For the Record: Big Buttons and Illegal Orders

Trump and His Big Buttons, via the Australian site Green Left.

With reference to what is presumably the finale of Bob Woodward's Trump Trilogy, Fear (2018), Rage (2020), and now Peril (to be released next Tuesday), now featuring a collaborator in the person of a WaPo colleague, Republican whisperer Robert Costa—

The advance promotion of the book from CNN offers a pretty interesting story of the very last days of the term, following the episode, just after the election, where Trump signs an order to withdraw all the US troops from Afghanistan before Biden's inauguration, by 15 January, as we've sort of known since May. Among other things, it's done in secrecy from the government, under the urging of Stephen Bannon, who's back in the scene urging Trump toward the real coup, and in tandem with the firing of defense secretary Mark Esper and all sorts of attendant intrigue in which Trump seems to be trying to seize some kind of power over DoD. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley and some others are able to stop the precipitous move in Afghanistan (if you think Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan three months after the agreed date was dangerously rushed and poorly planned, you'll agree that this proposal was at least a couple of orders of magnitude worse), but Milley is spooked by this evidence of Trump's ability to sneak around the normal channels, while CIA director Gina Haspel is suspecting Trump could order an attack on Iran, and going on to ask, "He is acting out like a six-year-old with a tantrum... This is a highly dangerous situation. We are going to lash out for his ego?"

Liar-in-Chief

 

Web of Deceit: Deadly Sands, by Big Fish Games.

Sometimes with Trump it's really fish in a barrel:

Was Andy McCabe ever forced to pay back the $700,000 illegally given to him and his wife, for his wife’s political campaign, by Crooked Hillary Clinton while Hillary was under FBI investigation, and McCabe was the head of the FBI??? Just askin’?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 12, 2020

McCabe wasn't head of FBI, and Clinton wasn't under investigation, when Jill McCabe ran for office in 2015, for two things. Email investigation was opened in January 2016. McCabe became acting director when you fired Comey in May 2017. You seem seriously disoriented.

— Your Strenuous Flu (@Yastreblyansky) September 12, 2020

Not to mention that the contributions in question were given only to Jill McCabe's campaign, not to "him and his wife" (way to acknowledge that you do regard campaign contributions as personal income, to be spent any way you choose, Donald, which is what young Duncan Hunter got 11 months for doing, and I do hope laundering campaign money into your wallet through your businesses is one of the things you get charged with), nor in any sense illegal, and had nothing to do with Hillary Clinton but were from Terry McAuliffe, the incumbent governor of Virginia. It's at least mildly amusing that he doesn't remember he's the one who gave McCabe the job.

I'm pretty much running out of what passed for a sense of humor since what is to my mind the most sinister of Trump's confessions to Woodward, on the order of Saudi crown prince Mohammad bin Salman to a team of his thugs to murder the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, spiriting away the remains after dismembering them with a bone saw, in October 2018:

Rage

 

Saying, "No, no, what fire? Sit down and watch the movie" in a crowded theater. https://t.co/XmGkHYPt8q

— Your Strenuous Flu (@Yastreblyansky) September 9, 2020

Jeez, this new Bob Woodward book, Rage, covering the last two years of the Trump administration, previewed in the WaPo by Robert Costa and Philip Rucker. People are focused on a couple of big revelations—first, that Trump deliberately downplayed the danger of the coronavirus 

“You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed,” Trump said in a Feb. 7 call [with Woodward]. “And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flu.”

“This is deadly stuff,” the president repeated for emphasis.

The Post story has audio of that: it's a response to a question on what he learned from Xi Jinping about the virus, direct from the leader of the country he'll be denouncing for its secrecy and deception a few weeks after that.

Readers write

AP photo via NPR.

Very pleased to report the appearance of another New Yorker piece by Jordan Orlando, this one a tribute to the late William Goldman and the making of maybe his greatest screenplay, All the President's Men:

William Goldman, who died a week ago, had already written three Robert Redford movies when the actor contacted him in early winter of 1974 and asked him to write a fourth: an adaptation of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s forthcoming book, a firsthand account of the two young Washington Post reporters’ Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation of the Watergate scandal. Redford was the one doing the asking because he was producing the movie under the aegis of his company, Wildwood Enterprises—Redford was among the first wave of post-studio-system, post-auteur-movement movie stars who, in the late nineteen-sixties and early nineteen-seventies, began taking direct control of their careers, forming companies that would choose projects; select co-stars, directors, and writers; and participate in the casting, writing, and promotion of their movies. But Redford’s involvement in “All the President’s Men” was unusually complex and deep, predating not just Goldman’s involvement but also the conception of the book itself. By most accounts, Redford is a big reason why the book—which launched Bob Woodward’s iconic career as the first modern “star” reporter and permanently changed the public’s understanding of journalism—assumed its innovative form, focussing on the reporters and the Post rather than Nixon and the White House. But it was Goldman, in the crowning achievement of his long, successful career as a novelist and screenwriter, who used his screenplay to forge the modern myth of the reporter as hero.

Glad to see that double-s "focussing" in the first graf just in case people don't believe it's really the New Yorker. This is starting to look like a career. Congratulations, Jordan!

For the Record: Anonymous Sources

Some imbecile was proving to me that Bob Woodward's use of anonymous sources was connected to the fact, not previously known to me, that the "MSM" and Hillary Clinton were in conspiratorial cahoots in the 2016 campaign:

An anonymous source confirms that his other anonymous sources are telling the truth https://t.co/w0s3ezyEOF

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) September 12, 2018

Then again you've never found out how historians work either, though you actually pretend to do it yourself.

— Yasphalt Jungle (@Yastreblyansky) September 12, 2018

You don't know how journalists work either. You're quoting from the rule book (which is very good), not from the technique book. "Sparingly" means "only if it's necessary to get the story", which in practice can be a lot, as when the sources' jobs or lives are on the line.

— Yasphalt Jungle (@Yastreblyansky) September 12, 2018

I AM A PART OF all that I have met

Galactic heroes via Target.

I think it was watching Lawrence O'Donnell on the TV claiming to have discovered that the author of the I AM PART OF THE RESISTANCE letter was old Dan Coats that convinced me I knew who it really was, because all his reasons were wrong, and it obviously wasn't Coats, who may well be pretty distressed over Trump's stupidity and mercuriality but—particularly if he is actively resisting anything—is too smart to express it in such a futile, self-defeating way as this invitation to Trump to become more paranoid and ungovernable than ever.

My theory, fed by narrativium, is that it must have been TV economist Larry Kudlow, who took over the National Economic Council from Gary Cohn in April, after Cohn fled, not in protest against Trump's admiration for the murderous neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan demonstrators in Charlottesville, August 2017 (though we understand Cohn threatened to resign at the time) but in recognition of his inability to persuade Trump to listen to reason on the subject of steel and aluminum tariffs. As we now begin to learn from Bob Woodward's research, Cohn was the heart and soul of the RESISTANCE in his time, or at least convinced Woodward that he was—the guy who stole papers off the sacred presidential desk.

Cohn's a believer in a conventionally conservative kind of economics, who wasn't bothered by the radical Trump overhaul of corporate and pass-through income and other taxes on the very rich, or the push toward radical deregulation in the finance industry and de-fanging of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, but is genuinely bewildered and upset by Trump's hatred of international cooperation, especially on trade (and as you know I don't like it either and don't @ me to tell me I'm a neoliberal). That's what he was resisting, in fact: the paper he stole from the Resolution Desk was an order to dissolve the US-South Korea Free Trade Agreement. And Kudlow is the same kind of economist, or has played one on television, and so is I AM PART OF THE RESISTANCE:

All the President's Mess

Amphora painting of Odysseus blinding Polyphemus, Eleusis Museum, via Wikipedia.

The thing about Woodward, you know, forty years he’s kissed ass and been kissed in return for crumbs, what the hell’s the point, and now he’s going to look tough again all because of rats leaving a sinking ship.

— Richard M. Nixon (@dick_nixon) September 4, 2018

That's the thing. It strikes me Woodward is like the little man in the forest in a Grimm story. Each brother in turn runs into him and he asks them to share their sandwich and pot of beer and rewards them with a magical object or a bag of gold pieces hidden in the tree stump; but the last brother who's rude and refuses gets a curse instead and henceforward every time he opens his mouth a frog leaps out of it, or something like that. Woodward's just responding to what he gets, and for the first time in 40 years he looks like he's done something.

The good news (and as you can tell from the title,  Fear, there's not a lot of it) is that Trump isn't president, as I've said. He's not authorized to speak for the White House. Kelly and Conway and the rest of the household retainers made huge and successful efforts to keep Trump from talking to Woodward until after the manuscript was submitted, because that would have been too embarrassing to bear, but a pretty accurate picture of the White House is emerging from the Wapo excerpts, and Trump isn't effectively in it, although he makes plenty of trouble trying to make decisions on the few matters that sort of interest him and sometimes getting away with it. But he doesn't know enough about what's going on, or care enough about it, except for the hopeless desire for protection against the Mueller investigation, to impose his will on it in general, and there's been what Woodward calls an "administrative coup d'état", where the staffers work as clearly as they can and Trump howls from the East Wing: