EVANGELICALS: Lord, if I'm wrong show me a sign!
*Trump Tower bursts into flames*
EVANGELICALS: …any sign at all!
— Jesse McLaren (@McJesse) January 8, 2018
WATCH: Smoke billows out of Trump Tower as firefighters respond to electrical fire https://t.co/kHlN77LRoc
— Raw Story (@RawStory) January 8, 2018
For once, the NYC Trump Tower tenants may have reason to be grateful to Trump — or, more correctly, Trump’s Secret Service detail. I went through a “routine” rooftop equipment-related “smoke event” some twenty years ago, when I was working in Boston’s Hancock Tower. Being rushed down sixty flights in the underlit emergency stairwell, while security guards ran up & down yelling at us and each other, is not one of my favorite life memories. Sounds like the SecServ guys alerted firefighters before the building had to be evacuated.
Meanwhile, smart review from Michael Hiltzik, at the LA Times — “I knew everything in Wolff’s ‘Fire and Fury’ even before it was published. Here’s how”:
… [T]he proper way to think about “Fire and Fury” is not as a book, but as an event. The vast majority of people discussing it over the next few weeks — assuming the furor lasts that long — will not have read it. When the Sunday cable talk shows went into full cry over it, they focused largely on the West Wing’s reaction to it…
But having done the reading homework myself, I can tell you that the first 30% of “Fire and Fury” is an engaging read, full of little frissons of revelation. It’s not badly written, though portions show the effects of hasty editing to meet a deadline.
After the first third, however, it becomes boring, repetitious and, ultimately, depressing. There just isn’t much for Wolff to say about the White House after he’s said it once, and the discouraging thought that his cast of characters are in place because of a quirk of the American presidential electoral system that surprised them as much as it shocked outsiders soon outweighs any pleasure one might get from watching them bite each others’ heads off…
Wolff identifies the principal camps during his time as a fly on the wall as those of Bannon; first daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner; and former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, who was replaced by John F. Kelly at the end of July. This started to be widely known even before inauguration day.
But Wolff may actually have made a signal contribution to Trumpology here by making clear how much each gang leaked to undermine the others. Despite the obligatory paragraphs in all those inside-the-West-Wing scoops in the big papers about how many sources they were based on (how many people work in the White House, anyway?), it appears from Wolff’s book that those stories really all emanate from the power jockeying among those three groups; sometimes it’s one camp leaking against the other two, sometimes two camps in temporary alliance against the third.
This just tells you that the correct rule of thumb to apply when reading any of these yarns is the Latin term “Cui bono?” (“Who gains?”)…
That being said, Cui bono from the agenda for the evening?
Monday Evening Open Thread: Somebody Burning Copies of <em>Fire & Fury</em>?Post + Comments (164)