Trump Demands Staffers Lie: SADE!

The emperor knows he has no clothes on. In fact he likes the way he looks naked, though it is not conventionally attractive, and he wants everybody to see it, shocked and awed by the monumentality of his flesh. But it's not what he wants them to talk about. That wouldn't be humiliating enough. He wants them to abjectly accept that he's wearing clothes when they can see plainly that he isn't. That's the deal.

Jonathan Chait writes that Trump has "figured out how to corrupt the entire government":

Donald Trump came to the presidency a complete novice to government and often found his corrupt, authoritarian impulses frustrated by its bureaucracy. But he is slowly learning how to control the machine that has stymied him. This is the story of 2019, as Trump has replaced institutionalists attempting to curtail his grossest instincts with loyalists happy to indulge them. It is playing out across multiple dimensions. This is the through-line between several seemingly disconnected episodes from the last several days.

And adduces the Sharpie embellishment of the hurricane map, where he demonstrateed that Dorian might have hit Alabama by tampering with a weather map to include a bit of the state, but what strikes me is how little effort Trump bothers to make to convince anybody, with that extraneous black outline of a bulb that could not possibly have any relationship to the weather system of the cone. Not only does he not care if we can see it's a fake, it's almost as if he wants us to see it's a fake and then keep it quiet.

And even when he gets hold of some better-looking evidence he's not really trying, or expecting his henchmen to try:

Literary Corner: The Whirlwind Out of the Voice

Uncredited image from the website named in lower left. 

You Can't Fake It

by Donald J. Trump

Let me tell you: your Senator is disgraceful what he did. This election, you will decide which party is in control of Congress, that's true, and if they win, even if they win the House, it's going to be just fighting, fighting, fighting, it's going to be—will be—

You love my hair. Thank you. She knows what to say. She knows how to make me happy. "I love your hair." Well the one thing that has been really great about this whole endeavor, I used to say— "He wears a hairpiece, he wears a hair—" They don't say that anymore. They—these people have seen me under every condition known to man. I haven't heard that one in over a year. You know when you're walking around and the wind is going crazy and you're inspecting, like I did the other day. The incredible hurricane, this horrible hurricane, Michael, that devastated Florida and Georgia and Alabama got hit hard and then a couple of weeks before—and Michael got a piece of them too—but a couple of weeks before̦ I went to North Carolina, South Carolina, you look at what happened in a little piece of Virginia and you walk around in those conditions. You can't fake it, can't fake it. So that's one good thing: nobody ever says that anymore. That's one of the—might be one of the best things that's happened to me a long time, because my whole life they said, "Is it or isn't it?" Barbara Walters interviewed me: "Do you mind if I play with your hair?" Remember that? And then numerous people have done that, but that's OK

—but the choice could not be more clear: Democrats produce mobs, Republicans produce jobs. True.

(Missoula rally 18 October 2018, 26:27-28:17)

David Choi/Business Insider believes Trump was directly claiming that his experience with hurricanes proves his hair is real, if anybody is still doubting. I just wanted to point out the masterful control exhibited in this interrupted intermezzo wrapping a hurricane inside a hair story inside a campaign slogan without—I won't say without skipping a beat, because there isn't any beat as such, just an enormous pulsation—but without allowing the hurricane to escape.

For the Record: Why lie about Maria?

Photo by Getty Images, via The Hill, from its report last week on the GAO finding that FEMA was grossly understaffed and overwhelmed by last year's hurricane season; that was before we learned Trump had diverted $10 million from the emergency management agency to ICE and the persecution of undocumented immigrants away from the border.

In fact @NydiaVelazquez and Bennie Thompson were demanding a better count from DHS a couple of weeks after the storm, but your FEMA administrator Brock Long turned them down. "Not my responsibility" https://t.co/kXtuYOTso8

— Yasphalt Jungle (@Yastreblyansky) September 15, 2018

Literary Corner: The Emperor of I Scream

Old Harbor. By voitv/DeviantArt.

The poet-president did a private reading of some new pieces yesterday, at his meeting with officials of the Federal Emergency Management Agency gearing up for the start of the hurricane season, of which Washington Post got hold of an audio recording. There's a simple structure, drily comic tone, and unexpected granularity in the works, which greatly heightens the fantastical oddity of the things he says.

Alternative Facts

by Donald J. Trump

I. Hurricane Harvey

Sixteen thousand people,
many of them in Texas,
for whatever reason that is,
people went out in their boats
to watch the hurricane.
That didn’t work out too well.
That didn’t work out too well.

"I thought you were bringing the beer!" Hurricane viewing party, Houston, 28 August 2017, photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images. In fact it's a volunteer rescue party, saving people's lives, but television images of calm and colorful scenes like these have inspired Trump to imagine an entirely new narrative, like that of the Washington tourists who came out in carriages with blankets and picnic baskets to watch the First Battle of Bull Run.

The emperor is displeased

Downtown San Juan at night, a week after the hurricane, photo by Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times/Getty via CNBC.

On Wednesday September 20, Hurricane Maria, the tenth most intense Atlantic storm in history, the strongest to hit the US possession of Puerto Rico since 1928 and the second wettest, dumping almost 38 inches of water on the eastern mountain city of Caguas, began wiping out 100% of the power grid on the island, leaving 3.4 millions American citizens without electricity, and with no access to food and safe drinking water beyond what they'd managed to lay in getting ready for the storm, or gas.

On Thursday the 21st, President Trump headed off for a long weekend at his Bedminster golf club, interrupted only by a visit to Alabama (campaigning for Senator Luther Strange, who lost his primary on the 26th).

Stupid Economist Tricks: Hurricane Pricing

Image via The Pediatric Insider.

On September 5 professional economist Tyler Cowen was explaining over at Bloomberg (via Edroso's Twitter feed) about how

Price Gouging Can Be a Type of Hurricane Aid

Higher prices can help resources get to the people who need them most.

And on September 6 we began hearing about airlines dealing with the advent of Irma by jacking prices up almost exactly 900%:

Totally unacceptable, a $358 flight from Miami to NYC went up to $3578. Why should expect anything decent from these airlines??? F ing RATS! https://t.co/rjdH6J0yOL

— Joseph Pep Nodarse (@joerileyhudson) September 6, 2017

Because who needs a flight out of Miami most? The one who can afford to pay $3600 for the privilege. By Paul Ryan's famous definition of freedom—

Engaged

Image by 731/Bloomberg.

POTUS engaged during his first broad-scale external crisis test, via @MarkLandler https://t.co/BJIklyqocz

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) August 27, 2017

"In a simple ceremony at Camp David, attended only by a few close friends, President Donald Trump asked the Gulf of Mexico to marry him, and the well-known North American body of water, dressed in a gauzy wrap dotted with clouds and a very large hurricane in its northwest, agreed, pending completion of the pre-nuptial agreement by their attorneys..."

No, not that kind of engagement. But there's something that did strike my funnybone about Landler's story: