You Come Here, You Drink Trump

"Forty-Five" cocktail (Wyoming whiskey, Demerara, orange bitters, Diet Coke, garnished with "two American beef sliders"), $45, at 45 Wine and Whiskey, burgers not shown.

Shane Goldmacher and Eric Lipton at The New York Times seemingly giddy with pleasure at how enthusiastically The Former Guy is taking care of business:

For Mr. Trump, the monetization of his post-presidency represents a return to his roots. He expertly leveraged his celebrity as the host of “The Apprentice” and his image as a decisive businessman to build credibility when he first entered politics. Now, he is executing the same playbook, only in reverse: converting a political following that provided hundreds of millions of dollars in small campaign contributions into a base of consumers for all things branded Trump.

Right. Years ago he turned his imaginary skills as the manager of a long string of real estate and tchotchke-selling businesses, based not on success (all the businesses actually failed) but rather his performance as that character on a TV drama, into a successful campaign for the presidency of the United States. Now he's turning his imaginary skills as president (in fact he is by common consent of historians, political scientists, and most normal people the worst president we've ever had) into actual success selling tchotchkes and profiting from real estate.

Ain't Gonna Work on Maggie's Form No More

A Twitter friend sent me the following by DM yesterday evening, and I didn't notice it until later:

Does @maggieNYT’s latest change your opinion any?

My opinion of what? I assume she must have posted another obnoxious, defensive tweet, and it's so bad I'll really stop coming to her defense myself, like she's my girlfriend and the scales will fall from my eyes and I'll ask for my ring back.

Look, she's not my girlfriend. I've never met her and it's unlikely I ever will. If I saw her at the smoked fish counter at Barney Greengrass I would pretend, as I always do with celebrities, that I didn't recognize her. I don't want to know her. More important, I really need for people to start distinguishing between the profoundly stupid question, "Is X a Good Person or a Bad Person?" and the important question, "Is a thing that X is doing having a good or useful or pleasing impact or a bad or unhelpful or ugly impact? and what do we need to do about it?

There's still work to do

 

Sheriff's deputy Jason Meade, left, and the late Casey Goodson, right, via Atlanta Black Star.

Sometime last night, following up in The Times on the story of the 16-year-old in a Columbus foster home who was shot dead by police just a few minutes, as it happened, before the announcement of the verdict in the murder of George Floyd—Ma'khia Bryant, who was apparently having a conflict with a couple of other girls in the home and had threatened them with a knife, which would be a bad thing, though not a capital crime to be punished without trial, right on the spot—I noticed, down toward the end of the story:

Columbus has been gripped by tension over police shootings since early December, when Casey Goodson Jr., 23, was shot to death at the entrance of his home by a Franklin County sheriff’s deputy assigned to a fugitive task force.

Why I Love The New York Times

10 February 1897, via Cincinnati Enquirer.

 

The most important thing I had to say about The Times the other day wasn't said by me, but the editor who was so rudely dismissed:

Please don’t cancel your subscriptions to @nytimes! It is an incredible paper filled with talented journalists. We need them and we need a thriving free press. Thank you!

— Lauren Wolfe (@Wolfe321) January 24, 2021

This is a feeling I've been kind of working on for a couple of years, especially in Twitter conversations with our old pal formerly known as Thornton, who has his own thesis on the subject of the US press with a foundation I don't totally disagree with—that the solution to the problem of papers that are terrified of looking partisan is to have them be partisan, for which we have contemporary models from The New York Post (bad!) to The Guardian's US edition (good!) as well as the whole history of North American journalism going back to the 18th century until after World War II, when this concept of rigorous institutional objectivity arose along with the concept of special professional qualifications for journalists, who mostly hadn't even gone to college before and now tend to be from Ivy schools and are expected to get advanced degrees from J-school and in some cases getting paid correspondingly, in six- and even seven-figure incomes, and are so abstracted from the world the rest of us live in that they often seem to have no sense of what is and isn't important.

But we need newspapers even if they're bad, and there's something about The Times in particular that is different, for me, not that the critiques don't apply—they do!—but that my relationship to it is different. I don't think of it as a company of which I'm a customer, but like Lauren Wolfe as a kind of community of which I'm a citizen.

Small Ball

Seven Springs Estate near Mt. Kisco; after local authorities refused to let him build a golf course and 15 private houses on the estate, Trump used not-developing it as a conservation easement charity deduction, probably inflating its value, while writing off the property taxes as a business expense. Photo by Craig Ruttle/AP, with a report on how New York attorney general Letitia James is looking at the setup from a criminal standpoint.

Total Fake News

by Donald J. Trump

I didn’t call on you. I’m talking
to him. You should be more respectful
of this gentleman. You’re very rude to him.

But I will tell you that I look forward to
releasing that. I look forward to
releasing many things. I’m going to
release many things, and people will
be really shocked. But the New York Times
has been doing — it’s fake story after
fake story. I’ve never seen anything like it.

And people understand it, and people —
that’s why the — the media has such a
low approval rating now because of
what they’ve done. It’s really a shame.

Well, then, that's not fake news, is it? In a unique feat of reporting, The New York Times has uncovered evidence backing up one of Trump's most idiotic-sounding claims: that audit that his taxes are always under, year in and year out, really exists—

Counterintelligence Matters

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images, from a May 2019 piece by Murray Waas in New York Review of Books suggesting—with receipts, as they say—that Rosenstein really should not have been supervising Mueller's work in the first place, before Barr took over; because of a conflict of interest, since he was apparently a central witness in the special counsel's inquiry.

The New York Times's Michael Schmidt, who broke the story of Hillary Clinton's improper email storage habits and also of James Comey's memos on Trump attempting to shake him down to stop the Flynn investigation, has a book about to come out (Donald Trump v. The United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President—stop him, that is, from threatening the rule of law, and Schmidt doesn't seem to have adopted the GOP view that he shouldn't be stopped), and the big scoop, in today's paper, is that the FBI has no counterintelligence investigation into Trump's Russia connections.

That is, there was such an investigation, as we've been supposing (for me most embarrassingly here, where I suggested that I knew more about it than Jeffrey Toobin), but Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein shut it down days after acting FBI director Andrew McCabe opened it, just after appointing Robert Mueller special counsel, leaving McCabe under the false impression that Mueller would be taking it over: 

In which I agree with Bari Weiss

Photo by Robert Cherny for The Frisc.

Sort of. "From the left," as you might say, with Weiss's views ("San Francisco Will Spend $600,000 to Erase History") on

the San Francisco school board’s unanimous decision on Tuesday night to spend at least $600,000 of taxpayer money not just to shroud a historic work of art but to destroy it.

By now stories of progressive Puritanism (or perhaps the better word is Philistinism) are so commonplace — snowflakes seek safe space! — that it can feel tedious to track the details of the latest outrage. But this case is so absurd that it’s worth reviewing the specifics.

It's about the 13 fresco murals painted in 1936 inside George Washington High School in San Francisco by Victor Arnautoff, a Communist student of Diego Rivera, under the auspices of the WPA, depicting a less sanitized version of the life of George Washington in which the Father of Our Country is shown managing the enslaved workers on his tobacco plantation at Mount Vernon (not cotton, as too many reports including Weiss's claim), and as a land speculator pushing the colonization of the frontier literally over the dead body of a murdered Native.

Got Paranoia? Barr's Narratology

Would you buy a used funeral from this man? Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images via Time.

I should be writing an "I told you so" post on the revelation showing up in The New York Times last night that Mueller's staffers are starting to complain that Barr's letter made Trump look less implicated than he actually is:

WASHINGTON — Some of Robert S. Mueller III’s investigators have told associates that Attorney General William P. Barr failed to adequately portray the findings of their inquiry and that they were more troubling for President Trump than Mr. Barr indicated, according to government officials and others familiar with their simmering frustrations....

The special counsel’s investigators had already written multiple summaries of the report, and some team members believe that Mr. Barr should have included more of their material in the four-page letter he wrote on March 24 laying out their main conclusions, according to government officials familiar with the investigation.

But it strikes me as coming a little late. Barr has already succeeded in shaping the discourse in a way that may end up being really hard to remedy. I'm talking about that that weirdly incommensurate treatment of the two chosen aspects of the criminal investigation:

The non-general in his labyrinth

Update: Thanks for the shoutout, Infidel753!

Screenshot from Jim Henson's Labyrinth, 1986.

A lot of people roll their eyes when journalists like Haberman and Baker file another story about Trump's "increasing isolation"—how much more could it have increased since the last time they wrote it? Is it getting near bottom yet?

WASHINGTON — When President Trump grows frustrated with advisers during meetings, which is not an uncommon occurrence, he sits back in his chair, crosses his arms and scowls. Often he erupts. “Freaking idiots!” he calls his aides. Except he uses a more pungent word than “freaking.”

For two years, Mr. Trump has waged war against his own government, convinced that people around him are fools. Angry that they resist his wishes, uninterested in the details of their briefings, he becomes especially agitated when they tell him he does not have the power to do what he wants, which makes him suspicious that they are secretly undermining him.

Personally, I've long thought such stories were appropriate to the Trump administration, in the same way the protocol trivialities and sly portraiture of the memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon were appropriate to the reign of Louis XIV, because that's the kind of administration it is, based on the day-to-day lurches in the emperor's mood and how he bestows his favor. Yesterday he was praising the newly resigned General Mattis for his distinguished service, today somebody's explained to him what the resignation letter said and he's demanding Mattis leave by New Year, instead of sticking it out through February:

Trump's a Criminal

Odd how @peterbakernyt totals up the very winning week Trump had without even a mention of the devastating investigation by his own newsroom showing that Trump is a fraud and a tax cheat. Almost like Baker is joining in its dismissal. https://t.co/ZlAljMOLdk via @BrendanBerger

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) October 6, 2018

The New York Times really is like a whole country, in which the White House press corps is just one colorful but tiny Village, with inexhaustibly interesting gossip but maybe a lot less significance than it thinks, as represented in Baker's clueless lede.

Meanwhile, the very same paper really did give nearly two years (that's why it didn't get published before the 2016 election, don't @ me) to this extraordinary investigation by The New York Times bylined by David Barstow, Susanne Craig, and Russ Buettner (now out in the print paper), detailing how the Trump Organization has always been a criminal organization dedicated, like Al Capone's, to hiding its wealth from the tax collectors.

The narrative framing is mostly about how Trump's been lying all these years about being a self-made man—

Literary Corner: Epic

Study the Late Joseph McCarthy

by Donald J. Trump

The Failing New York Times wrote
a story that made it seem
like the White House Councel had TURNED
on the President, when in fact
it is just the opposite - &
the two Fake reporters knew this.

This is why the Fake News Media
has become the Enemy of
the People. So bad for America!

Some members of the media are
very Angry at the Fake
Story in the New York Times.
They actually called to complain
and apologize - a big step forward.

From the day I announced, the Times has been
Fake News, and with their disgusting
new Board Member, it will only
get worse! Study the late
Joseph McCarthy, because we are now in period with Mueller and his gang that make Joseph McCarthy look like a baby! Rigged Witch Hunt!

Study for Mast (for Ingmar Bergman), 1988, by Robert Motherwell. Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

The Failing New York Times wrote a story

That's Michael Schmidt and Maggie Haberman, of course, "White House Counsel Has Cooperated Extensively With Mueller’s Obstruction Inquiry," bringing us word of the 30 hours of interviews Counsel Don F. McGahn has had with the investigation since last November or so, detailing particularly, Schmidt and Haberman believe, his observations on the president's obstuction of justice since the Inauguration:

For the Record: Can Korean-Americans be Racists?

Like did somebody say there was anything wrong with being an underground goblin?  Via Monsters Vault.

I feel like I warned everybody about Kevin Williamson, that when the Atlantic hired him and then fired him over his ridiculously ghoulish tweets demanding capital punishment for women who undergo abortions—by hanging if I remember it right—the world would have been better off focusing on what a terrible writer he was, and how thoroughly dishonest, instead of pressing him like a mob of Jake Tappers to confess that he really wanted mass executions, which of course he didn't, he's much too clubbable for that—he just wanted to make people's flesh creep, like the fat boy in Pickwick Papers, only with self-righteousness instead of honest fear, and without any sense that his stupid and careless words were encouraging actual real-world abortion haters to kill, as they have killed before—

But no, everybody wanted to make it about the tweets, and now the world has constructed its equal and opposite reaction in the form of The New York Times hiring a gifted young tech writer, Sarah Jeong, to serve on its editorial board, and a massive rightwing butthurt protest because she once emitted some mean tweets, displaying an alarming lack of compassion for white people, because that's one of the big issues of the day. For example, in response to some especially obnoxious "can we hear both sides?" tweet from Andrew Sullivan in 2014, she'd responded,

Comically enough, this was the one Andrew Sullivan himself would personally call out four years later, as especially hurtful, completely unaware that it had been composed as a direct parody of his own most offensively just-saying "can't we at least consider the possibility that black people are genetically predisposed to sit around gossiping in the low-stress environment of the African savannah?" manner.

Everything's going to be fine for Sarah Jeong, the Times has backed her up appropriately, but I really can't pass over the implication around the intertubes that it's somehow impossible for Asian women to suffer discrimination:

Give Peace a Chance

Via.

It was tons of fun mocking New York Times's Mark Landler for his silly piece announcing that Emperor Trump has "thought long" about the North Korea issue and "been preparing for it all his adult life" by going to military school and retailing mythical tales about General MacArthur, but in today's reality-based reporting from Singapore, the very same Mark Landler does some really good service detailing the progression in which Trump is surrendering to Kim Jong-un in the hope of getting to a place where he can declare victory:

The statement is likely to have three sections — dealing with denuclearization, security guarantees for the North and steps to be taken by both sides — according to a person briefed on the talks. But it was not clear that the Americans would succeed in extracting a more detailed commitment to disarming than North Korea has already offered.

If anything, the White House moved closer to Pyongyang’s language, saying it sought complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization “on the Korean Peninsula” — a clause that North Korea interprets as potentially requiring the United States to scale back troop deployments there or to shrink its nuclear umbrella over two East Asian allies, South Korea and Japan.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo insisted the administration’s policy had not changed. But he confirmed that the United States would offer security assurances that were different from what Washington had offered North Korea in negotiations under Presidents George W. Bush or Bill Clinton. He declined to outline them.