Literary Corner: Bird Graveyard

Wind farm off the Aberdeenshire coastline, visible from the Trump International Golf Links in Balmedie. Photo by Nigel Mowat via BBC.

By somewhat popular demand:

Tremendous Fumes

by Donald J. Trump

We’ll have an economy based on wind. I never
understood wind. You know, I know windmills very much.
I’ve studied it better than anybody I know. It’s very expensive.
They’re made in China and Germany mostly — very few made here,

almost none. But they’ve manufactured tremendous —
if you’re into this — tremendous fumes. Gases
are spewing into the atmosphere. You know we have
a world, right? So the world is tiny compared to the universe.

So tremendous, tremendous amount of fumes and everything.
You talk about the carbon footprint — fumes are spewing into the air.
Right? Spewing. Whether it’s in China, Germany, it’s going
into the air.  It’s our air, their air, everything — right?

So they make these things and then they put them up.
And if you own a house within vision of some
of these monsters, your house is worth 50 percent
of the price. They’re noisy. They kill the birds.

You want to see a bird graveyard? You just go.
Take a look. A bird graveyard. Go under a windmill someday.
You’ll see more birds than you’ve ever seen ever in your life.
You know, in California, they were killing the bald eagle.

If you shoot a bald eagle, they want to put you in jail
for 10 years. A windmill will kill many bald eagles.
It’s true. And you know what? After a certain
number, they make you turn the windmill off.

That’s true, by the way. This is — they make you turn it off
after you — and yet, if you killed one they put you in jail.
That’s okay. But why is it okay for these windmills
to destroy the bird population? And that’s what they’re doing.

The Trump Doctrine: I Only Care About Big Stuff

Beach at Biarritz, via en.plages.tv.

Everything you assumed was true is going to turn out to be true. Most outlets don't even have time for this one tonight, on top of the Marie Yovanovitch testimony and the Roger Stone verdict, but I just love it. Especially in the summer.

Remember how Trump announced in August at the Group of Seven meeting in Biarritz that he thought next year's summit should be held at the Doral Golf Resort in Miami? And on October 17th it turned out to be true, in a bravura press conference performance by Mick Mulvaney?

So we use the same set of criteria that previous administrations have used.  We started with a list of about a dozen, just on paper.  And we sent an advance team out to actually visit 10 locations in several states.  We visited California, Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, Michigan, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Utah.  Now, we got that list down to just under 10, and the advance team went out to visit those.  And from there, we got down to four finalists that our senior team went out to look at.  They looked at — I think it was one in Hawaii, two in Utah, and then the Mar-a-Lago facility in Florida.

And it became apparent at the end of that process that Doral was, by far and away — far and away — the best physical facility for this meeting.  In fact, I was talking to one of the advance teams when they came back, and I said, “What was it like?”  And they said, “Mick, you’re not going to believe this, but it’s almost like they built this facility to host this type of event.”

Actually, no, according to emails sourced by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and reported in the Washington Post. Starting in late May, by early July the Secret Service had whittled the list down to four sites in Hawaii, California, Utah, and North Carolina, and were preparing to send senior staffers for a final trip, when something happened to make them chop the California and North Carolina sites and add Miami:

Guys, I have an idea where that money may have come from

Doonbeg Golf Course, County Clare, via RTE.

Among all the week's crazy news stories,  this one, from Jonathan O'Connell, David A. Fahrenthold and Jack Gillum at the Washington Post last Saturday (and reinforced by the WNYC/Pro Publica Trump Inc. project), got a little lost:

In the nine years before he ran for president, Donald Trump’s company spent more than $400 million in cash on new properties — including 14 transactions paid for in full, without borrowing from banks — during a buying binge that defied real estate industry practices and Trump’s own history as the self-described “King of Debt.”

Trump’s vast outlay of cash, tracked through public records and totaled publicly here for the first time, provides a new window into the president’s private company, which discloses few details about its finances.

It shows that Trump had access to far more cash than previously known, despite his string of commercial bankruptcies and the Great Recession’s hammering of the real estate industry. 

Eleven golf courses and resorts from Aberdeen (2006) through Doonbeg and Turnberry (2014), a winery-resort, a hotel, and five houses, almost entirely paid with cash, from a man who used to boast that the secret of his success was Other People's Money.

Elevating the art

Computers and fabrication: 3-D printing at the 2006 Maker Faire, via Edutopia.

Trump's hard at work during his working vacation, nine tweets before breakfast, which is a lot, apparently kicked off by this morning's New York Times, and Sheryl Gay Stolberg's well-made piece

Many Politicians Lie. But Trump Has Elevated the Art of Fabrication.

The failing @nytimes, which has made every wrong prediction about me including my big election win (apologized), is totally inept!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 7, 2017

"Inept" is a pretty cute word choice. The Times did not apologize for anything in its letter to subscribers of November 13, and it's bizarre that he keeps claiming they did, though of course a good example of the phenomenon Stolberg writes about. It's funny how he takes the media failure to predict his victory as a personal insult to himself instead of an unpredictable weirdness in the results (that his share of the vote should distribute itself into just the right counties in those four states to add up to a win, even though he was three million votes behind). It was not a big win. Peter Baker at The Times doesn't speculate on what predictions are meant by "every wrong prediction",  and I'm not going to try.

Looks as if Kelly can't stop people from dumping clippings on the emperor's desk when he's in Jersey.

Tough Enough

National Review's Kevin D. Williamson, continuing his discussion of the David Mamet fake toughness of Donald J. Trump, works himself into a funny rhetorical pickle on the subject of the genuinely tough, where he nominates the military heroes, Senator McCain and former president George H.W. Bush:

The fact that McCain has been something of a disappointment as a senator and a presidential candidate invites reflection upon the actual political value of personal toughness. George H. W. Bush finished flying a World War II combat mission while bleeding from a head wound in an airplane that was on fire before parachuting into the Pacific, where he evaded vengeful Japanese soldiers who were just then engaged in torturing and eating their prisoners. He was somehow lampooned as a “wimp” by the same media that had earlier accused him of being a bloodthirsty killer (it was alleged that he had strafed a Japanese lifeboat), and some conservatives joined in that, Pat Buchanan among them. The wimp flew 58 combat missions, whereas tough-guy Trump might play 58 holes of golf in an unusually active fortnight. But George H. W. Bush’s genuine toughness and courage was nearly irrelevant to his performance in office.

Given that Trump has visited a golf course 43 times in the first 14 fortnights/28 weeks of his presidency, or almost exactly 3 times per fortnight, I'd suggest he plays at least 54 holes in a normal fortnight. (Reporters aren't generally allowed to know when he's playing, and he's known to have claimed he was doing a meeting when he was actually on the course; more details and possibly different calculations here.) The 58 holes of an unusually active fortnight would be when he's interrupted on the fifth hole of a fourth round because he's required to do something presidential. That would indeed be unusual. He's so lazy he's been known to drive his cart across a putting green, something even an ignoramus like me can recognize as disgusting. Perhaps that is one reason he is reluctant to play on courses he doesn't own.

Money pouring in

Trump National Charlotte is a big wedding venue: "The Lakefront Ballroom is every bride’s dream come true. Nowhere else can you find a back wall of the reception hall open to a beautiful beach on Lake Norman. The bride and groom can even plan to enter and leave the reception by boat." It's certainly true that you can't find a wall open to a beach on Lake Norman anywhere other than on Lake Norman.

So golf writer (golf writer?!) James Dodson, hawking a newly published memoir (The Range Bucket List: The Golf Adventure of a Lifetime) on WBUR radio in Boston, was telling the interviewer about his day with the future president on the future president's Trump National Golf Club Charlotte, sometime in early 2014, when he was wondering where Trump was getting the $100 million he claimed to have to finance the purchase of all those golf courses in the middle of the Great Recession, and asked young Grand Duke Eric about it:

"So when I got in the cart with Eric," Dodson says, "as we were setting off, I said, 'Eric, who’s funding? I know no banks — because of the recession, the Great Recession — have touched a golf course. You know, no one’s funding any kind of golf construction. It’s dead in the water the last four or five years.' And this is what he said. He said, 'Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.' I said, 'Really?' And he said, 'Oh, yeah. We’ve got some guys that really, really love golf, and they’re really invested in our programs. We just go there all the time.' Now that was three years ago, so it was pretty interesting."

Indeed it was. So you've heard about that. What I thought was funny was the reaction of some of the reactionary brethren, like Fox News's Brit Hume, to whom the whole concept of Trump being in debt to a Russian bank seemed completely unfamiliar: