The Cheshire Cat in Crazytown
With his first debate a couple days away, and some mail-in ballots already en route to the vote counters, the president is not wasting timing preparing for Joe Biden’s blistering fastballs. He is back to barnstorming and soaking up MAGAhead adulation. A creation of the now passed Roger Ailes and Fox News, President Trump, ironically, has rejuvenated CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. Calling them fake added eyeballs and money to their bottom lines. And the books. Has any president generated so many books?
Bob Woodward takes his second bite from the Trump apple, with “Rage.” Woodward has completed the interview circuit with his biggest prop being Trump on tape. Trump cooperated and the esteemed author had the president saying what he knew and when he knew it: about the coronavirus, of course.
Eighteen (18) interviews of the president telling Bob Woodward how great he’s done, that the economy before the covid-19 hit was the greatest in human history. He’s done more for black people than any president since Lincoln. “The media is my opponent, regardless of anything. No matter how well we do, they will say we didn’t do well.” Samo, samo.
But, Woodward talked to others, and that’s where the value of the book lies. General James Mattis described what meetings with Trump were like. “It is very difficult to have a discussion with the president. If an intel briefer was going to start a discussion with the president, they were only a couple sentences in and it could go off on what I kind of irreverently call those Seattle freeway off-ramps to nowhere. Shoot off onto another subject. So it was not where you could take him to 30,000 feet. You could try, but then something that had been said on Fox News or something was more salient to him.”
Mattis warned Dan Coates, “The president has no moral compass.” Coates, a fellow evangelical with, and close friend to V.P. Mike Pence, replied, “True, to [Trump], a lie is not a lie. It’s just what he thinks. He doesn’t know the difference between the truth and a lie.”
Ultimately, Mattis said of Trump, “He’s dangerous. He’s unfit.”
What Woodward makes clear is, Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner is the real White House Chief-of-Staff, though he doesn’t have the title. Getting along with Jared is a must, because Ivanka’s husband is tasked with running most everything. For instance, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson “thought Kushner’s dealings with Netanyahu were ‘nauseating to watch. It was stomach churning.’”
John Kelly was briefly a problem for Kuschner. “Kelly was killing me in a million ways,” Kuschner told Woodward. While Kelly tried to run a tight ship, Kuschner was allowed to “dip in and out of presidential business at will,” Woodward writes.
Kushner explained Trump’s idiosyncrasies. “With the president, there’s a hundred different shades of gray. And if people try to get a quick answer out of him, it’s easy. You can get him to decide in your favor by limiting his information. But you better be sure as hell that people with competing views aren’t going to find their way to him. And when that happens, he’s going to undo his decision.” In other words, make sure you pitch Trump last.
“Incomplete information, inadequate staffing--the appearance of impulsive decision making was all someone else’s fault,” Woodward quotes Kushner. “John Kelly was less charitable, calling Trump’s style,“Crazytown.”
Kushner told Woodward that to understand Trump, one had to understand the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland. Paraphrasing the cat Kushner said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any path will get you there.” Direction isn’t the strategy, endurance and persistence is.
Kushner also recommended Scott Adam’s book “Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter.” Adams writes that Trump “can invent any reality” for most voters on most issues.
Summing Kushner’s recommendations about Trump, Woodward writes, “President Trump [is] crazy, aimless, stubborn and manipulative.”
In one conversation with Trump, Woodward related a story about Watergate and told the president that if Nixon would have just apologized [impeachment talk] would have gone away. The two went back and forth, with Trump saying he couldn’t apologize if he didn’t do anything wrong. He said he would apologize if he did something wrong. But, “Here’s the thing,” Trump said, “I’m never wrong.”
So, while Senator Lindsey Graham told Trump to do three things to get re-elected: DACA, police reform, and infrastructure, the president intends to go the law-and-order route.
With the passing of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg and the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett, Woodward explains that Nevada Senator Harry Reid pushed through the elimination of the filibuster which “effectively allowed one senator to block the appointment of a judge.” The result is “making the judiciary more ideological.”
With the judiciary more ideological, the Senate will become “more ideological, more partisan and focused on the short term rather than able to take a long view.”
Crazytown, indeed.
