White House Kayfabe

 

Prime Minister Winston Churchill in "siren suit" visiting the White House in January 1942; photo by the Royal Navy's official photographer, Lt. C.J. Ware, via Wikipedia.

Trump may have been genuinely upset by President Zelenskyy's showing up at the White House in fatigues and sweat shirt instead of a suit and tie (he once slapped his eldest boy to the floor in front of everybody in the dorm for thinking it would be OK to wear jeans on a father-and-son outing—to see a baseball game, no less), but he can't have been surprised, since it's known that that's what Zelenskyy does, and intends to do until the war is over, by way of showing solidarity with his country's troops, as Winston Churchill liked to do in one of his special rompers outfits during World War II. 

So it's pretty clear that the incident on Friday was wholly staged kayfabe, from Trump's greeting as the Ukrainian president stepped out of the car ("You're dressed up today") onwards. 

The reporter who fired the first shot at Zelenskyy's clothing choices, Brian Glenn, was obviously planted for the purpose—he's from one of the new media joints the White House has chosen to replace the venerable AP in small-size press availabilities, the cable channel Real America's Voice, previously best known as a venue for Stephen Bannon's show after Bannon was thrown off of YouTube and Spotify, and had been selected to lead the press pool alongside CNN for the occasion (on Thursday it was Newsmax). Glenn is also said to be "dating" Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), which sounds to me like an assertion that the two of them have regularly scheduled sexual relations, but you really don't want to get into that. (That's what she said, heh-heh.)

Winston

It's well known that all babies look like Winston Churchill, but the resemblance is even more amazing when they actually are Winston Churchill. Photo via somebody's Pinterest.

Mr. Bret Stephens suggesting a new biography for our Christmas reading, Churchill: Walking With Destiny by Andrew Walker, as "an antidote to the reigning conceits, self-deceptions, half-truths and clichés of our day":

For instance: Being born into “privilege” is ipso facto a privilege.

For Churchill — who suffered as a child under the remote glare of contemptuous father and a self-indulgent mother; fought valiantly in four wars by the time he was 25; and earned his own living through prodigious literary efforts that ultimately earned him a Nobel Prize — the main privilege was the opportunity to bear up under the immense weight of inner expectation that came with being born to a historic name.

It's true that Churchill's careers in the military and politics didn't pay him enough to live in the style to which he accustomed himself, as Alan Livsey/Financial Times wrote in his review of David Lough's 2015 No More Champagne: Churchill and His Money:

A lively terror

Prime Minister David Cameron and President Barack Obama inspecting the Jacob Epstein bust of Winston Churchill in the Oval Office (not the identical one loaned by the British Embassy to George W. Bush, which was returned to the embassy after Bush left the White House), July 2010, photo by Pete De Souza. Via ABC News. 

Speaking as an old Boomer who yields to none in my loathing for that bloodsucker and intellectual mediocrity Henry Kissinger, I was not sorry to hear Bernie Sanders last night calling Hillary Clinton out for her friendliness with the criminal advocate of mass murder in Cambodia, Chile, East Timor, and who knows where else, but taken aback, by the same token, when he was nominating two leaders, one domestic and one foreign, who would "influence his foreign policy decisions", in answer to Judy Woodruff's question.

He started off by naming Franklin Roosevelt, not a bad choice at all, but failed to mention any of FDR's foreign policy ideas or moves in his explanation, which made him sound a little like Marco Rubio playing pin the sound bite on the donkey, if you know what I mean, and then his other choice was none other than Sir Winston Churchill, defended in terms that weren't too different, logically, from Clinton's defense of Kissinger (she may "disagree" with him "on a number of things" but he went to China) earlier in the debate: