Or, put in their terms, because they’ll never blame themselves for anything, make them blame/despise the act of voting, which has let them down.
Suzanne
Can I confess some (I hope understandable) human frailty? I committed to canvassing in an hour, and it is SO HOT and I am SO OVERWORKED and the couch looks incredibly inviting.
Coffee. A podcast or maybe some Miles Davis. A book. Sigh.
scav
They really don’t get that the very least amusing or interesting thing is the lying or the coverup of the sexual gallivanting of one oranga donna (does rate a giggle for being so utterly predictabke). The real side-splitting belly laughs arise from watching the current demonstration of some sweetly slavish tongue-washing devotion marbled with chocolate hypocrisy being spread over a fairly banal shit sandwich by the strident superior moral-values crowd.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Suzanne: Stay hydrated. Put your water bottle in the freezer now so it’s super cold when you go out.
Thoughtful David
The idea that it could be true must have Melanoma fuming. She’s probably starting to cotton onto the idea that the big inheritance she’s expecting isn’t going to be so big, if it’s anything at all. Having to split it with yet another heir (I’d hope the child would sue to be included if there were any real money there) must drive her up the wall. But I really don’t care. Do u?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Thoughtful David: my latest crackpot theory that I think is totally true is that the $26 million of inaugural money that was paid to a friend of hers got laundered into a payment to Mrs Beast to keep her from filing those rumored divorce papers
Frankensteinbeck
@Suzanne:
Make them feel laughed at or viewed with contempt. Not hate, that makes them feel powerful. Hell, they will spell out exactly the tactic that works best – publicly mocking them for their stupidity, racism, and lack of class. They hate it. It infuriates them. They feel that way precisely because it also scares them. Trump is their avatar, and like them he wants to be seen as a dangerous enemy, not a pathetic loser. The latter makes them irrational, but it also depresses them – and they were already irrational.
Thoughtful David
On the dead thread below, I saw much discussion about pay for congresscritters.
My idea is that their pay should be pegged permanently to some multiple of the US median household income, which is now about $60,000. Let’s say, 3X median household income, which would be now about $180,000, about what they’re making now.
Then, the only way they could get a raise would be to increase the median income. This would have several beneficial effects:
* It’s pegged to inflation in that as household income increases, theirs would too, so no need ever for any increase.
* It’s a strong incentive to increase median household income. It makes the idea of a $15/hr minimum wage look good to them.
* If median income goes up, their income goes up 3X as fast, another strong incentive to raise median wage.
* If median income goes down, their income goes down 3X as fast, a strong incentive not to let that happen and a way to make them share the pain.
* The best way for them to raise the median income is to tax the shit out the 1% and pass it to the bottom half as income.
Platonailedit
Thoughtful David
Oh, and giving the top half big tax breaks doesn’t increase their income at all.
rikyrah
Something to make you smile ?? ?
Oh Roger!!
Robert Caruso (@robertcaruso) Tweeted:
Andrew Miller, former aide to Roger Stone who blew off two subpoenas from Mueller’s grand jury, granted immunity. t.co/aNUM0cOXSn twitter.com/robertcaruso/status/1033211350292602880?s=17
s
@cleek:
Dump paid to kill it, no it is not too wacky
Schlemazel
@Gvg:
Dump paid to kill it, no it is not too wacky
rikyrah
@Calouste:
They were coming after the company, which is why he flipped.
Platonailedit
@Thoughtful David:
Better yet, for every % rise of tax on 1%ers, they get a cut. What? Legalize corruption.
Suzanne
@Frankensteinbeck:
ERGH, my comment got eated by this fucken site. BLAR.
And their laziness. Don’t forget laziness.
This is actually a paradox that interests me. In that book that I keep talking about (“White Working Class” by Joan Williams), she discusses how the WWC has constructed their group identity around faith, discipline, and hard work. But in the discussion about why the WWC admires the rich but resents professionals (who actually do work for a living), Williams notes that the WWC thinks that professionals work too hard, that they concentrate too much energy and gain too much of a sense of self from career, and that they neglect their family responsibilities to focus on their jobs. It kills me that they somehow get to think of themselves as hard workers while actually looking down on people who work harder or at least more than they do.
Fair Economist
@Thoughtful David: Yes, paying Congresscritters a multiple of the median income is a great idea.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Suzanne: I haven’t read that book, but I heard Williams interviewed and she makes a good and thoughtful case. On the other end of the spectrum, here’s a great thread about the utterly ridiculous Salena Zito.
I’ll add one that isn’t in this thread. Zito trots out the old line about the high percentage of “evangelicals” who voted for trump, without bothering to mention what probably every political junkie on the internet knows, that the number refers only to white evangelicals
J R in WV
@Fair Economist:
Just as limiting CEO level pay to a smaller multiple of the average wage the corporation pays would be a good thing. Say, 10 times as much as the average worker’s take home. You would hear the squealing from miles away!
MagdaInBlack
I’m struggling with this. As a Democrat, and being of decidedly WWC income, in a very LARGE collision repair based corp, I find the prevailing attitude toward “The Professional Class”……is that they are basically lazy ass-kissers making far to much money while we prop them up. We see that they get far more lee-way with regard to tending to family than we in the ranks get very little. We see where the money and benefits go. We see how much play time they get…..
And then…despite seeing all this, so many of us vote Republican.
This is a puzzlement.
I’m just relating my experience, being among the tribe on a daily basis.
Suzanne
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I think Williams does a good job describing why there is a large subculture of people who would certainly be better off financially under Democratic policies but who just HAAAAAAATE us. I think she is right, and I also think that we liberals/progressives have constructed ourselves as compassionate and understanding and equity-minded, and that has kept us from really understanding this hatred as much as we should. Or we say that it’s racism, which is really just a slice of their motivation.
However, I am of the opinion that we should probably let those voters go (as a class—individuals are of course welcome to get on board) and construct a new coalition without them. The implications of what this class of people wants (according to Williams) in order to regain their relative position in American society are a hard NO from me.
MagdaInBlack
Id really miss my edit button ?
Another Scott
Donated++ It’s a long-shot, but we need to fight for every seat.
Thanks Doug!
Cheers,
Scott.
TopClimber
@Fair Economist: Given the cost of maintaining households in DC and their home district, I think $500K per year is about right. Recapture part of it based on rising personal income scale (-$10K for each $50 K of income >$500K, for instance). You want to make it possible for people of modest means but grassroots effectiveness to serve independently of sugar daddies.
Why would you want your Congress person to make less than a mediocre utility infielder on a major league baseball team? Paying them all a total of roughly $250 million to oversee a $4 trillion budget seems money well spent.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
MagdaInBlack
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I just want to strangle these people
Suzanne
@MagdaInBlack:
My experience is that professionals never take all of their vacation time (essentially giving back their compensation), work at least 10 hours a day with an hour commute each way, take more financial and professional risk, are almost always “on call” or answering email, and took out a shit-ton of student debt for this privilege. So it’s really hard to convince me that a bit of flexibility (like taking off an hour early to go to my kid’s curriculum night, like I did last week) is not a reasonable expectation for my job.
Considering how at least half of the people I have worked with in my professional career have a similar story, I have a really, REALLY hard time with the fact that I am being judged as simultaneously lazy/entitled and overly committed to my career by a class of people who, quite frankly, invented the punch-and-dump.
rikyrah
@rikyrah:
Sorry to report that this isn’t true??
He hasn’t flipped yet.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I clued into the hatred pretty easily because I grew up (b. 1967) in a family of “lifelong Democrats”– ethnic Chicago Irish, Roosevelt-Kennedy-Daley Democrats– that included, and honestly still includes, a lot economically secure trump types. I remember an old family friend telling me in ’92 that he was a “lifelong Democrat” for Buchanan. He was the kind of guy the media call “Reagan Democrats”, but I always say most of them were probably Nixon supporters. He died a long time ago, but his wife is still alive, and I’d be surprised if half of his eight kids weren’t trump voters– though a lot of that tribe, including my far-right, devout Catholic aunts and cousins, hate trump.
yeah, “cultural resentment” is broader than, even if it almost always includes, racism. I remember being very surprised to hear the very smart and very liberal Michael Tomasky say, without any irony that I could detect, that “bathrooms” were a challenging issue for his HRC-leaning mother and her friends.
Suzanne
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Williams also makes the very solid point that they way that have constructed masculinity in terms of certain kinds of work (military, construction, policing, factory work) and how it offered a provider role is critical. The suggestion that men go into so-called pink-collar fields in order to regain that provider role is resented. She extrapolates that some of the hostility to Black Lives Matter from this group is probably sexist in nature, as it is seen as tearing down (or at least questioning) the institution of policing, which is seen as a respected career for a man without a college degree.
MagdaInBlack
@Suzanne:
I am telling you what is believed by the people around me.
I am telling you what how it is seen at this level.
I am not here to defend either view: I can only relate what i hear and experience.
I work 10 hour days, as does everyone around me and leaving early for personal reasons is not well recieved unless you’re management. Trust me no one at our upper level skips their vacations. Or their early Fridays. Or their kids baseball games.
You can discount my personal experience, but, I am of the working class.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@MagdaInBlack: the head of the CBS news division, David Rhodes, was a protege of Roger Ailes who was hired away from Fox, and he no doubt brought a lot of people with him, people on camera and behind the scenes
MagdaInBlack
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
So the virus spread.
Suzanne
@MagdaInBlack: No, I get that you’re reporting rather than defending. I’m merely saying that plenty of professionals work really fucking hard, and it is really a whole lot of bullshit to be simultaneously considered lazy and too hardworking/morally unbalanced……but the rich, who actually ***do*** work less and inherit more are considered aspirational. That is some fucked-up shit. That is flat earth-level delusion.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Suzanne: I think no small part of trump’s success in selling himself as a successful “businessman” comes from his very Queens persona, the accent, the mangled syntax, the general sloppy schlubbiness– he must be a self-made guy cause no trust fund baby could be such a crude slob. Trump actually comes from “older” money than Romney– Gramma Trump was running a successful whorehouse when George Romney was hitchhiking back from Mexico–, but Willard is such natural-born toff I’m sure he put off a lot of lunch-bucket types
MagdaInBlack
@Suzanne:
Thus the level of resentment and misunderstanding at both levels.
Its an odd world I inhabit, a liberal Democrat in a blue collar workplace.
Consider me your imbedded reporter ?
Immanentize
@rikyrah: I mentioned this yesterday, but “flipping” and being granted immunity by are prosecutor are two totally different things. Flipping means cooperation for leniency. Sometimes, being granted immunity is part of the deal to flip….
But being granted immunity often just means the prosecutor is putting the screws to a witness who has pleaded the fifth and refuses to testify on the ground that it may incriminate them. Here is how that works — reluctant witness (like Stone’s aide) fights fights fights his grand jury subpoena. Then, when he loses all those battles, he goes to the Grand Jury and refuses to testify based on his fifth amendment rights. (More accurately, the person’s attorney informs the prosecutor that s/he will invoke the fifth if forced to appear before the G.J.) At that point, a prosecutor can remove any witnesses fifth amendment protection by granting immunity. There does not need to be any deal or any flipping at all. Then, that person has no fifth amendment basis for refusing to testify and if called to the G.J. either testifies, or goes to jail until they do.
Perfect example is Susan McDougal who, in the Whitewater investigation refused to flip, and then refused to testify based on the 5th. She was granted immunity by the prosecutors, recalled to the G.J, where she continued to refuse to testify. So, they put her in jail until she agreed to testify — which she never did. She ended up doing just shy of two years before they let her out.
So, take away: Being granted immunity =/= to flipping.
Suzanne
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Oh for sure. Williams makes a very solid point that Trump embodies the working class aspiration of having a lot of money without being of a higher class milieu.
What I think is really hard about this is that this cohort (obviously not all of the individuals, but the cohort) rejects everything they need to succeed in the 21st century economy: education, relocation to urban centers or at least prosperous areas, and potentially strategically selecting or changing career paths.
Suzanne
@MagdaInBlack: In my job (architect), I often work with blue-collar construction guys. Many of them make as much or more than I do. I am usually one of only 3 women maximum on a project, and I am almost always the most senior. Women architects (and black and Latinx architects) are still a rarity. And I, to put it mildly, do not come from wealth privilege. I have a serious issue with the class resentment that my minority colleagues and I experience from these guys. It’s a bunch of bullshit.
Frankensteinbeck
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I don’t think much of the base associates that with businessmen. Certainly not the ones I grew up around. They associate it with low level mafia goons and con men. I think the overwhelming part of selling himself as a successful businessman is that his supporters are heavily invested in him proving that shit-for-brains assholes are the smartest people on Earth and should always get their way.
Frankensteinbeck
@Suzanne:
I think you and I just said the same thing, looked at from a different direction.
Suzanne
@Frankensteinbeck: If out believe Williams, she says most working class people don’t know anyone who’s truly wealthy. They do know someone who opened a business doing what they did before, now does pretty well at it, and they think that this guy (almost always a guy) has earned his success and is honest and that all businessmen are like that.
Side note: I get annoyed when I hear people talk about how the trades are awesome and that plumbers make six figures ergo going to college is dumb. The boss owner plumber makes six figures. The twenty plumbers that work for that guy make 45K.
Luthe
@Thoughtful David: Someone else said they should get a housing allowance. Where the DC Housing Authority would find another 535 Section 8 vouchers i don’t know…
Mnemosyne
@MagdaInBlack:
@Suzanne:
I think part of the disconnect for both of yinz ? is that saying someone is part of the “professional class” used to mean someone who had a license from the state to perform specific professional tasks that required an extra level of schooling/training: doctors, lawyers, CPAs, architects, etc.
But nowadays, any asshole with an undergraduate degree in business and a manager title calls him or herself part of the “professional class.” I think the disconnect here is that Suzanne is thinking of the “professional class” as being the licensed professionals like herself, while Magda deals more with the second group.
MagdaInBlack
@Mnemosyne:
Perhaps we should refer to my group as the corporate managerial class?
MagdaInBlack
@Mnemosyne:
Or possibly “corporate a-holes?” As they say in the shop ?
MagdaInBlack
@Suzanne:
You’re getting a double-whammy: an educated woman on the job-site.
Ian
@MagdaInBlack:
Not sure the stereotype of WWC vs “professional workers” is accurate in reality as it is in newspaper reports. Most Trump voters, like most republicans, fall in between the 50-100000 income. To me that says mid-management and professional more than true working class.
I do not have the data on hand, but I believe that true ‘working class’ voters break heavily Democratic. hen one takes minorities out and only looks at white population the threshold for D vs R voter behaviour is around 45K$ a year.
Mnemosyne
@Mnemosyne:
That might help but, let’s face it, you were only calling them what they call themselves. And it’s a really, really common way that bad managers try to inflate their importance, which is why people can find themselves talking at cross-purposes about this stuff.
Ian
@TopClimber:
I’m confused, we keep assuming Congress critters “need” to buy a second house in DC.
What’s wrong with renting in DC or Nova? And how do all those people who live in DC manage to get by with so much less than 174K a year? Why do Congress critters “need” to fly back and forth every single time they arn’t in session.
Finally, if these congresscritters feel they are so poorly compensated, they can always vote to raise their own wages. It is a really cool perk.
Suzanne
@Mnemosyne: Perhaps. But I used to work in advertising, and those people mostly don’t have licenses or education beyond a bachelor’s. They’re just typical white-collar office workers. And they worked at least as hard as the blue-collar workers I encounter. Maybe not as much physical effort, but certainly more mental effort.
I honestly think blue-collar resentment of white-collar workers is at least partly about jealousy. Sorry not sorry.
Suzanne
@Ian: You are correct, but you are also making the same error a lot of people make, which is to conflate income with social class milieu. That is because we don’t really have a great set of shared language to discuss this stuff. The class of people we are imperfectly calling “white working class” is largely made up of people that make more money than one might expect, but they share subculture and folkways with people who make less.
Mnemosyne
@Suzanne:
And how many of them have had surgery to repair work-related injuries? Not mental health issues, but torn rotator cuffs or ligament tears directly caused by their jobs?
You’ll see a lot of advertising workers in their 60s or 70s, but not a lot of construction workers that age. If any.
Suzanne
@Mnemosyne: Oh for sure, no argument. But most of the ad people I worked with often worked nights and weekends and only had working vacations, and since they were salaried, no extra pay for that. And, quite frankly, they did more thoughtful work. They worked on the kinds of problems that don’t have clear instructions to solve, so they worked harder in a different way. Mental and intellectual labor is still labor. The idea that the only valuable work is physical is really a corrosive notion.
Emma
@MagdaInBlack: This is making Brazilian soap operas look like Shakespeare.
MagdaInBlack
@Mnemosyne:
Exactly: body men generally are burned out at 50- 55.
Point is maybe we are all unfamiliar with what other peoples jobs entail.
What we imagine creates resentment.
Walk in the other persons shoes might help.
Mnemosyne
@Suzanne:
Yeah, we agree more than we disagree — after all, I’m an aspiring novelist working a pink collar job, so obviously I know that intellectual work can be just as hard as physical work.
I wandered away for a bit and realized that I’m not quite doing justice to Magda’s argument and let myself go down the “what is work” rabbit hole when I didn’t mean to. I’m going to give two scenarios even though I’m pretty sure I know which one you would pick:
Let’s say that your assistant comes to you and says that she’d like to take a week of vacation in a couple of months (IOW she’s giving you plenty of warning and planning it based on the department’s calendar) so she can take her kids on a family road trip to Disneyland and see some sights. Would your response be:
(A) “Wow, it sounds like you guys are going to have a great time! Of course you can have that week off. I want to hear all about it when you get back!”
Or is it
(B) (heavy sigh) “You know how busy we are right now, and I don’t know what the workload is going to be that week. I just don’t think we can spare you for a whole week.”
Now, as I said, I think I’ve known you long enough that you would give answer A, assuming that there aren’t any upcoming projects your assistant doesn’t know about yet, in which case you would ask her to pick a different week within reasonable proximity to her request.
Magda works at a place where the answer for workers at her level is always B. It’s never a good time for her or her coworkers to use their vacation time, but the managers’ requests always get approved. That’s the kind of shit that causes resentment within the ranks and gets workers to think ill of the professional (managers) class.
Citizen Alan
@Mnemosyne:
I’m suddenly reminded over the British sitcom “Are You Being Served” in which a recurring plot point involved the men and women who worked as sales people for a somewhat fashionable London department store were desperate to believe that they were of a higher class than all the grunts who worked in maintenance and the packing department, even though the ladder were better paid and had better benefits as a result of their union membership.
Suzanne
@Mnemosyne: First off, I don’t have an assistant. There are junior staff members, and unless there is absolutely some world-melting complete crisis, everyone at my office gets to take their PTO time off when they want as long as they give reasonable notice. HOWEVER, I am a client manager, and it is expected that I will provide client service when my clients want it, even if I am on PTO. I call in to meetings when I am sick, or on vacation, or on weekends or evenings. I work weekends and have canceled vacation plans to accommodate deadlines. And I will also note that junior staff are not expected to do this. The higher up you are on the totem pole in my profession, more is expected. That is entirely reasonable to me. I very much encourage my colleagues to take their PTO and enjoy their personal lives. But that doesn’t mean that I always do it.
Mnemosyne
And that’s how it ought to be — the higher-ups get paid more because they’re expected to make more sacrifices to get the work done.
Unfortunately, a lot of managers have decided that if they have to make sacrifices, everyone under them should have to make those same sacrifices. G was sometimes called back from vacation when he was working as an order entry clerk, because they just couldn’t let an hourly employee take a full week off without everything falling apart. ?
I don’t begrudge my boss her vacation time and early days for childcare, because she never begrudges me my days off and encourages me to do stuff like go to writing conferences. If she did begrudge me those days off while taking her same time off for the same reasons, I would resent it like hell, and it sounds like that’s what’s going on at Magda’s company.
Shorter me: managers taking time off while expecting their subordinates to make sacrifices is pretty much a recipe for an unhappy workplace.
GTfromWY
Ok Juicers. Here’s Yoda (white girl) and Lynx (gray young woman) relaxing at home in beautiful Wilson, WY. Maybe next years pet calendar?
dropbox.com/s/uneepjkp1mwcjr2/IMG_0050.JPG?dl=0
GTfromWY
@Frankensteinbeck: Good
Morning baud ?