Fascism and Other Matters

It's amazing how much Republicans (I don't mean people who "identify" as Republicans, I mean party cadres, the activists who do the work and enjoy the rewards, ideological and material, because that's the kind of party the GOP is now) despise their voters.

While both sides have been criticized for misleading fundraising tactics, “[t]he Republican fundraising machine has been subject to more than 800 complaints to the Federal Trade Commission since 2022 — nearly seven times more than the number of complaints lodged against the other side,” they report.

One sad example: “One 82-year-old woman, who wore pajamas with holes in them because she didn’t want to spend money on new ones, didn’t realize she had given Republicans more than $350,000 while living in a 1,000 square-foot Baltimore condo since 2020.”

"I love the poorly educated," said Trump, but I think his understanding of "love" is a relationship where he gets a lot more out of it than he puts in, if you know what I mean.

***

This is so embarrassing on CNN's part:

An American Nightmare

Mrs. Barker ("I'm a professional woman"), after she's removed her dress, and Mommy, in red, in Albee's An American Dream. Cherry Lane Theater, New York, 2008.

Olivia Nuzzi's enchanting new absurdist comedy My Private Oval Office Press Conference organizes itself around the kind of Catch-22 dilemma that's endemic to the human condition: the protagonist, a president of the United States and former businessman, wants to fire his chief of staff, a retired Marine general, but doesn't know how, or can't summon up the courage, even though, ironically, he literally became famous for pretending to fire people who were pretending to work for him in a television show devoted to the ritual firing of the different characters who wandered on and off the set. But in the diegetic "real life" of Nuzzi's film, which is coincidentally a kind of real life, the only person in the White House who has the necessary skills and balls is the chief of staff himself.

The best the president can do is to try once or twice a week to get him to fire himself—"I really need you to leave, John," he'll say—but General Kelly pays him no attention, carrying on as if Trump hadn't said anything, neatening up the Resolute desk, ordering supplies, and firing those people he thinks it's necessary to fire, and looking pained when Trump makes a faux pas, like Jeeves the time Bertie insisted on wearing the white mess jacket:

Jeeves: I assumed it had got into your wardrobe by mistake, sir, or else that it has been placed there by your enemies.

Bertie Wooster: I will have you know, Jeeves, that I bought this in Cannes!

Jeeves: And wore it, sir?

Bertie Wooster: Every night at the Casino. Beautiful women used to try and catch my eye!

Jeeves: Presumably they thought you were a waiter, sir.

Anyway, a lovely young reporter called Olivia wanders into this standoff, for an assignment from New York Magazine, where the editors are more fun-loving than those of The New York Times, and just as she's leaving by the North Gate from a hard morning's reporting, the press secretary beckons her back into the building with a phone call and then a solemn, wordless gesture, like a mute attendant, though she turns out not to be mute after all:

Continental Breakfast

Gif via Buzzfeed.

No doubt everybody's seen this video and heard the first-order commentary on the utter mortification on Chief of Staff John Kelly's lips as the boss is saying, in essence, to the German chancellor, "No puppet! No puppet! You're the puppet!" while the stricken smile of our ambassador to NATO, Kay Bailey Hutchinson, is saying, "Well, bless his heart!" as one does in a Texas Baptist church when one's brother-in-law starts hallucinating again and drops his trousers and takes a dump on the altar table during the collection. I'm pretty sure it's not the first time we've seen Kelly making that face, but his involuntary leg movements—as if they want to escape and he can barely command them—are something else.

Quite interesting to watch John Kelly's face in the background as Trump says that "Germany is totally controlled by Russia." (via ABC). pic.twitter.com/qJvj30a3zv

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) July 11, 2018

You've probably also heard how the press secretary acknowledged that Kelly was upset, but didn't acknowledge that he was upset because people whose opinion he values were seeing him as the helpless imprisoned tool of your impulsive and not very bright old uncle with the serious anger issues who nurses his rage from dawn till dusk at the teat of the TV, or because the grandest military alliance in human history was perhaps being shattered before his eyes. No,

In a statement to The Post, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said, "[Kelly] was displeased because he was expecting a full breakfast and there were only pastries and cheese." (Washington Post)

Like the axe murderer in the Snickers commercial who turns out to be Jan Brady once she gets down some calories. Give Kelly his bacon and eggs and he'll be Dean Acheson.

And what on earth made you think it had something to do with the president?

We know Huckabee-Sanders lies all the time, too. There's nothing new here! And yet I can't stop feeling some kind of line has really been crossed this time. Like, she can't really be expecting people to cooperate with this one, can she? Can she?

Update:  Not even close. For one thing, it was Americans, in the form of Ambassador Hutchinson's residence, who paid for breakfast. and for another, there was plenty to eat.

Is it possible @PressSec did not tell the truth about today’s supposedly inadequate NATO breakfast being the cause of CoS Kelly’s visible dismay and horror? https://t.co/rQxconWSDg

— David Frum (@davidfrum) July 12, 2018

Thus offering an explanation that is not only hilariously unbelievable but also throws a (distinguished Republican) colleague under the bus. In this way Huckabee Sanders provides an illustration of Trumpiness in which mendacity, stupidity, and treachery may be combined more intimately than they have ever been. H/t Cullen Martin.

We don't have to prosecute them/but then we're not prosecuting them

Francisco de Goya, St. Peter Repentant, 1823-25. Via Wikipedia.

The truest Trump is perhaps the one who's spare and blank and at the same time musically repetitive, like the Eliot of "Ash Wednesday" ("Because I know that time is always time/ And place is always and only place/And what is actual is actual only for one time/ And only for one place...")—in this case literally true, because, speaking to the National Federation of Independent Businesses on their 75th anniversary, uncharacteristically using fairly elaborate notes but no prepared text, he found himself hovering around, if not quite landing on, a helipad of contrition:

Confessional

by Donald J. Trump

I

We have one chance
to get it right.
We might as well
get it right or let's
just keep it going but
let’s do it right.

II

We have a chance. We want to solve
this problem. We want to solve
family separation. I don’t want
children taken away from parents
and when you prosecute the parents
for coming in illegally, which should happen,
you have to take the children away.

III

Now, we don’t have to prosecute them
but then we’re not prosecuting them
for coming in illegally. That’s not good.

It's the acknowledgment that this crisis of concentration camps for children is of his own making: he did it, personally, voluntarily, in some kind of knowledge of what the consequences were going to be. "We don't have to" but it "should happen" (dodging the responsibility with the impersonal verb).

And then what do you know? After contrition comes atonement, and lo and behold!