Tag Archives: Rick Wilson

Trump Behind Closed Doors is So Far Beyond Anything “Veep” Could Imagine.

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While we all hold our breath and wait for the 126 Republican congress-critters and 17 state attorneys general — valiant defenders of the Constitution — to suffer any consequences for trying to overthrow a presidential election (*), I came across this item.

“Barack and Michelle are reportedly producing a comedy series for Netflix ‘based on the chaotic transition of power when Donald Trump became president in 2016’. The show, titled The G Word With Adam Conover, is a collaboration between the comedian and the former first couple’s Higher Ground Productions, based on Michael Lewis’s book The Fifth Risk, which was born out of a September 2017 Vanity Fair article. The book covers the historic chaos and mismanagement that occurred in the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, and Energy during the handoff between the administrations.”

I spotted that story the same day Julias-Louis Dreyfus showed up on Rick Wilson and Molly Jong-Fast’s podcast, “The New Abnormal”, and where she was asked for million and first time if the Trump presidency had out-lunaticked, out-venaled and out-bungled anything they ever imagined when and her writers was shooting “Veep?” Short answer — yes. Team Trump, meaning Jared and Rudy and Ivanka, etc., has performed so far beyond (I mean, below) what “Veep’s” writers could dream up there’s talk of reviving the show based on a new lower bar for what audiences are prepared to believe about … the President of the United States.

Then there is Noel Casler, a professional “talent wrangler” who worked on “The Celebrity Apprentice” and is now flagrantly violated his Trump-mandated Non-Disclosure Agreement with tales of Trump’s chronic incontinence, his plastic girdle, Adderall addiction, halitosis, sexual predation, personal grooming, functional illiteracy and vain-glorious laziness. Stories that rival anything “Dumb and Dumber” imagined, much less ‘Veep”.

Being an admitted (former) coke-snorting rock ‘n roller, Casler’s stories don’t carry quite the credibility of say, Maggie Haberman at The New York Times. But as he points out in this interview, Trump is still president. For another month Trump can still sic The Justice Department on anyone who dares say he wears Depends. Casler also reminds us that the edges of all these stories have circulated for years and that at this point only the most delusional Trump cultist finds it hard to paint in the numbers and accept that as bad, as ludicrous and buffoonish as everything is that we can see right now, what is waiting to be told is even more clownish.

Or, as Lori Levine, one of Casler’s interviers says, “Wait a minute. Can we get back to the shitting his pants story?”

Understanding that journalism is a delicate balance of reporting-while-maintaining-access, I have no trouble — zero — believing that people like Haberman or any of the Washington Post’s White House team or CNN’s have terabytes of files of stories of Trump’s more personal dysfunctions. Stories they’ve chosen to withold until after he’s safely gone. I mean, from the Times’ perspective, is presidential incontinence a legitimate story? Heaven’s no! You can imagine the editor’s meeting on that one. The Times does not run “shitting your pants:” stories.

The accepted tradition of journalism is to ignore “private” behavior. LBJ took heat once for pulling his dog’s ears. But no one in real time — while he was in office — told the story about Johnson forcing staffers to watch him relieve his bowels or whipping out “Jumbo” to make a point about who was the biggest dog in the kennel. Likewise, JFK had to be long dead and buried before we were told he was obsessively nailing everything in skirts while supposedly guiding us to The New Frontier.

Times of course have changed, post Bill and Monica and The Blue Dress. But unlike Clinton, Trump has been so derelict in his duty, so sociopathic in his disregard for pandemic suffering and death and so complicit in protecting Vladimir Putin, his only reservoir of good will is with ‘Murica’s sad Lost Minority, the torch-and-pitchfork MAGA crowd. You knw, the bellowing mob forever pissed at the way big city elitists have played them for chumps all their lives.

Point being, even if the Biden administration decides to pass on a prosecution, or even a Truth Commission on the Trump years, popular culture is well positioned to take all the drugged-out, scatological, grifting gold that Donny and the gang have given them and make a fresh fortune out of it.

Among the 81 million in this bubble it requires no suspension of disbelief.

(*Will never happen. In fact they will proudly remind voters about it next election.)

Good Lord! Why Would Any of Us Ever Believe a Pollster Again?

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There is your basic “wrong”. Like last week, when all the sports guys predicted the Packers would beat the Vikings by two touchdowns. Ha! What a botch! But then there’s World Class, Never to be Forgiven-or-Forgotten-Etched-in-Granite-for-All-the-School-Children-to-See-Wrong … like, for example, America’s professional pollsters’ and pundits’ whiplash-inducing botch of last night’s election.

Holy Jesus, most of these boys and girls are going to need new identities and applications for the lunch shift at Chick-fil-A.

As someone who consumed waay too much pollster/pundit blather over the past year, I have no problem telling you that no one I heard — not your Nate Silvers, your David Plouffes, your David Axelrods, your Nate Cohns, your John Heilemans, your Rick Wilsons, your Steve Schmidts, your Amy Walters or your Dave Wassermans laid out a scenario remotely resembling what we’re looking at today. (All of them will be spinning the meaning of the word, “remotely” in the weeks, months and years to come.)

All along, the key ingredient for 2020 was what was described as your “shy Trump voter”, basically another, previously untapped layer of under-educated white males (and some females) that Trump could both find and fire up enough for them to show up and vote, maybe for the first time ever. And — what I kept hearing from “the experts” — was that that voter was a myth. They didn’t exist. Word was that the new, modern, far more sophisticated post-2016 polling, weighted to properly account for hard-to-get ahold of under-educated white males had their non-existence covered.

Well, obviously not, as those voters poured out of wherever they were hiding and voted in record numbers to reelect Donald Trump, the man who has ended the pandemic and got everybody back to work and drinking at their favorite bar.

My old “Same Rowdy Crowd” compadre, Jon Austin, (i.e. “The Great and Powerful”), has done lots of homework on the last pre-election polling data. Here I cut and paste from him unapologetically.

” … much of my thinking [says Austin] is driven by the assessments of the three election-prediction sites that use polling and other factors to assign a percentage probability of which way each state will vote. Again, those sites are:

• DecisionDesk (https://forecast.decisiondeskhq.com/president). As of October 30th, it gives Biden an 87 percent chance of winning the election.

• The Economist (https://projects.economist.com/us-2020-forecast/president). As of October 30th, it gives Biden a 96 percent chance of winning.

• FiveThirtyEight (https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/). As of October 29th, it gives Biden an 89 percent chance of winning.”

Now obviously, as of Wednesday afternoon Biden may still win, in which all of these particular sites will no doubt claim they “got it right”. But the picture they painted in their live cable TV interviews and in quotes to reporters was of something far different. And beyond them, in state polls, the product emits an even worse smell.

I eagerly await hearing from the professional pollster who had Lindsey Graham beating Jaime Harrison by 12%. Or Susan Collins over Sara Gideon by 9%. Or Joni Ernst over Theresa Greenfield in Iowa by 7% Or even Trump in Ohio by a fat 8%.

Conventional wisdom and pervasive chatter in veteran-operative liberal circles, after inhaling double secret probation “internal polling” and the junk above was that Biden had it comfortably in the bag, with a Democratic Senate “leaning” to “likely.” Hell, remember all that fantasizing about Texas? 5.5% may be better than the 9% Hillary lost by, but it’s nobody’s idea of “in the hunt.”

What we’re left with, while the pro pollsters scurry off to get emergency collagen injections for their reputations, is one very stark reality.

Far … far … from Donald Trump and the election of 2020 marking the death knell of the Republican party, supposedly destroyed by Trump’s malignant incompetence and vulgarity, the oppooisite is true. The astonishing, previously undetected number of votes Trump pulled out of the hills, hollers and exurbs of America, means that with or without him, Trumpism — grievance-driven, anti-science and fully isolated from reality by “alternative facts” — is now more powerful than ever. More powerful than any expert data geek or veteran pundit ever imagined.

To put a blunt point on it, that means no Republican candidate at any level, much less anyone running for national office, will dare step a rat’s whisker away from authoritarian/racist Trumpist messaging. Or in other words, things are looking good for Donny Jr. and Tucker Carlson in 2024.

Or hell, even my gal the QAnon Queen, freshly-elected Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Greene.

How Much Worse Can This Get? A Whole Lot.

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It’s tough sometimes being a cheery, what me worry?, live-in-the-moment, glass half-full kind of guy. If you’re like me, you look around and say, “They couldn’t fck this up any worse than they have.” But if you said that, like me, you’d be wrong. Very wrong. Take for example the other day after reading two pieces, one from Politico and the other from The Atlantic, back-to back. The effect, on me at least, was to check Google Flights for a one-way ticket to New Zealand.

The Politico piece was titled, “Experts Knew a Pandemic was Coming. Here’s What They’re Worried About Next. Nine disasters we still aren’t ready for.”

Some of the scenarios experts were consulted about include, of course, “The Big One”, the mega-quake that levels Seattle or the Bay Area or LA. Based not just on the level of federal government preparation for a disaster like this entirely forseeable coronavirus pandemic, but the response to post-Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, experts see no way the current underfunded, chaotically-managed federal system is ready to capably respond to a major, long-term disaster hitting a large metropolitan area.

Among other scenarios are: loose nukes, any serious planning for mass migration up from tropical regions as climate changes spikes humidity to unlivable levels, all the bio-terrorist attacks you, me and Hollywood can imagine and so on.

The takeaway is very reminiscent of Michael Lewis’ most recent book, “The Fifth Risk.”

In the months after the Trump election in 2016, Lewis went around to key government agencies, the Energy Department, the Agriculture Department and others and found a common bewilderment. Unlike every previous transition, from say George W. to Obama, the in-coming Trump administration never bothered to send anyone to be educated on the details of how the agencies actually ran. No one showed up. PowerPoints and thick three-ring binders and top agency officials sat ignored … until they were eventually unceremoniously replaced with cronies and grifters like Wilbur Ross, Rick Perry, Ryan Zinke and on and on. And at that point even worse bungling, corruption and mis-management became the order of the day.

Dan Balz of The Washington Post revisits much the same theme in a story yesterday morning, titled “Coronavirus pandemic exposes how US has hollowed out its government.”

But as bad as all that is, #1 on Politico’s list is the international rise of white supremacy. #1, they say. Specifically, the swelling radicalization of home grown, far-right zealot/terrorists inspired and directed via the internet, exactly the way ISIS recruits and trains its holy “warriors”. To this Politico moves on to and melds in the rage-stoking power of “deep fakes” and waves of nefarious misinformation peddling via social media, a la Russia in 2016.

Is there anyone so naive to think that that kind of chaos-inducing activity will not be expanded and improved upon this coming fall? Why would anyone think that? Our adversaries — Putin, North Korea, whoever — don’t have to attack us with guns and bombs. The chaos we inflict on ourselves — because of misinformation and misplaced zealotry — will create all the destruction they could want.

So … while I was still digesting those dystopian, high-probability scenarios, I waded int The Atlantic story. It’s titled, “Nothing Can Stop What is Coming” and it underline something I’ve worried about a lot over the last four years.

In January 2016 yours truly, NostraLambertus, wrote piece titled, “Why Trump Can Win It All, and I Mean ‘All’ “. My concern then was that Trump was appealing to a serious, previously untapped chunk of the population. A sub-set that rarely if ever voted, a crowd for whom he was the long-awaited candidate of their most fevered dreams. For them Trump had an appeal far different and far stronger than any ordinary Republican or Democrat.

I didn’t quite say it at the time. But it’s an appeal that borders on the religious.

The Atlantic’s Adrienne LaFrance begins her piece with a long take-out on QAnon, the wildly popular-though-faceless-and-nameless source of bizarre coded conspiracies. Like the one about the pizza joint in D.C. where Hillary Clinton and other Illuminati-style Democrats were running a child sex ring.

LaFrance takes readers on an unsettling history and survey of QAnon and a half dozen other irrational, obscene, frequently racist and violence-oriented sites like 4chan, 8chan and 8kun, as well as the characters, both conniving and sad, associated with them. All that before rolling up her investigation into a truly scary summation.

She writes, “I have known [a political-science professor at the University of Miami named Joseph] Uscinski for years … . Many people assume, he told me, that a propensity for conspiracy thinking is predictable along ideological lines. That’s wrong, he explained. It’s better to think of conspiracy thinking as independent of party politics. It’s a particular form of mind-wiring. [Emphasis mine.] And it’s generally characterized by acceptance of the following propositions: Our lives are controlled by plots hatched in secret places. Although we ostensibly live in a democracy, a small group of people run everything, but we don’t know who they are. When big events occur—pandemics, recessions, wars, terrorist attacks—it is because that secretive group is working against the rest of us.

“QAnon isn’t a far-right conspiracy, the way it’s often described, Uscinski went on, despite its obviously pro-Trump narrative. And that’s because Trump isn’t a typical far-right politician. Q appeals to people with the greatest attraction to conspiracy thinking of any kind, and that appeal crosses ideological lines.”

She then moves to her closing statement.

She says, “QAnon carries on a tradition of apocalyptic thinking that has spanned thousands of years. It offers a polemic to empower those who feel adrift. … The Seventh-day Adventists and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are thriving religious movements indigenous to America. Do not be surprised if QAnon becomes another. It already has more adherents by far than either of those two denominations had in the first decades of their existence. People are expressing their faith through devoted study of Q drops as installments of a foundational text, through the development of Q-worshipping groups, and through sweeping expressions of gratitude for what Q has brought to their lives. Does it matter that we do not know who Q is? The divine is always a mystery. Does it matter that basic aspects of Q’s teachings cannot be confirmed? The basic tenets of Christianity cannot be confirmed. Among the people of QAnon, faith remains absolute. True believers describe a feeling of rebirth, an irreversible arousal to existential knowledge. They are certain that a Great Awakening is coming. They’ll wait as long as they must for deliverance.”

The nut of it all is pretty obvious: Such people, as described above, are the fiery, white-hot core of Trump’s base. To them he is a key figure in what they regard as a god-like, divine plan. Trump is, in effect, the earthly vessel for the long-awaited cleansing apocalypse. And because of their “mind-wiring” they are unable to be convinced otherwise or to ever abandon him.

This white-hot core is primed and eager to accept anything they’re told by QAnon, who could be anyone. (Former Republican strategist Rick Wilson is convinced QAnon gets most of his inside information from White House communications advisor, Dan Scavino. BTW: Here’s a clip of Wilson in early 2018, imagining a “Mad Max” post-Trump landscape.)

More to point in terms of what’s coming this fall, there’s every reason to believe this “religious” core will act on whatever irrational, magical thinking they’re guided toward by QAnon, some other “divine” source or by Trump himself. There’s certainly no reason to think they’re disillusioned. To the contrary, they’re prepping for the battle. By every indication, they will mobilize and vote for Trump in even greater numbers than they did in 2016.

Likewise, who is prepared to assume they’ll accept Trump’s defeat, if it happens this November?

It’s Time. Fauci and Birx Need to Resign.

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What’s happening to Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx is not a pleasant thing to watch. Though unknown to most of us before the pandemic, they built long and impressive careers, both by being competent in their profession and by carefully nurturing their reputations. Now though they’ve both becomes creatures of Trump culture, part of his supporting cast. A cast mostly of grotesques.

I know I’ve referred to this many times before, but it continues to apply over and over and over again. Everything Trump Touches Dies. (TM: Rick Wilson.) From the $400 million (in 2020 dollars) shoveled to him by his Klansman father, which he proceeded to squander, to his mis-managed airline, his bogus university, his fraudulent foundation, all his ex-wives, his porn star hookups, bankrupt casinos and mistreatment of lackeys like Chris Christie, Reince Preibus, Paul Manafort, Rex Tillerson, H.R. McMaster, Lev and Igor, Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn, Paul Ryan and on and on, Trump has either sullied or compounded the self-sullying of everyone he’s drawn into his wobbling orbit.

And now it’s Fauci and Birx’ turn.

Fauci has been noticeably absent from Trump’s most recent afternoon press rallies, including last Thursday’s where it was up to a stricken-looking Deborah Birx to tap-dance and prevaricate around Trump’s brain-seizing riffs on injecting disinfectants and sticking UV lights up our where-evers. Then Sunday, Birx was the one pushed out on “Meet the Press” and Jake Tapper to explain away some more and deflect attention from what the rest of the entire planet of intelligent humans regarded, unmistakably, as lethal misinformation wrapped around unconscionable ignorance.

I take no pleasure in saying Birx has torched her credibility, but her feet are on fire. She has in effect become a Trump enabler. Which is to say her role, publicly, has become less that of an advisor and more that of an apologist. She’s become the loyal assistant to an ill-informed, anti-science demagogue, which is precisely the opposite of the virtues she built her reputation on over forty years in her chosen profession. To stay any longer, she is risking historic culpability in what will be regarded as the most catastrophic failure of presidential leadership in American history. (And yes, I know I’ve said that before, too. But it bears repeating, like a mantra.)

People like Fauci and Birx, at the top of their bureaucratic food chains, have talents beyond “mere” scientific knowledge. Fauci in particular is regarded as a remarkably skillful player at the game of massaging, finessing and herding serious, high-brow egos toward a common goal. But in Trump, a narcissistic sociopath who can’t tell the difference between the Hippocratic Oath and Fantasia’s dancing hippos, there is no foundation in knowledge or professional empathy to work with.

In Fauci and Birx we are … again … looking at career company players who can not break free of the rules and protocols that brought them stature and prominence. Like former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, former Chief of Staff and Marine General John Kelly, ex-oil company CEO Tillerson, whoever wrote “Anonymous”, former Goldman, Sachs President Gary Cohn and even Robert Mueller, Fauci and Birx to this point have not been able to say what must be said. Namely, that Donald Trump not only has no clue what he’s talking about, but has no capacity whatsoever to deal with the biggest crisis the country has faced since WWII.

Like the other estimable reputations mentioned above, Fauci and Birx have so far refused to accept that the rules that brought them to this point of their careers have no weight or value in proximity to Trump. He regards their credibility and sense of duty to the standards of their profession as exploitable weaknesses to be bent to the service … of his reputation, which is to say the fantasy he creates for it.

The irony is that were they to announce their resignations — with unequivocal criticism of the stark, on-going failures of Trump — their standing as the foremost go-to truth-tellers on the pandemic would only increase. Trump would no doubt do everything he could to vilify and demote both. But since each would remain deep in the loop in terms of the science and logistics of pandemic response, they would remain vital, much sought after sources of critical information.

Given a choice between a daily unfettered Fauci & Birx pandemic update or one from their Trump-appointed replacements, (Jared? Pence?), which would you watch? Which would you believe?

More to the point, out from under the reputation-poisoning weight of Trump enabling they could speak freely and like intelligent adults to an adult public.

“Cops for Trump”

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As I sit here sharpening the points of my pitchfork and adding a couple quarts of fuel to my XL Tiki torch, in preparation for tonight’s Trump rally downtown, I’m reminded again of the angriest and funniest book written so far on The Trump Degeneracy.

“Everything Trump Touches Dies”, by longtime Republican campaign strategist/hit man Rick Wilson, is a pitiless, acid-tipped dagger assault on Trump and every know-nothing tribal toadie who ever signed on to the reality TV huckster’s bald-faced racism, corruption and incompetence. Sadly, that’s a sub-set of people that now includes at least a portion of the Minneapolis Police Department. (Wilson gets off a hilarious, coffee-out-the-nose line every other page.)

Whether some of Minneapolis’ finest are actually stupid enough to show up downtown tonight wearing their “Cops for Trump” t-shirts, (it is a bit chilly), it almost doesn’t matter. The fact that their union president, Bob Kroll, everyone’s caricature of a right-wing thug cop, has made a point of his and his
“brotherhood’s” full-throated support of Trump is all that matters.

I mean the t-shirts could just as easily read: “Cops for Career Criminals”, “Cops for Shameless Racists” or “Cops for Any Fool Who’ll Stick it to the Libtards.”

Over the past couple decades a few groups in particular have seriously degraded their credibility with the general public. Along with (white) evangelicals blind to the sexism, racism and sewer-level morals of Trump and his ilk, American cops have done a startlingly effective job of discrediting their profession and the pretense that they are politically neutral public servants.

A couple days ago I was listening to (yet another) Ezra Klein podcast, this time with New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell on the event of his latest book, “Talking to Strangers.” At one point Gladwell dives into the serious problem American cops have properly and reliably interpreting the demeanor of people they stop and confront. (Gladwell emphasizes that far too many of the stops are for reasobns that amount to “ticky tack bullshit”.) The case of Sandra Bland, a thoroughly innocent Texas woman stopped (mainly because she was black, let’s be honest) and who later hung herself in jail, is a key drama Gladwell explores.

He dives into the rippling effects of The Kansas City Experiment, an early ’70s protocol that did prove successful in driving down crime in tough neighborhoods. Key was a more intrusive, predictive brand of policing that had the person-to-person effect of treating every police-citizen interaction as a criminal erncounter.

Gladwell

‘s larger point is that the “Minority Report”-like concept of stopping crimes before they happen has seriously mutated over the years into the kind of militarized, nakedly-racist profiling now seen in dozens of “cop-involved” killings across the country. I refer you to Philando Castile here in Minnesota, an interaction that also involved the average not too well trained/inexperienced cop’s role as a revenue-producer for his municipality.

Gladwell points this out as well as a key part of the perversion of police work in recent years. (Over the last 14 years of his life Castile was stopped by cops 46 times, resulting in several thousand dollars of fines. You’re free to check it out and decide how “ticky tack” most of these stops were and ask if any white guy in a Mercedes would have been stopped even once.)

Bad as all that is, Kroll and company’s unabashed, in-your-face-pointy-headed-liberal-wusses “Cops for Trump” move reasserts to every Minneapolis citizen the high likelihood that the cop cruising down the street is carrying a heavy baggage of greivances, along with a badge and a loaded gun. Far from being apolitical and color blind, “Cops for Trump” strongly suggests a fellow traveler/sympathizer with not just appalling corruption and criminality, but what history will eventually conclude is the most open and unapologetically racist Presidency since, well, since Andrew Jackson.

By so shamefully linking themselves to Donald Trump, Bob Kroll’s Minneapolis cops have significantly accelerated the death of their own legitimacy.