Posted Sunday morning, February 24, 2019.
Alec Baldwin as Donald Trump using the “best words” to explain his declaration of a national emergency on last week’s Saturday Night Live. Screenshot via Business Insider.
Just something to keep in mind when trying to figure out what he means: Trump's use of words is careless, impulsive, emotional, ignorant, profligate, and lunatic. He often doesn't mean anything more than he's mad about something, happy about something---happy in his mean-spirited, malicious, and self-serving way---has something he wants to boast about, or is simply feeling neglected and wants attention, and he spouts off using whatever words are within easiest reach.
He venting. He’s human. All too human. Like many of us---a great many of us---he mistakes venting (and complaining, whining, kvetching, and griping and grousing) with action. It’s another way he’s just like most of his mob of hideous men. They’re great gripers, grousers, and whiners. It’s why you hate to sit next to them at a bar or have them working near you during a downtime. They recognize themselves in him.
Sure, they see him as a stronger, tougher, more successful and heroic version of themselves, but still as themselves. Listening to him gripe and grouse and whine on their behalf feels makes them feel like they’re doing something about the things they gripe and grouse and whine about. Fortunately, they’re content with that. They go to the rallies like they go to football games: to watch their hero be heroic on their behalf. And he knows that. Like the huckster he is, he knows what the suckers want and he’s happy to sell it to them. That’s another thing to keep in mind.
He’s selling, always selling. First and foremost, he’s a salesman. A dishonest salesman with just one defective product to sell.
“Donald Trump”.
“Now with new and improved xenophobia and racism!”
And as a salesman, he’s dependent on his pitch. Words are all he’s got And words have carried him every step of the way from Queens to the White House. No wonder he’s proud of his skill and talent as a wordsmith. But it’s also no wonder he’s careless and irresponsible with words. He uses them to open and close deals. They’re tools for selling. In other, um, words, they’re advertising. And, as everybody knows, advertising is just creative lying. Or as he’s put it “truthful hyperbole”. He has the “best words” but they’re “just words.”
Doesn't mean the things he says and tweets aren't dangerous and destructive. It means you can drive yourself crazy trying to parse every single statement he makes
Trump lives in the moment. He thinks ahead only far enough to see his way out of a current predicament. What he says off the cuff is an expression of a passing emotion.
In that he is, again, just like his base. It's more important to him and to them to FEEL their anger and fear right now than actually act on them
So watch what they do and try not to worry so much about what they say.
Not that it will make you feel that much better. It will just help you get a better sense of what is actually going on
All this is by way of a reaction to his characteristic over-reaction to last week’s Saturday Night Live. I was inclined to think he was just venting and when he used the word “retribution” in his tweet he was being as careless and emotional in his choice of words as he usually is. To me it sounded like a more amateurishly ominous way of saying “You’ll get yours someday, pal!”, the pal here being NBC and not Alec Baldwin, so Baldwin can breathe easier. Easy for me to say. I’m not Alec Baldwin.
Others didn’t see it that way. They saw Trump making a serious and immediate threat. They saw Trump taking another step toward dictatorship they’ve talked themselves into believing he’s bent on creating and on his way to doing so. I didn’t see it like that. Which brings me to something else.
We’re doing a lot of this to ourselves. We’re scaring ourselves with our own nightmares. Something else to keep in mind: Trump poisons everything he touches, and that includes us!
He’s making us paranoid, irrational, and near-hysterical in our arguments which are often ahistorical or wrongly historical as we reach for analogies in events and past times that aren’t in fact analogous as we try to explain him or explain him away. It sometimes seems to me we’re growing desperate not so much to talk ourselves down from the ledge as to scare ourselves out onto it.
Don’t get me wrong. I think Trump would like to be a dictator. He’s made it clear he thinks that’s what a president is. The word I think he’d use in comparison is “boss” but that’s what a boss is in his mind, someone who gets to tell everybody else what to do. He’s always thought this. There’s this quote from Vince Lombardi Jr in Jeff Pearlman’s “Football for a Buck”, talking about Trump in 1984:
“The first time I met Donald Trump was on a flight to a league meeting,” said Vince Lombardi Jr., son of the the legendary Packer coach and president/general manager of the Michigan Panthers. “I didn’t know who he was, just he was a busy young guy. He started asking me all these football questions, then he told me I had no idea what I was talking about. I thought, ‘Who the hell is this guy?’ Later on, I noted one very unique thing about the people who worked for him. They only knew two words--- ‘Yes, Donald.’”
A president with the power of Donald Trump’s idea of a boss is a dictator.
But Donald Trump is Donald Trump before he’s anything, and Donald Trump is a vindictive little bully who lives to get even with his enemies, and his enemies include anyone who doesn't share his monstrously high opinion of himself, and his main way of getting even has been to make them pay, literally. “Retribution” is a threat he’s made many times in the past against writers and journalists who’ve offended his vanity, but he hasn’t always let the word stand by itself. He’s coupled it with “cost”, notably when he was fuming over Bob Woodward’s book, “Fear” last fall...
President Trump suggested Wednesday that Congress should change libel laws so he would be better positioned to seek “retribution” against Bob Woodward, the author of an explosive new book that portrays a presidency careening toward a “nervous breakdown.”
“Isn’t it a shame that someone can write an article or book, totally make up stories and form a picture of a person that is literally the exact opposite of the fact, and get away with it without retribution or cost,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “Don’t know why Washington politicians don’t change libel laws?”
That’s what Trump was doing in his tweet. Wishfully threatening to sue. Lawsuits have been his retributive weapon of choice his whole adult life.
Of course, he can’t sue NBC, Alec Baldwin, and the writers and producers of Saturday Night Live for libel. Well, he could, but he wouldn’t get very far. He’s a public figure. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision in New York Times vs. Sullivan, you can pretty much write or say anything you want about a public figure. Trump himself takes advantage of this all the time.
So, I was inclined to shrug off the tweet as just another instance of Trump’s spouting off. There’s nothing he can do to change the libel laws, I assured myself. He’ll move on to venting about something else by tomorrow.
But then Clarence Thomas entered the act.
Justice Clarence Thomas called for the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the landmark 1964 New York Times v. Sullivan ruling, which protects news organizations from most libel suits when they write about public figures.
Adding to a list of far-reaching positions he has taken on constitutional questions, Thomas wrote Tuesday that the New York Times ruling and follow-up cases "were policy-driven decisions masquerading as constitutional law."...
Thomas’s position aligns him at least to some degree with President Donald Trump, who has called for overhauling the country’s libel laws to make it easier to sue...
The New York Times ruling says that news organizations and other speakers can’t be sued for defaming a public figure unless they act with "actual malice." The case involved an advertisement seeking donations for Martin Luther King’s legal defense and criticizing police tactics used against civil rights protesters.
Thomas, a 1991 appointee of President George H.W. Bush, said Tuesday the reach of defamation law was a matter for the states.
"We did not begin meddling in this area until 1964, nearly 175 years after the First Amendment was ratified," he wrote. "The states are perfectly capable of striking an acceptable balance between encouraging robust public discourse and providing a meaningful remedy for reputational harm."
Thomas’s 14-page opinion accompanied a Supreme Court order that refused to revive a defamation lawsuit against entertainer Bill Cosby. The suit was filed by Kathrine McKee, who said Cosby defamed her in the course of denying her allegations that he raped her decades ago. Cosby was convicted of sexual assault last year in a separate case.
Trump, who frequently attacks the news media as dishonest, called for a "strong look at our country’s libel laws" in January 2018 after the publication of a book depicted him as an inept leader of a dysfunctional White House.
During his campaign in February 2016 Trump said a rally, “We’re going to open up libel laws and we’re going to have people sue you like you’ve never got sued before."
The book Trump was mad about last January, by the way, was Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury”, and if there’s been a book about Trump written by someone who genuinely appears to have been acting out of malice and with a reckless disregard for truth it’s “Fire and Fury”. Other books and additional reporting since have shown that Wolff may have been a bit careless with some particulars but he got the overall right. But the fact is Trump didn’t sue at the time and hasn’t, as far as I know, sued Wolff and his publisher or anyone since. But that doesn’t mean he hasn’t wanted to and hasn’t been looking for an opportunity to do it. And there is something he can do to change the libel laws in his favor.
He can appoint more justices who think like Thomas to the Supreme Court.
At any rate, this reminded me...
In a passage in “Fear”, Lindsey Graham recounts a phone conversation he had with Trump in January 2018 that was supposed to be about a meeting they were going to have the next day to hammer out a deal on DACA, which Graham had good reason for thinking Trump was in favor of making, mainly because Trump had already told Graham he was. In the middle of the conversation, Trump suddenly veered off into complaining about the libel laws. This is in the third person, but I say it’s Graham doing to the recounting because I think it’s clear Graham was Woodward’s prime source here...
“Can we change the libel laws?” Trump asked, rapidly shifting the tenor of their conversation to one of his pet peeves.
“No,” Graham, the lawyer, said.
“Why?”
We are not England, Graham said, where the libel laws are stricter.
People were writing “bullshit,” Trump said.
“I don’t doubt it,” Graham agreed. “But no, we can’t change the libel laws and don’t worry about it.” In the landmark 1964 decision New York Times v. Sullivan, the U.S. Supreme Court had set the libel bar about as high as possible: something was libelous only if published or said knowing it was false and with reckless disregard for the truth.
“Well, I don’t intend to become like England,” Trump said.
“There’s no more bigger punching bag in all the world than the President of the United States,” Graham said, “and you’ve gotten more than your fair share of unfounded criticism, but that’s just the hand you’re dealt. And the way you beat them, Mr. President, is you produce. And the way you put your critics in a box is you don’t sue them, you just deliver. Prove all those guys wrong.”
Graham felt it had been one of his best conversations with the president. He had done most of the talking.
Trump was probably still stewing over “Fire and Fury”. And Graham’s palavering is both ironic and a clue as to what he’s up to now in his blatant attempts to curry Trump’s favor by making himself out as Trump’s most aggressive defenders. But what’s most compelling about this anecdote to me is that the meeting Graham and Trump were laying the groundwork for has become notorious.
It was the “shithole countries” meeting.
End of Part One. Follow the link to Part Two: "Just words except when they're not just HIS words".
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"Fear" and "Fire and Fury" are available in the usual forms at Amazon and from Audible. Like I said, there have been a number of books since Wolff's whose writers Trump wishes he could subject to his retribution and probably plenty more to come. The two I'm looking forward to reading right now are Andrew McCabe's "The Threat" and "Team of Vipers" by Cliff Sims, the first for its urgency, the second for the gossip. But the book I'm recommending is "The Apprentice" by Greg Miller because I think it's the most damning because it's the best written and seems the best reported. It's available in hardcover and for kindle at Amazon and as an audiobook from Audible.
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