Mined from the notebooks, Saturday, September 21, 2019. Posted Saturday morning, September 28.
AP file photo from January 2017 of Trump pretending to president by phone saying whatever came into his mind to the President of Australia. Alex Brandon/AP.
[Note from your faithful correspondent: The trouble I have with my notebooks is getting the notes out of them and onto the computer. I can’t sit at a desk or table and type like a writer possessed anymore. The result often is that by the time I get done it looks like I’m behind the curve when, if I wasn’t ahead of it, I was at least keeping even. Since I wrote these notes at the end of the last week certain things have played out just as I expected, including, especially, the Republicans coming to Trump’s defense and dismissing the threat posed by impeachment hearings using almost the exact words I have them using here. This isn’t particularly insightful on my part. It’s on the order of predicting the sun will rise in the morning. Anywho...this is the first of three posts based on the same notebook entry. I’d have typed it up as one post but, like I said, I can’t put in the desk time I used to, and I don’t want to get any further behind.]
From the Department of Like I Would Know: Our story so far as I don’t come close to understanding it...
This we know about Trump. He’ll say anything at any time except the right thing. When he comes close to saying the right thing it’s scripted and he can barely feign interest. He prefers to speak from instinct. Since his instincts are venal, corrupt, ignorant, vain, egotistical, mendacious, full of resentments, self-loathing, and self-doubt, almost everything he says is venal, designed to further his scheming and self-enrichment, ignorant, vain, egotistical, packed full of lies, and consisting of lists of his resentments and projections of his self-loathing and self-doubt. The connection is self-aggrandizement and self-advancement. Everything he says he says because he thinks it’s to his advantage, political, personal, and financial. If he said what he probably did say to Zelensky, he said it because he saw an opening. And he wasn’t offering a bribe. He was extorting a concession. Give me what I want and I’ll give you what you need---maybe. Trump is a bully as much as he’s any of the other awful things that make him unfit for the presidency. He enjoys showing he’s the boss. The point is to let you know who’s calling the shots, provided, of course, he sees you as weaker than him. If he sees you as stronger, he grovels.
When I went to bed Thursday night my Twitter feed was blowing up over the Whistleblower story. There wasn’t much information. Mostly speculation based on a given---that he’d been overheard selling out the interests of the United States (again) for his personal gain. The only question was to whom he was offering the deal. Within minutes, the question was getting an answer, probably based on news stories I was too late to the party to have seen linked to in real time: Ukraine’s President Zelanasky. There was a growing sense of certainty what the deal he didn’t dare refuse was: Military aid in exchange for dirt on Joe Biden. Joy began to grow throughout Liberal Twitterland. This is it! the tweet-cry went up.This is the one! The scandal that will take him down at last! This is going to change everything!
It might, but probably won’t. The fundamental dynamic that’s kept him afloat for going on three years won’t change. He’s good for the Republicans and they know it and like it. A few might be nervous, but they’re going to wait and see if, like all the previous and scandals and crises he’s survived, he’ll survive this one. The moment will pass and be forgotten when the next scandal comes along. Meanwhile, their colleagues will do their utmost to help him get through the mess.
Democrats and liberals making the case for impeachment hearings right now, trying to beat back the objection from other Democrats and liberals who are less gung-ho that there’s nothing to be gained by a process they’re bound to lose, argue that it will put Republicans on the defensive. They will have have to go on record defending their votes to let Trump get away with it, as if that would be hard for them.
GOP: Nothing to see here. None of it’s impeachable. It’s just Democrats desperate to destroy a president they know they can’t beat in an election.
GOP Voters: Sounds right to us!
It’s not the surest of bets this will cause his mobs of hideous men and women to abandon him. They won’t see whatever it’s turned out he’s done as treason or even wrong. They’ll see it as business as usual. As far as they know this is how things are done. Politicians make secret deals for their own material or career advantage, the good of the country and will of the People be damned. They’re all liars, cheats, frauds, thieves, knaves, and scoundrels---and there’s plenty of evidence to back them up---and it’s why they like Trump. He’s their scoundrel. They’re convinced everything Obama did, domestically and internationally, he did to weaken the country and to buy the votes of his base with free stuff good, hardworking (white and Republican, all synonyms) real Americans paid for. They’re convinced the mission of the Clinton Foundation is to make the Clintons rich through influence-peddling. The emails and Benghazi proved her corruption---she was beholden to the globalists’ interests. The only difference between her and Trump ethically was that the liberal elites liked her and welcomed her into their club. Trump might be rotten to the core but at least he’s on “our” side. He cheats and he swindles and blackmails and bribes his way to raking in as much as he can for himself, but “we” get to share in the spoils, even if the only pay-off is the satisfaction of seeing him put another one over on THEM!
Very soon they’ll have themselves convinced Trump was being patriotic.
And Trump himself will help with this. He’ll insist he’s done nothing wrong. He won’t do it just because he’s a shameless, brazen liar. As far as he’s concerned nothing he does is wrong. As far as he’s concerned he’s just doing what everybody else does. He thinks most people are as crooked, greedy, self-serving, and self-dealing as he is. Anybody who says they aren’t is a liar and a hypocrite. Anybody who isn’t a hypocrite and a liar is a fool and deserves to be mocked, gulled, and fleeced. The secret of Trump’s political “genius” is that he thinks just like his mobs of hideous men and women and he’s able to repeat their own thoughts back to them in words and in a tone that sound like genius to them because they’re their thoughts and they think they’re geniuses too...
I’m cutting myself off here. The second part will go into the works as soon as I post this. Meanwhile,on a note of related despair: Three reasons I think this one will sink and one reason I think it likely won't: The Survival of Our Criminal Operator-in-Chief.
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