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| Couldn't find a decent illustration for "mere anarchy", which has been taken over by Woody Allen and Moby (in separate efforts), but here's a fabulous widening gyre, by Hiroshige. |
Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, introduces his version of a take we'll be hearing a lot of, I'm sure, on the Mueller Report ("The Mueller Exposé")
Roughly four thousand, two hundred and twenty-seven Trump-era news cycles ago, there was a rather famous book called “Fire and Fury.” The author, Michael Wolff, used an interesting tactic to gain access to the Trump White House: He allowed his subjects, the president included, to believe that he was going to write a positive account of the Trump administration, and then used that access to produce an account of an administration in constant chaos, and a president who was understood by everyone around him to be unfit for the job.
One way to approach the Mueller report, if your sense of civic duty requires you to approach it, is to see it as a more rigorous, capacious version of “Fire and Fury.” Mueller's exposé was backed by subpoena power rather than just sweet talk, but ultimately it delivers the same general portrait: Donald Trump as an amoral incompetent surrounded by grifters, misfits and his own overpromoted children, who is saved from self-destruction by advisers who sometimes decline to follow orders, and saved from high crimes in part by incompetence and weakness.Sure he's disgusting, but his quick-witted staff (as opposed to the corrupt staff that "surrounds" him, apparently he's got both) stops him from committing all the crimes he's inclined to commit, so we ought to be able to live with that for another four years. And what an "interesting" unethical slob that Michael Wolff was, allowing Trump to think he was going to tell comforting lies about the president when he was secretly planning to tell the truth the whole time. Now let's get back to the horse race!
