Curious Moments From Fire And Fury: Trump In The White House (Part Four)

34. A proud Trump privately admitted to feeding the media false information.

“If you couldn’t get press directly for yourself, you became a leaker. There was no happenstance news, in Trump’s view. All news was manipulated and designed, planned and planted. All news was to some extent fake–he understood that very well, because he himself had faked it so many times in his career. This was why he had so naturally cottoned to the ‘fake news’ label. ‘I’ve made stuff up forever, and they always print it,’ he bragged.”

35. Trump took credit for MBS becoming the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.

From Chapter 17:

“Within weeks of the trip, MBS, detaining MBN quite in the dead of night, would force him to relinquish the Crown Prince title, which MBS would then assume for himself. Trump would tell friends that he and Jared had engineered a Saudi coup: ‘We’ve put our man on top!'”

36. A lot of law firms don’t want to represent Trump.

Also from Chapter 17:

“…it certainly didn’t help that they were unable to hire a law firm with a top-notch white-collar government practice. By the time Bannon and Priebus were back in Washington, three blue-chip firms had said no. All of them were afraid they would face a rebellion among the younger staff if they represented Trump, afraid Trump would publicly humiliate them if the going got tough, and afraid Trump would stiff them for the bill.

In the end, nine top firms turned them down.”

37. Kushner & Ivanka retaliated against two frustrated, outgoing Trump lawyers by leaking dirt about them to the press.

As the media started successfully discrediting the original, false, then shifting assertions regarding the famous Trump Tower meeting that has been a focal point of the Mueller investigation, two of Trump’s attorneys saw the writing on the wall:

“Mark Corallo was instructed not to speak to the press, indeed not to even answer his phone. Later that week, Corallo, seeing no good outcome–and privately confiding that he believed the meeting on Air Force One represented a likely obstruction of justice–quit. (The Jarvanka side would put it out that Corallo was fired.)”

[snip]

“Likewise, the Trump family, no matter its legal exposure, was not going to be run by its lawyers. Jared and Ivanka helped to coordinate a set of lurid leaks–drinking, bad behavior, personal life in disarray–about Marc Kasowitz, who had advised the president to send the couple home. Shortly after the presidential party returned to Washington, Kasowitz was out.”

In Chapter 21, gelatinous salamander Steve Bannon offered his own view:

“Look, Kasowitz has known him for twenty-five years.  Kasowitz has gotten him out of all kinds of jams.  Kasowitz on the campaign–what did we have, a hundred women?  Kasowitz took care of all of them.  And now he lasts, what, four weeks?  He’s in the mumble tank. This is New York’s toughest lawyer, broken.  Mark Corallo, toughest motherfucker I ever met, just can’t do it.”

Wait, did Trump have one of his lawyers pay off “a hundred women” he had affairs with or is that number exaggerated?  Again, author Michael Wolff doesn’t follow up.

38. Anthony Scaramucci helped kill a damaging Kushner story so he could get a job in the White House.

From Chapter 20:

“Scaramucci called a reporter he knew to urge that an upcoming story about Kushner’s Russian contacts be spiked.  He followed up by having another mutual contact call the reporter to say that if the story was spiked it would help the Mooch get into the White House, whereupon the reporter would have special Mooch access.  The Mooch then assured Jared and Ivanka that he had, in this clever way, killed the story.”

39. Bannon’s theory on the true focus of the Mueller investigation:

From Chapter 21:

“This is all about money laundering…Their path to fucking Trump goes right through Paul Manafort, Don Jr., and Jared Kushner…It goes through Deutsche Bank and all the Kushner shit.  The Kushner shit is greasy.  They’re going to go right through that.  They’re going to roll those guys up and say play me or trade me.”

[snip]

“They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on National TV.  Michael Cohen, cracked like an egg.”

40. Bannon doesn’t think Trump will survive his Presidency.

Also from Chapter 21:

“I’m pretty good at coming up with solutions, I came up with a solution for his broke-dick campaign in about a day, but I don’t see this.  I don’t see a plan for getting through.  Now, I gave him a plan…seal the Oval Office…send [Jared & Ivanka] home…get rid of Hope [Hicks], all these deadbeats…You listen to your [lawyers] and never talk about this stuff again, you just conduct yourself as commander in chief and then you can be president for eight years.  If you don’t, you’re not, simple.  But he’s the president…and he’s clearly choosing to go down another path…you can’t stop him.  The guy is going to call his own plays.  He’s Trump…”

41. Bannon knew Anthony Scaramucci wouldn’t last very long as communications director.

“He’ll be on that podium for two days and he’ll be so chopped he’ll bleed out everywhere.  He’ll literally blow up in a week…Hiring Scaramucci?  He’s not qualified to do anything.  He runs a fund of funds.  Do you know what a fund of funds is?  It’s not a fund.”

42. Trump is in deep denial about the Ku Klux Klan.

From Chapter 22:

“Privately, he kept trying to rationalize why someone would be a member of the KKK–that, they might not actually believe what the KKK believed, and that the KKK probably does not believe what it used to believe, and, anyway, who really know what the KKK believes now?”

43. Maybe this is why Nikki Haley recently resigned as UN Ambassador.

From the Epilogue:

“Haley–‘as ambitious as Lucifer,’ in the characterization of one member of the senior staff–had concluded that Trump’s tenure would last, at best, a single term, and that she, with requisite submission, could be his heir apparent.”

[snip]

“The president had been spending a notable amount of private time with Haley on Air Force One and was seen to be grooming her for a national political future.”

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Wednesday, October 31, 2018
7:09 p.m.

Curious Moments From Fire And Fury: Inside The Trump White House (Part Three)

20. Trump has an unnamed source who dishes about the Department of Justice.

From Chapter Eleven:

“…Trump already had good reason to worry about the DOJ. The president had a private source, one of his frequent callers, who, he believed, was keeping him abreast of what was going on in the Justice Department…”

[snip]

“The source, a longtime friend with his own DOJ sources…fed the president a bleak picture of a Justice Department and an FBI run amok in its efforts to get him. ‘Treason’ was a word that was being used, the president was told.

‘The DOJ,’ the president’s source told him, ‘was filled with women who hated him.’…’They want to make Watergate look like Pissgate,’ the president was told. This comparison confused Trump; he thought his friend was making a reference to the Steele dossier and its tale of the golden showers.”

21. Tony Blair falsely claimed that the British were spying on Trump.

Also from Chapter Eleven:

“In February [2017], Blair visited Kushner in the White House.

On this trip, the now freelance diplomat, seeking to prove his usefulness to this new White House, imparted a juicy nugget of information. There was, he suggested, the possibility that the British had had the Trump campaign staff under surveillance, monitoring its telephone calls and other communications and possibly even Trump himself.

[snip]

It was unclear whether Blair’s information was rumor, informed conjecture, his own speculation, or solid stuff. But, as it churned and festered in the president’s mind, Kushner and Bannon went out to CIA headquarters in Langley to meet with Mike Pompeo and his deputy director Gina Haspel to check it out. A few days later, the CIA opaquely reported back that the information was not correct; it was a ‘miscommunication.'”

22. Trump doesn’t really care about abolishing the Affordable Care Act.

From Chapter Twelve:

“Trump had little or no interest in the central Republican goal of repealing Obamacare. An overweight seventy-year-old man with various physical phobias (for instance, he lied about his height to keep from having a body mass index that would label him as obese), he personally found health care and medical treatments of all kinds a distasteful subject. The details of the contested legislation were, to him, particularly boring. His attention would begin wandering from the first words of a policy discussion…he certainly could not make any kind of meaningful distinction, positive or negative, between the health care system before Obamacare and the one after.”

23. Jared Kushner privately supports the ACA and has a family member who benefits from it.

“Kushner…privately suggested that he was personally against both repeal alone and repeal and replace. He and his wife took a conventional Democratic view on Obamacare (it was better than the alternative; its problems could be fixed in the future)…(What’s more, Kushner’s brother Josh ran a health insurance company that depended on Obamacare.)”

24. Gary Cohn allegedly sent a scathing email that got forwarded throughout the Administration.

From Chapter Fourteen:

“In April, an email originally copied to more than a dozen people went into far wider circulation when it was forwarded and reforwarded. Purporting to represent the views of Gary Cohn [Trump’s Economic Advisor] and quite succinctly summarizing the appalled sense in much of the White House, the email read:

It’s worse than you can imagine. An idiot surrounded by clowns. Trump won’t read anything–not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers, nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored. And his staff is no better. Kushner is an entitled baby who knows nothing. Bannon is an arrogant prick who thinks he’s smarter than he is. Trump is less a person than a collection of terrible traits. No one will survive the first year but his family. I hate the work, but feel I need to stay because I’m the only person there with a clue what he’s doing. The reason so few jobs have been filled is that they only accept people who pass ridiculous purity tests, even for midlevel policy-making jobs where the people will never see the light of day. I am in a constant state of shock and horror.”

25. Steve Bannon was kicked off the National Security Council after being the only Trump official to oppose a military response against the Syrian government.

Also from Chapter Fourteen:

“By midmorning on April 4 [2017], a full briefing had been assembled at the White House for the president about the chemical attacks.”

[snip]

“Bannon, at perhaps his lowest moment of influence in the White House–many still felt that his departure was imminent–was the only voice arguing against a military response. It was a purist’s rationale: keep the United States out of intractable problems, and certainly don’t increase our involvement in them. He was holding the line against the rising business-as-usual faction, making decisions based on the same set of assumptions, Bannon believed, that has resulted in the Middle East quagmire.”

[snip]

“The president had already agreed to McMaster’s demand that Bannon be removed from the National Security Council, though the change wouldn’t be announced until the following day.”

[snip]

“The announcement of Bannon’s removal was made the day after the attack.”

26. Even Roger Ailes got fed up with Trump.

From Chapter Fifteen:

“In the past month, Ailes, a frequent Trump caller and after-dinner adviser, had all but stopped speaking to the president, piqued by the constant reports that Trump was bad-mouthing him as he praised a newly attentive [Rupert] Murdoch, who had, before the election, only ever ridiculed Trump.

‘Men who demand the most loyalty tend to be the least loyal pricks,’ noted a sardonic Ailes (a man who himself demanded lots of loyalty).”

[snip]

“…noted Ailes…’Donald and I were really quite good friends for more than 25 years, but he would have preferred to be friends with Murdoch, who thought he was a moron–at least until he became president.'”

27. Kellyanne Conway is more honest about Trump in private.

Also from Chapter Fifteen:

“In private…she seemed to regard Trump as a figure of exhausting exaggeration or even absurdity–or, at least, if you regarded him that way, she seemed to suggest that she might, too. She illustrated her opinion of her boss with a whole series of facial expressions: eyes rolling, mouth agape, head snapping back.”

28. Before he became an outspoken critic, Kellyanne’s husband George, originally an early Trump booster, nearly worked for him.

“After the election,” according to author Michael Wolff, there was “a scramble to get her husband an administration job…” What that job would’ve been is not divulged.

29. Even Trump government insiders, including his own daughter, thought Kellyanne’s “defend-at-all-costs shtick” was ridiculous.

“Loyalty was Trump’s most valued attribute, and in Conway’s view her kamikaze-like media defense of the president had earned her a position of utmost primacy in the White House. But in her public persona, she had pushed the boundaries of loyalty too far; she was so hyperbolic that even Trump loyalists found her behaviour extreme and were repelled. None were more put off than Jared and Ivanka…appalled at the shamelessness of her television appearances…”

They were so appalled, according to Wolff, they started leaking “about how she had been sidelined…reduced to second-rate media, to being a designated emissary to right-wing groups, and left out of any meaningful decision making.”

She almost resigned but Trump insisted she keep defending him on-air. (“You will always have a place in my administration…You will be here for eight years.”)

30. Before aligning with Trump, Hope Hicks once worked for the PR firm that protected Harvey Weinstein. So did Jared Kushner spokesman Josh Raffel.

“She first went to work for Matthew Hiltzik, who ran a small New York-based PR firm and was noted for his ability to work with high-maintenance clients, including the movie producer Harvey Weinstein (later pilloried for years of sexual harassment and abuse–accusations that Hiltzik and his staff had long helped protect him from)…”

[snip]

“Kushner’s Office of American Innovation employed, as its spokesperson, Josh Raffel, who, like Hicks, came out of Matthew Hiltzik’s PR shop.”

31. Trump didn’t understand why Hicks wanted to protect ex-boyfriend Corey Lewandowski from bad press after he was fired for “clashing with Trump family members.”

“…Hicks sat in Trump Tower with Trump and his sons, worrying about Lewandowski’s treatment in the press and wondering aloud how she might help him. Trump, who otherwise seemed to treat Hicks in a protective and even paternal way, looked up and said, ‘Why? You’ve already done enough for him. You’re the best piece of tail he’ll ever have,’ sending Hicks running from the room.

32. Why Trump thinks his son-in-law can solve the Middle East crisis.

From Chapter Sixteen:

“…the president had been gleefully telling multiple people that Jared could solve the Middle East problem because the Kushners knew all the crooks in [Apartheid] Israel…”

33. Trump despised Sally Yates.

Also from Chapter Sixteen:

“To Trump, he was just up against Sally Yates, who was, he steamed, ‘such a cunt.'”

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Wednesday, October 31, 2018
6:50 p.m.

Curious Moments From Fire And Fury: Inside The Trump White House (Part Two)

11. Supposed Trump critic Joe Scarborough keeps privately advising him over the phone.

One of Trump’s earliest public supporters was the host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, one of the President’s must-see morning cable news shows, until he eventually and inevitably started to turn on him.  However, in chapter two, Scarborough “privately told Trump ‘Washington will go up in flames’ if Bannon became chief of staff, and beginning a running theme, publicly denigrated Bannon on the show.'”

In chapter three, he’s urged to call Trump by worried staffers wanting the former Republican Congressman and others, it should be noted, to “call him and say Simmer down,’ with regards to attacking his growing band of critics, a similar sentiment another Trump friend, radio broadcaster Howard Stern, expressed publicly recently on his Sirius/XM satellite radio program.

“‘Who do you have in there?’ said Joe Scarborough in a frantic call. ‘Who’s the person you trust?  Jared?  Who can talk you through this stuff before you decided to act on it?’

‘Well,’ said the president, ‘you won’t like the answer, but the answer is me.  Me.  I talk to myself.'”

12. There is nothing to like about Stephen Miller.

From Chapter Three:

“Bannon got Stephen Miller to write the immigration EO.  Miller, a fifty-five-year-old trapped in a thirty-two-year-old’s body, was a former Jeff Sessions staffer brought on to the Trump campaign for his political expertise.  Except, other than being a dedicated far-right conservative, it was unclear what particular abilities accompanied Miller’s political views.  He was supposed to be a speechwriter, but if so, he seemed restricted to bullet points and unable to construct sentences.  He was supposed to be a policy adviser but knew little about policy.  He was supposed to be the house intellectual but was militantly unread.  He was supposed to be a communications specialist, but he antagonized almost everyone.  Bannon, during the transition, sent him to the Internet to learn about and to try to draft the EO.”

13. Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski visited Trump in the White House shortly after he first attempted to ban Muslims in his infamous Executive Order.

From Chapter Five:

“On the Sunday after the immigration order was issued, Joe Scarborough and his cohost on the MSNBC show Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski, came for lunch at the White House.

[snip]

“‘So how do you think the first week has gone?’ Trump asked the couple, in a buoyant mood, seeking flattery.

Scarborough, puzzled by Trump’s jauntiness in the face of the protests spreading across the nation, demurred and then said, ‘Well, I love what you did with U.S. Steel and that you had the union guys come into the Oval Office.’ Trump had pledged to use U.S.-made steel in U.S. pipelines…”

[snip]

Scarborough then ventured his opinion that the immigration order might have been handled better and that, all in all, it seemed like a rough period.”

After “plung[ing] into a long monologue about how well things had gone”, Trump told him, “I could have invited Hannity!”

“…Jared and Ivanka joined the president and Scarborough and Brzezinski.  Jared had become quite a Scarborough confidant and would continue to supply Scarborough with an inside view of the White House–that is, leaking to him.  Scarborough, in turn, would become a defender of Kushner’s White House position and view.

[snip]

“Trump continued to cast for positive impressions of his first week and Scarborough again reverted to his praise of Trump’s handling of the steel union leadership.”

14. Ivanka Trump wants to run for President.

Also from Chapter Five:

“Jared and Ivanka had made an earnest deal between themselves:  if sometime in the future the time came, she’d be the one to run for president (or the first one of them to take the shot).  The first woman president, Ivanka entertained, would not be Hillary Clinton, it would be Ivanka Trump.”

15. Is Ivanka an enabler of her father’s extramarital affairs?

“She was a helper not just in his business dealings, but in his marital realignments.  She facilitated entrances and exits.  If you have a douchebag dad, and if everyone is open about it, then maybe it becomes fun and life a romantic comedy–sort of.”

16. Trump is paranoid about being assassinated by germs.

From Chapter Six:

“…he imposed a set of new rules:  nobody touch anything, especially not his toothbrush.  (He had a longtime fear of being poisoned, one reason why he liked to eat a McDonald’s–nobody knew he was coming and the food was premade.)”

17. Rudy Guiliani was offered numerous jobs within the administration.  He wanted to be Secretary of State.  Trump staffers thought he would also hold out for a spot on the Supreme Court.

The longtime Trump apologist “was offered attorney general”, an undetermined job within the “Department of Homeland Security” (I’m presuming it was Director) “and director of national intelligence, but he turned them all down, continuing to hold out for State.  Or, in what staffers took to be the ultimate presumption, or grand triangulation, the Supreme Court.”

When Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s eventual first appointee for the highest bench in America, “took public exception to Trump’s disparagement of the courts”, Trump, “in a moment of pique, decided to pull his nomination and, during conversations with his after-dinner callers, went back to discussing how he should have given the nod to Rudy.  He was the only loyal guy.”  After much pushback from deteriorating skunk beetle Steve Bannon and then-Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, Trump ultimately relented and stuck with Gorsuch after all.  Wolff reports, “…Trump would shortly not remember when he had ever wanted anyone but Gorsuch.”

18. Michael Flynn initially denied any Russian collusion to a Washington Post reporter off the record.

February 8, 2017 would prove to be the beginning of the end for Donald Trump’s soon-to-be embattled National Security Advisor.  In “the same room where Japanese diplomats waited to meet with Secretary of State Cordell Hull as he learned of the attack on Pearl Harbor” in December 1941, Michael Flynn sat for an interview with Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post “in the most ornate room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building…”

“To all outward appearances, it was an uneventful background interview, and DeYoung, Columbo-like in her affect, aroused no suspicions when she broached the de rigueur question:  ‘My colleagues asked me to ask you this:  Did you talk to the Russians about sanctions?'”

Flynn made an unequivocal denial twice (“no such conversations”, according to Wolff).

“But later that day, DeYoung called [National Security Council official and spokesman Michael] Anton” who attended the off-the-record interview to inquire “if she could use Flynn’s denial on the record.  Anton said he saw no problem–after all, the White House wanted Flynn’s denial to be clear–and notified Flynn.

Suddenly, Flynn had “some worries about the statement.”

After Anton asked him, “If you knew that there might be a tape of this conversation that could surface, would you still be a hundred percent sure?”, “Flynn equivocated, and Anton, suddenly concerned, advised him that if he couldn’t be sure they ought to ‘walk it back.'”

In the eventual WaPo article that “contained new leaked details of the [Russian Ambassador] Kislyak phone call…Flynn, through his spokesman, backed away from the denial.  The spokesman said Flynn ‘indicated that while he had no recollection of discussing sanctions, he couldn’t be certain that the topic never came up.'”

Trump refused to fire him “after just twenty-four days” on the job.  “And he was adamant about not wanting to blame Flynn for talking to the Russians, even about sanctions.  In Trump’s view, condemning his advisor would connect him to a plot where there was no plot.  His fury wasn’t directed toward Flynn but to the ‘incidental’ wiretap that had surveilled him.”

Trump finally agreed to dismiss him after he was convinced that Flynn shouldn’t have misled Vice President Pence even though, as Wolff notes, “Flynn did not report to Vice President Pence, and he was arguably a good deal more powerful than Pence.”

That said, Trump, to this day, still thinks Flynn got railroaded:

“…the president did not waiver in his belief in Flynn.  Rather, Flynn’s enemies were his enemies.  And Russia was a gun to his head.  He might, however ruefully, have had to fire Flynn, but Flynn was still his guy.”

19. Trump told friends in private, “rambling” phone conversations what he really thought of his underlings.

From Chapter Eight:

“In paranoid or sadistic fashion, he’d speculate on the flaws and weaknesses of each member of his staff.  Bannon was disloyal (not mention he always looks like shit)”, the origin of the eventual “Sloppy Steve” epithet.  “Priebus was weak (not to mention he was short–a midget).  Kushner” his own son-in-law “was a suck-up.  Spicer was stupid (and looks terrible too).  Conway was a crybaby.  Jared and Ivanka should never have come to Washington.”

In the Epilogue, “the president had also stopped defending his own family, wondering when they would ‘take the hint and go home.'”

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Wednesday, October 31, 2018
6:37 p.m.

Curious Moments From Fire And Fury: Inside The Trump White House (Part One)

In the first week of 2018, Michael Wolff released Fire And Fury: Inside The Trump White House.  Like Bob Woodward’s book, Fear: Trump In The White House, which came out eight months later, it’s far less interested in consistently reporting and analyzing the GOP’s destructive political policies that will have ramifications and deadly consequences for years to come and way more fascinated with the ongoing, less substantial topic of civil war happening within the administration’s executive branch.

Instead of focusing on Trump’s shameless attempts at destroying the environment, for instance, there’s way too much attention paid to living dead ghoul Steve Bannon’s ongoing feud with Jarvanka, the racist’s derisive amalgamated nickname for Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, and the well established idiocy of the commander in chief.

Wolff also uses the phrase “joie de guerre” way too many times but I digress.

That said, like the Woodword book, there are still numerous moments worth highlighting, some of which deserve greater, prolonged scrutiny.  Let’s go through them:

1. Did John Bolton sexually harass a woman in a hotel?

In the book’s prologue, Wolff recounts a conversation between decomposing Nazi Steve Bannon and now dead serial sexual harasser Roger Ailes, the former Fox News wunderkind, during a private dinner at Trump’s Mar-A-Logo resort in Florida on January 3, 2017.  During a discussion about who the President-elect should pick to become his National Security Advisor, John Bolton’s name comes up.

It’s well known that Trump didn’t like him because he hated his moustache.  “Trump doesn’t think he looks the part,” observes Bannon.  But after further asserting that he’s “an acquired taste”, Ailes responds thusly:

“Well, he got in trouble because he got in a fight one night and chased some woman.”

To which Bannon replies, “If I told Trump that, he might have the job.”

Although Trump selected H.R. McMaster as his NSA, the married Bolton would ultimately replace him, moustache and all, a year later.

So, who was the woman and what the hell happened?  Disappointingly, Wolff never follows up.

2. Bannon suggested illegally divvying up Occupied Palestine to other countries besides Apartheid Israel.

At that same dinner, after announcing to Ailes that the eventual decision to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv will happen on “[d]ay one” of Trump’s presidency (it actually took place in May of this year, fourteen months after the Mar-A-Lago dinner, to much international outrage), he also suggested that Palestine, illegally occupied by the white supremacist Apartheid Israel regime for decades, be split up thusly by other autocratic dictatorships:

“Let Jordan take the West Bank, let Egypt take Gaza.  Let them deal with it.  Or sink trying.”

3. Bannon compared Obama’s heartless drone wars to LBJ’s mishandling of The Vietnam War.

While conversing with Ailes at Mar-A-Lago, Trump’s then-chief campaign strategist got into a rant about Obama’s National Security Advisor Susan Rice.  In the midst of this, he commented on the way the Obama Administration conducted the war against ISIS:

“They’re picking the targets, she’s picking the drone strikes.  I mean, they’re running the war with just as much effectiveness as Johnson in sixty-eight.  The Pentagon is totally disengaged from the whole thing.  Intel services are disengaged from the whole thing.  The media has let Obama off the hook.  Take the ideology away from it, this is complete amateur hour.”

4. Kellyanne Conway was so certain Trump would lose the election she secretly courted TV news media to secure a future on-air gig.

From Chapter 1:

“Donald Trump would lose the election–of this she was sure–but he would quite possibly hold the defeat to under 6 points.

[snip]

Now she briefed some of the television producers and anchors with whom she’d built strong relationships–and with whom, actively interviewing in the last few weeks, she was hoping to land a permanent on-air job after the election.  She’d carefully courted many of them since joining the Trump campaign in mid-August…”

5. A revealing Trump anecdote that illustrates how he was able to connect with his supporters.

From Chapter Two:

“Trump’s understanding of his own essential nature was even more precise.  Once, coming back on his plane with a billionaire friend who had brought along a foreign model.  Trump, trying to move in on his friend’s date, urged a stop in Atlantic City.  He would provide a tour of his casino.  His friend assured the model that there was nothing to recommend Atlantic City.  It was a place run by white trash.

‘What is this ‘white trash’?’ asked the model.

‘They’re people just like me,’ said Trump, ‘only they’re poor.'”

6. Tom Barrack’s connection to Trump and other wealthy sex offenders.

“Barrack, the grandson of Lebanese immigrants, is a starstruck real estate investor of legendary acumen who owns Michael Jackson’s former oddball paradise, Neverland Ranch.  With Jeffrey Epstein–the New York financier who would become a tabloid regular after accusations of sex with underage girls and a guilty plea to one count of soliciting prostitution that sent him to jail in 2008 in Palm Beach for thirteen months–Trump and Barrack were a 1980s and ’90s set of nightlife Musketeers.”

7. Trump didn’t think Chris Christie’s shady closing of the George Washington Bridge was that big of a deal.

“Early in the campaign, Trump said he wouldn’t have run against Christie but for the Bridgegate scandal (which erupted when Christie’s associates closed traffic lanes on the George Washington Bridge to undermine the mayor of a nearby town who was a Christie opponent, and which Trump privately justified as ‘just New Jersey hardball’).”

8. Anna Wintour wanted Trump to name her UK ambassador since Obama passed and Hillary Clinton lost the election.

“Anna Wintour, the Vogue editor and fashion industry queen, had hoped to be named America’s ambassador to the UK under Obama and, when that didn’t happen, closely aligned herself with Hillary Clinton.  Now Wintour arrived at Trump Tower (but haughtily refused to do the perp walk) and, with quite some remarkable chutzpah, pitched herself to Trump to be his ambassador to the Court of St. James’s.  And Trump was inclined to entertain the idea.  (‘Fortunately,’ said Bannon, ‘there was no chemistry.’)”

9. Even Trump supporter Rupert Murdoch thinks lowly of Trump’s intelligence.

As Trump was transitioning from public citizen to President of the United States in late 2016, he entertained numerous high profile visitors.  In mid-December, he was visited by “a[n unnamed] high-level delegation from Silicon Valley…though Trump had repeatedly criticized the tech industry throughout the campaign.”

After the meeting, Trump called News Corporation head Rupert Murdoch who “asked him how the meeting had gone.”

“Oh, great, just great,’ said Trump. ‘Really, really good.  These guys really need my help.  Obama was not very favorable to them, too much regulation.  [What about their collusion in online mass surveillance?]  This is really an opportunity for me to help them.’

‘Donald,’ said Murdoch, ‘ for eight years these guys had Obama in their pocket.  They practically ran the administration.  They don’t need your help.’

‘Take this H-1B visa issue.  They really need these H-1B visas.'”

Murdoch suggested that taking a liberal approach to H-1B visas might be hard to square with his immigration promises.  But Trump seemed unconcerned, assuring Murdoch, ‘We’ll figure it out.’

‘What a fucking idiot,’ said Murdoch, shrugging, as he got off the phone.”

10. An unnamed Republican gave a prescient warning to Jared Kushner about Trump’s future.

From Chapter Three:

“‘Don’t let him piss off the press, don’t let him piss off the Republican Party, don’t threaten congressmen because they will fuck you if you do, and most of all don’t let him piss off the intel community,’ said one national Republican figure to Kushner.  ‘If you fuck with the intel community they will figure out a way to get back at you and you’ll have two or three years of a Russian investigation, and every day something else will leak out.'”

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Wednesday, October 31, 2018
3:36 a.m.

Hide And Go Shriek

Four teenage couples decide to spend the night in a locked furniture store to celebrate their high school graduation.  They are horny and stupid, perfect victims for a mysterious serial killer locked inside with them.

That’s the set-up for Hide And Go Shriek, a horrendously constructed slasher film with an appropriately awful pun for a title.  Released 30 years ago to no acclaim or financial success, it’s no wonder the filmmakers had a hard time finding a surviving print to restore for DVD.

Why do these dopes want to have a sleepover in a furniture store in the first place?  It doesn’t matter.  The point is to get them in a confined space so they can be gradually picked off for no good reason.

The movie seemingly reveals its villain early on when the kids arrive.  He’s an ex-con with cheap-looking snake tattoos who did time for armed robbery but is now helping out in the store.  Out early for good behaviour, he lives alone after hours on the top floor of the building.

But of course, he’s not the villain.  His hair is different from the actual killer.  And he’s not a cross dresser or a murderer.  In the film’s embarrassingly atrocious cold open, another man who lives at that furniture store dolls up his face like he’s a member of The Human League, drives around to pick up a sex worker, bangs her against a brick wall and then stabs her to death.  An instant dud of a moment.

If you look closely, though, the actress who plays her is still noticeably breathing on the ground.  And what did they use for blood?  It doesn’t look right at all.

How do the horny kids manage to avoid being kicked out of the furniture store cleverly named Fine Furniture?  Future soap opera star Sean Kanan, the only recognizable cast member in his first feature, is the son of the owner who may one day pass this business on to him.  They basically stay out of sight until they get locked in.

In the meantime, he contemplates marriage with girlfriend Bonnie (the pitiful Bunky Jones in a sometimes silly performance) and continually warns the other couples to not mess around with the merchandise.  And no, it does not look like it’s worth a fortune, fella.  Good thing this set is not well lit.

The more we get to know these eight characters the more we wonder why it’s taking so long for them to get bumped off.  They are annoying, especially the guy who must be a Corey Hart fan because even though most of the lights are turned off inside the store he’s still wearing his goddamn sunglasses.  He can’t keep his hands off the mannequins and he’s singlehandedly responsible for almost all of the tiresome false alarms.

After Kanan gives everybody the tour (mostly in the dark, I must stress again), for some unknown reason they all agree to play hide and seek.  Basically, this gives all the couples an excuse to bugger off somewhere private to screw around.  But it also allows the lurking serial killer to divide and conquer.  Oh, and also try on late 80s teen wardrobe while occasionally giggling.

I will say this for Hide And Go Shriek.  Despite maintaining many slasher conventions (including the old belated discovery of dead bodies routine) it most certainly doesn’t end the way I expected.  For one thing, only half the couples get murdered.  For another, there’s the totally surprising connection between the ex-con and the killer.

However, the heel’s questionable actions make zero sense.  Why would a gay man pursue women he has zero beef with and then off them?  How was he able to live in the furniture store all this time without his ex ever knowing he was there?  Why did he think these moronic teenagers were a threat to his love life when they’re all wifed up?  And why does he keep rearranging the mannequins?

When it’s not being confusing, Hide And Go Shriek is laughable.  Dig that fake head falling from the top of the elevator or Bunky Jones overdoing an emotional scene.  Even an ordinary sequence where the store owner is just walking is unintentionally funny because the foley work is so shoddy.  The sounds just don’t match the movement at all.

However, nothing tops the ending for pure, misguided hilarity.  Can someone really survive that big of a fall in an elevator shaft, pretend to be dead under a blanket on a gurney, bump off the unsuspecting EMT without anyone knowing and then somehow end up in the driver’s seat of the ambulance with the ignorant survivors in the back?

I wasn’t a big fan of The Stepfather but there’s one genuinely freaky moment when Terry O’Quinn appears to be looking directly into the camera.  It’s so unexpected which is it why it works so well.

The last shot of Hide And Go Shriek attempts something similar.  Unfortunately, it provokes a big, unwanted laugh.  In that moment, we realize we’ve been had.  Like the movie itself, the villain isn’t scary at all.  His goofy face should’ve stayed in the shadows.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Wednesday, October 24, 2018
4:23 a.m.

Winchester (2018)

There really was a Sarah Winchester.  She really was married to a rifle tycoon.  They did, in fact, have a child that died as a baby.  And she truly kept expanding the family mansion in San Francisco, California for decades right up until the day she died.  (It was never finished and has since become a popular tourist attraction.)

But that’s about the only truth to be found in Winchester, a seemingly intelligent but otherwise convoluted supernatural horror film.  Then again, what would you expect from the identical twin directors of the far worse Jigsaw?

Helen Mirren plays Sarah as a profoundly guilt-ridden widow trying to come to terms with the consequences of her company’s products in 1906.  (She’s also an inventor who’s developed a primitive in-house intercom system.  Only one person uses it, defeating its purpose.)

After the death of her husband to a sudden, inexplicable bout of tuberculosis, she becomes the majority shareholder of his highly lucrative company.  In the company catalogue, she has somehow managed to slip in an ad for roller skates amongst all the other devices of death.  Never once does she contemplate selling her considerable stake.

Why does she have construction workers constantly expanding the family mansion at all hours of the day and night in ways that don’t make a lot of sense?  It’s a mystery that troubles and displeases the other executives who want her out.  One of them hires the initially reluctant Dr. Eric Price (Jason Clarke) to visit her and conduct a professional evaluation.

The shrink has his own problems.  He’s never gotten over the death of his wife, Ruby.  Now addicted to a liquid mix of opium and alcohol which he ingests one drop at a time, he hires sex workers to keep him company.  He only really converges with one (another is seen dancing around by herself) and is more interested in conversation and magic tricks than a physical release.  The drug makes him hallucinate.

Once at the mansion he encounters Sarah’s protective niece, Mrs. Marriott (Sarah Snook), another widow (her late husband was a hardcore alcoholic) with a young red-headed son who’s been acting strangely since the start of the film.  It’s clear in that opening scene that this labyrinthian palace is haunted.  But by what exactly?

Halfway through, Sarah tells Dr. Price that she believes they are pissed off spirits who were all victims of fatal blasts from Winchester rifles.  (She keeps a complete record of all the dead in a series of books with their names on the spines.)  They use her as a vessel to draw designs for rooms where they were all murdered in to show her where and how they died.  (Who do they think they are?  Noted architect Art Vandellay?)

Once the rooms are complete, they appear and she apologizes, begging for forgiveness.  For most, this is enough and they vanish forever, their rooms immediately dismantled.  It’s the vindictive remainders that are a problem.  Those spirits have to be locked in their rooms.  Doors are nailed shut with 13 nails into a piece of wood.  Not a good security system, as it turns out.

However, one such spirit is walking around freely in the house pretending to be one of the mansion’s many servants.  Early on, I honestly thought all of them were like that so that eventual revelation doesn’t pay off the way it should.  It makes you wonder why some ghosts are more powerful than others.  It also makes you wonder why he waits so long to attack the family.

Dr. Price is told by Mrs. Marriott that he’s restricted to certain parts of the ever expanding mansion but of course, he doesn’t listen.  As the workers continue to hammer and saw all night long, those midnight bell chimes keep waking him up and turn him into a Nosy Rosy.

Since arriving he’s been in deep denial about the cheap scares he keeps experiencing, first thinking it’s because of his addiction, then when his coveted bottle is taken away, withdrawals.  It doesn’t help that his late wife may have gone through what Sarah has been dealing with this entire time.  Quite frankly, it takes him way too long to accept he’s in a cliched ghost story.

Mrs. Marriott’s young son, clearly possessed by one of the lingering spirits, tries to freak out Sarah by aiming badly when he fires a Winchester rifle at her, a ridiculous scene that defies logic.  Long before that moment, though, he suddenly decides to take a giant leap from high up above.  Why would the ghost force him to do this when he needs him to take out Sarah?

Winchester inspires lots of natural questions like that, none of which result in good answers.  As that vengeful spirit grows in power he acquires like-minded allies.  And then the famous San Francisco earthquake happens which finally leads to the inevitable final confrontation.  It’s neither exciting nor suspenseful.

It’s always a bad sign for films like this when the “Inspired by Actual Events” graphic pops up right at the start.  That’s a blatant warning you’re about to experience a bunch of bullshit.  Because the real Sarah Winchester was incredibly private and reclusive (there’s only one surviving photograph of her shown at the end of the film), not much is really known about her actual state of mind.

Winchester, the movie, makes it seem like she had an unusual extra-sensorial gift.  It’s more likely she was so overcome with grief the loss of her family deteriorated her mind beyond the point of no return.  She wasn’t “cursed” or even haunted by gun victims.  She was in a permanent state of depression.  The real Sarah never remarried or bore more children.  (In the film, she clings to a surviving lock of her baby daughter’s hair.)

Despite a weak plot, the film looks the way it should, elegantly old-fashioned.  Much attention to detail has been paid to the cube-like Winchester mansion and especially the Victorian-era costumes.  That said, the lack of a creepy atmosphere is unfortunate.  This certainly isn’t The Woman In Black.  Walking cautiously in these hallways doesn’t evoke the same sense of dread.

Helen Mirren’s Sarah is an interesting, forceful enigma, another woman in black who is no shrinking violet. She can see right through Dr. Price’s parlour trick among his other transparent shrink gimmicks.  She cuts to the chase instantaneously, her bullshit detector highly attuned.  She knows why he’s here and even his dark secret.  Had the film abandoned its haunted house nonsense and focused more on her contradictions (smart enough to outmatch the fictional shrink but highly susceptible to “flights of fancy”) and figured out a smarter way to have us emotionally connect to her endless depression, it would’ve been more compelling.  Sarah Snook and Jason Clarke, both Australian where the film was mostly shot, are good actors with more predictable story arcs.  I felt disconnected from their grief, as well.

From the opening scene, Winchester fails to hook you.  Its overreliance on nonsensical jump scares and routine false alarms, its chronic dependence on a hokey story, these are not the ingredients of a successful horror film.

The real Sarah Winchester was troubled enough.  There was no need to make her famous mansion haunted, as well.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Sunday, October 21, 2018
4:37 p.m.

White Of The Eye

White Of The Eye is one of the most confused, disconnected and disjointed horror films I’ve ever seen.  In fact, there’s very little horror in it at all, none of it particularly effective or memorable.  But that’s not its biggest problem.

Cathy Moriarty plays a woman torn between two men:  Alan Rosenberg, a multi-ethnic guy from her past, and David Keith, the Indigenous honky she dumped him for.  In a flashback sequence, while en route to Malibu Beach in the 1970s, she gets into a fight with Rosenberg.  The trip is taking too long (they’ve been driving from New York for weeks) and she’s quite tired of hearing Hot Chocolate’s You Sexy Thing.  When he angrily tells her to put her cigarette ashes in a tray, after ripping out the 8-track, she dumps them in his player instead.  He proceeds to dump 7UP in it so it doesn’t burn.

They arrive at some repair place where the grandson of the owner happens to be Keith (that hair, Good God) who is a whiz at installing and fixing electronic equipment.  (He thinks he’s a human tuning fork (he likes to hum like one) but never mind.)  Very quickly, he gets the portable 8-track back on track.  Since Rosenberg wants to stick around Globe, Arizona for a few days, he invites himself on a hunting trip with Keith.  To show his thanks, Keith bangs Moriarty.

In the present, Keith and Moriarty have a cute young daughter with a punching problem at school.  (Moriarty never did make it to Malibu Beach.)  But it’s their own relationship that’s on the verge of being knocked out.  Keith is continually being seduced by the wife (Alberta Watson) of some unseen cement tycoon who has a lot of time to herself.  (Moriarty can’t stand her and “slut” shames her behind her back.  They have zero personal interactions.  She just spots her one day going to the hair salon.)  She lures him to her secluded place in the desert by getting him to “fix” her satellite TV which clearly isn’t broken.

Keith can’t seem to make up his mind whether he wants to fool around with Watson or not which strikes me as disingenuous, no matter how he feels about Moriarty.  But inevitably, he gives in.  Moriarty finds out and punctures one of his precious, expensive business van tires.  She also tears him a new one.

Meanwhile, when Moriarty stops for gas one day, there’s the recently (and conveniently) released Rosenberg, now a mechanic who lives in the nearby hotel.  (We have no idea what he got pinched for.)  They reconnect and have sex which is weird because in the flashback sequences she can’t stand him.  Absence makes the loins grow hotter, I suppose.  Keith never finds out about it which makes Moriarty’s anger towards him regarding his own affair very hypocritical indeed.  She’s also indecisive about her feelings which doesn’t help the film’s already shaky credibility.

You’d be forgiven for thinking I’m describing a soap opera rather than a horror film because White Of The Eye is way more interested in this sizzle-free love rectangle than its misogynistic thriller plot.  You wouldn’t even know this is supposed to be a screen chiller for long stretches of time because scaring you doesn’t appear to be its main focus or concern, which is just as well since those aren’t good scenes anyway.

In the opening sequence, a local woman in this small Arizona town gets brutally murdered in her home.  The killer bashes her head against the glass door of her microwave and leaves a mess in her entire house which in the aftermath looks like some kind of tasteless expressionist art display.  It’s an uncomfortable scene that serves as a reminder that there are way too many exploitative violence-against-women scenes in movies like this and I’m getting tired of seeing them.

Anyway, the cops, led by Die Hard 2’s Art Evans in a mostly good performance, seem to initially believe correctly that Keith is their man but they too hedge their bets and don’t do the obvious thing of asking a court for a search warrant of his house and van.  (There’s a weird scene when a fellow cop dials up Keith’s juvenile rap sheet (his father was an embezzler who managed to successfully disappear from his life) which perturbs Evans who doesn’t think it should be part of the investigation.  Huh?)  An hour of screen time later, a second woman is killed.  I wonder if Keith is a fan of The Undertaker.

The tire tracks left in the dirt by the getaway car from the murder scenes are a perfect match to Keith’s own.  Not many people in Globe, Arizona have these special tires on their vehicles and only one installs expensive stereo equipment in this area.  (If you have to look in your wife’s datebook for an alibi, you’re fucked.)  Also, some hard to understand Native American symbols are left behind at the first crime scene which is part of Keith’s heritage.  The explanation by Evans left me even more confused, unfortunately.

Whenever he’s questioned, though, Keith is stoic coolness, never betraying his dark secret, even though he belatedly and openly realizes his goose is getting cooked.  (Evans actually takes him back to the second crime scene to show him that he knows full well what he did but curiously does not arrest him!  Why not?)

But in the film’s second half when Moriarty realizes who she’s hitched her wagon to, he suddenly goes nuts, completely out of character for his mostly tranquil home life.  After discovering hidden body parts under her bathroom sink (that’s always fun), Moriarty makes a frantic call to a friend urging her to pick up her daughter.  But the friend wants to go see Gone With The Wind, a four-hour movie she’s never watched before, and so by the time she calls back, Keith picks up the phone and becomes livid.

It should be noted at no time up to this point has he ever abused Moriarty, his kid or even the family dog.  He’s never even said a bad word about his wife (although he’s not too thrilled about not hunting innocent animals anymore which he blames on her but whatever.)  So, for him to suddenly stab the hell out of their bed and then lock her up in the attic feels awfully sudden and tacked on.  It’s as though the filmmakers realized, oh shit, that’s right, we have to resolve the murder plot so let’s have our killer finally lose it in front of his family, the only people he’s never actually harmed.  (And yes, the poor pooch eventually gets shot by the heel, a very tired cliche.)

Near the end of the film, Keith starts sporting war paint and a couple of man buns (is he trying to be a samurai?) while wrapping himself in explosives that his young daughter thinks are hot dogs.  Just before that, he confesses his crimes.  But when you unravel his contorted reasoning for murdering pretty dames, it still feels like fairly standard woman-hating, no different from most movie slashers.  How Alberta Watson gets spared makes absolutely no sense.  Regarding the flashbacks, it’s also strange that he never bumped off his romantic rival, either.

White Of The Eye was shot in 1986 but not released in North American theatres until 1988.  I’m amazed it got released at all.  Then again, Cannon Films, pretty much at the end of its financial lifeline, needed whatever dough it could squeeze out of this turdburger.  It didn’t save it from filing for bankruptcy just a couple of years later.

The cast does its best with a highly convoluted screenplay (Rosenberg is easily the best performer despite not actually being a First Nations person) but despite their best efforts they can’t help but be left to flounder in all this impenetrable muck.  The film is all over the map in terms of its overlong story and uneven characters.

First, it’s a horror movie, then, a police procedural.  Then, it’s a soap opera, then it’s back to being a thriller and detective story again.  After returning to all the nonexistent sexual tension it ends with the horror stuff one last time.  The constant shift in tone is annoying and hard to accept and follow.

Not helping is the distractingly inappropriate musical score by Pink Floyd’s Dave Mason and 10cc’s Rick Fenn.  I’ll admit, one or two of their themes are effective but the rest aren’t suitable for a horror film.  So much of a thriller’s tension comes from its soundtrack.  But it sounds like their work was added by mistake.  It feels like it was written and recorded for a completely different film.

The heart of the problem is the strange relationship between Moriarty and Keith.  Even after she finds out who he really is, he’s still able to make her smile by offering to defrost frozen pizza and finally picking up those cooking pans she’s been bugging him to buy.  But then, when she stares at the reflection of her sullen face in one of them, she runs to the bathroom to barf.  That leads to the discovery of the mysterious body parts.

At one point, she locks herself in a closet.  Keith breaks down the door.  They then have consensual sex!  Then the concerned friend, the one who’s supposed to come get her daughter, calls and Keith starts tearing up their bed.

Even in the climactic moment where a tearful Moriarty can end her toxic relationship once and for all, she hesitates and still declares her love for Keith who bizarrely reciprocates.  It’s all for naught because of a fateful lighter flick.

During another flashback, someone gives her an English penny.  He advises her to rub it to prevent her husband from cheating.  God knows rubbing it didn’t result in a better movie.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Thursday, October 11, 2018
8:01 p.m.

Revelations From Bob Woodward’s Donald Trump Book (Part Six)

41. Despite publicly predicting a future victory in Afghanistan, the Trump Administration’s private position is that it’s a lost cause.

From Chapter 31:

A “60-page strategy memo” was put together by the Defense Department in mid-August 2017.

“Buried in the 19-page section on integrated strategy was an admission:  ‘Stalemate likely to persist in Afghanistan’ and ‘Taliban likely to continue to gain ground.’

In the tradition of concealing the real story in a memo, ‘Win is unattainable’ was the conclusion signed by [National Security Advisor H.R.] McMaster.”

Then-CIA-chief Mike Pompeo:

“Are you going to take responsibility for Afghanistan?  Because we’re not going to win.  You understand we’re not going to win!”

From Chapter 27:

“‘Mr. President,’ [General] Dunford [Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman] said, very polite, very soft-spoken, ‘there’s not a mandate to win…’ Under Obama, who had pulled out most of the troops–down to 8,400, from a high of 100,000—the strategy was effectively to achieve a stalemate.”

42. The Secretary of State let slip the reality of Afghanistan during a press briefing.

From Chapter 31:

“…Tillerson found another way to declare that a win was not attainable.  He addressed the Taliban at a press briefing:  ‘You will not win a battlefield victory.  We may not win one, but neither will you.’

Stalemate.”

43. Trump didn’t believe the American car industry was doing well or that the US government won most of its trade disputes with the WTO even though Gary Cohn had data evidence.

From Chapter 33:

“Cohn assembled the best statistics that could be compiled.  Trump would not read, so Cohn brought charts to the Oval Office.  The numbers showed that the American auto industry was fine.  One big chart showed Detroit’s Big Three were producing 3.6 million fewer cars and light trucks since 1994, but the rest of the U.S., mostly in the Southeast, was up the same 3.6 millon.

The entire BMW 3 series in the world were made in South Carolina, Cohn said.  The Mercedes SUVs were all made in the United States.  The millions of auto jobs lost in Detroit had moved to South Carolina and North Carolina because of right-to-work laws.”

[snip]

“Cohn had put another document, ‘U.S. Record in WTO Disputes,’ in the daily book that [Staff Secretary Rob] Porter compiled for the president at night.”

Trump “rarely if ever cracked it open.”  He claimed, “The World Trade Organization is the worst organization every created!…We lose more cases than anything.”

According to the aforementioned daily book, “The document showed that the United States won 85.7 percent of its WTO cases, more than average.”

Trump’s response:  “This is bullshit…This is wrong.”

Cohen’s rebuttal:  “This is the factual data.  There’s no one that’s going to disagree with this data.  Data is data.”

44. Lindsey Graham wanted China to assassinate Kim Jong Un.

From Chapter 34:

“Graham made a dramatic proposal to [Chief of Staff John] Kelly and McMaster. ‘China needs to kill him and replace him with a North Korean general they control,’…China had at least enough control so the North would not attack.  ‘I think the Chinese are clearly the key here and they need to take him out.  Not us, them.  And control the nuclear inventory there.  And wind this thing down.  Or control him.”

45. Chief of Staff John Kelly threatened to quit on at least two occasions.

The first involved an argument with ICE union leader Chris Crane.   According to Woodward, they “had an intense dislike for each other” because Kelly “blocked ICE agents from a hard-line crackdown on some immigration violations.”

Trump was livid that Kelly, who developed a controversial internal reputation for keeping certain officials away from the President, would not let Crane visit him in the Oval Office.  Trump watched Crane complain about this on Fox News.

That led to a confrontation after Trump invited Crane over “without informing Kelly.”

“Kelly heard Crane was in the Oval Office and strode in.  Soon Crane and Kelly were cursing each other.

‘I can’t believe you’d let some fucking guy like this into the Oval Office,’ Kelly told Trump.  If this was the way it was going to work, he said, ‘then I quit!’  And he stormed out.

Trump later told others that he thought Kelly and Crane were going to get into a fistfight.”

When Kelly “urged the president to select Kirstjen Nielsen” to be the next Homeland Security Secretary, Trump complained, “She’s a Bushie.  Everybody hates her.”  As Kelly’s defense of her went nowhere, Trump threatened to cancel her nomination.  (She was eventually confirmed.)

“Kelly threw up his hands.  ‘Maybe I’m just going to have to resign.’  And he stormed out.”

The hotheaded Kelly remains Chief of Staff as of this writing.

46. Trump proposed a more honest name for his awful tax bill.

According to Woodward, he wanted to “[c]all it the ‘Cut, Cut, Cut Bill’.”  Congressional Republicans went with “The Tax Cut And Jobs Act”.  But curiously, in the end, “it was finalized as ‘An Act to Provide for Reconciliation Pursuant to Titles II and V of the Concurrent Resolution on the Budget for Fiscal Year 2018.'”

Yeah, that’s much better.

47. Bannon understood Trump’s enormous vulnerability as a philandering, rapey misogynist.

From Chapter 36:

“The #TimesUp And #MeToo movements of women and feminists would create an alternative to end the male-dominated patriarchy, Bannon believed.

‘Trump is the perfect foil…He’s the bad father, the terrible first husband, the boyfriend that fucked you over and wasted all those years, and [you] gave up your youth for, and then dumped you.  And the terrible boss that grabbed you by the pussy all the time and demeaned you.”

48. Afghanistan may reach the point of no return sometime early next year.

From Chapter 38:

“The DNI intelligence expert briefed Trump on Afghanistan in early 2018:  No gains by the U.S. in territory.  Nothing clawed back.  No improvement from last year; actually, some areas were getting worse.”

[snip]

“The coalition probably only had until the spring of 2019 to keep the status quo [a stalemate with The Taliban].  The political fabric seemed to be coming apart.  A perfect storm was coming, and a practical problem like weather might be the tipping point…A drought was coming, and with it a crisis of food insecurity…Some two million [Afghani refugees] had lived in Pakistan in decades [after their families fled during the 1979 Soviet invasion], never in their native Afghanistan, but they would be coming.”

49. Despite his constant, incessant ass-kissing, Trump’s new golf buddy Lindsey Graham wasn’t loyal enough in the eyes of the President.

At the end of 2017, the shameless South Carolina Senator played a round of golf with Trump at his International Golf Club in Florida.

After calling Trump’s course “spectacular” and telling Trump, “You’re a very good commander in chief,” Graham continued to brown nose:

“You’re cleaning up the mess that Obama left you.  You’re doing a damn good job of cleaning it up.  You’re rebuilding the military.  You’re taking a wet blanket off the economy.  You’re really unshackling the military and the economy.  God bless you for undoing the damage done in the last eight years.”

But Trump wanted more loyalty:

“You’re a middle-of-the-road guy.  I want you to be 100 percent for Trump.”

“‘Okay, what’s the issue?’ Graham asked, ‘and I’ll tell you whether I’m 100 percent for you or not.'”

“You’re like 82 percent…”

“Well, some days I’m 100 percent.  Some days I may be zero.”

That wasn’t good enough:

“I want you to be a 100 percent guy.”

50. John Dowd quit representing Trump because he knows he’ll be a terrible witness for Mueller.  Once he resigned, Trump informed the press.

After realizing during a test run, a preview of a potential Q&A with Robert Mueller, that Trump would be an awful advocate for himself in the Russia investigation (he blew up, continually insisting he was innocent and the victim of a “hoax”), attorney John Dowd pleaded with his client to remain silent:

“Mr. President, that’s why you can’t testify…When you’re a fact witness, you try to provide facts.  If you don’t know the facts, I’d just prefer you to say, Bob [Mueller], I just don’t remember.  I got too much going on here.  Instead of sort of guessing and making all kinds of wild conclusions.”

In the final chapter of Fear: Trump In The White House, Dowd reached his breaking point:

“I’m not happy, Mr. President.  This is a goddamn heartbreak…I’ve failed as your lawyer.  I’ve been unable to persuade you to take my advice…I wish I could persuade you…Don’t testify.  It’s either that or an orange jump suit.  If it’s decision time, you’re going to go forward, I can’t be with you.”

As soon as Dowd resigned in a morning phone call, the attorney presumed Trump immediately called the press.  Because “[t]wo minutes later”, he got calls from the Washington Post and The New York Times asking for comment.

As Woodward notes, “Trump always liked to be the first to deliver the news.”

51. Another Trump attorney Ty Cobb could be called as a witness, if he hasn’t already.

Dowd deeply regretted pushing Trump to hire the mustachioed attorney who went out on TV insisting that the President “was not afraid to testify.”

“‘He should have declined.  He’s a government employee.  And by the way, they can call him as a witness.  He has no [attorney/client] privilege with you.’

‘Jesus,’ Trump said, sounding worried.  ‘I’ve talked a lot with him.”

52. Dowd doesn’t think Trump will be impeached.

From Chapter 42:

“They’re not going to impeach you.  Are you shitting me?  They’re a bunch of cowards, the whole town. The media, the Congress.  They’re gutless.  What’s the impeachment going to be, for exercising Article II [of the US Constitution]?  Huh?  Hello?  Hello, I want to hear Speaker Ryan take that one up before the Rules Committee and the Judiciary Committee…We ought to tell them to go fuck themselves.

According to Woodward, “Dowd remained convinced that Mueller never had a Russian case or an obstruction case.  He was looking for the perjury trap.”  Which is why Dowd was insistent that Trump not submit to questioning.

53. The newest member of the Supreme Court recommended another abusive misogynist to work in the White House.

In the footnotes for Chapter 17, Woodward reveals that one of the many people who recommended Staff Secretary Rob Porter, who eventually resigned after revelations that he abused women he was romantically involved with, was none other than Brett Kavanaugh, who has faced his own accusations of harassment and assault.

54. A letter sent to Robert Mueller claimed Trump could fire him.  It also claimed he could free his criminalized staffers nabbed by the investigation.

Shortly before he quit, Trump attorney John Dowd convinced Special Counsel Robert Mueller to send him a list of topics he was pursuing to give The President’s legal team a head’s up.  If Trump had to answer any questions at all, Dowd preferred it be done on paper, not in person.

“The subject read ‘Request for Testimony on Alleged Obstruction of Justice.’

A raw assertion of presidential power was printed in boldface:  ‘He could, if he wished, terminate the inquiry, or even exercise his power to pardon if he so desired.'”

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Sunday, October 7, 2018
8:37 p.m.

Revelations From Bob Woodward’s Donald Trump Book (Part Five)

25. Steve Bannon got into a screaming match with Ivanka Trump about her role in the White House.

From Chapter 18:

“During a meeting in Priebus’s corner office Bannon and Ivanka got into an altercation.”

“‘You’re a goddamn staffer!’ Bannon finally screamed at Ivanka.  ‘You’re nothing but a fucking staffer!’…’You walk around this place and act like you’re in charge, and you’re not.  You’re on staff!’

‘I’m not a staffer!’ she shouted. ‘I’ll never be a staffer.  I’m the first daughter’–she really used the title–‘and I’m never going to be a staffer!'”

26. Bannon and Jared Kushner both believed they leaked negative stories about each other to the press.

Meanwhile, the exasperated white supremacist accused Ivanka’s husband of telling the UK paper the Daily Mail, anonymously of course, “about Trump blowing up at him and Priebus and blocking them from traveling on Air Force One to Florida.  It wasn’t true they had been kicked off the trip.  Both declined to travel that day.  ‘You fucking set me up,’…You trashed Reince in this story.  And I know you did it.’

Kushner vehemently denied it, and seemed offended at the accusation.”

In turn, Ivanka’s husband accused Bannon of being the source for a 2016 New York Times story about Kushner’s “December 2016 meeting with the Russian ambassador, adding fuel to the allegations that the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia.”

Curiously, Woodward doesn’t mention a denial on Bannon’s part.

27. Maybe it was Trump’s Commerce Secretary who wrote that anonymous “I’m Part Of The Resistance” NYT op-ed.

From Chapter 19:

“Several days later Wilbur Ross laid out the reasoning on the importance of trade deficits.  Echoing the president, Ross said trade deficits are the lodestar and were a mark of our economic instability and weakness.”

28. Trump showed his appreciation for Ross, who saved his ass nearly 30 years ago, by tearing into him over a new trade deal with China.

“In the spring of 2017, Ross negotiated a deal with China for the U.S. to import Chinese chicken and export beef.  He called it ‘a herculean accomplishment.’  But there was some criticism of the deal.”

“In a meeting at the White House, the president tore into Ross. ‘I can’t believe you made this deal.  Why didn’t you tell anybody?  You didn’t tell me about this.  You just went off and did it on your own.  And it’s a terrible deal.  We got screwed.  Wilbur, maybe you used to have it.’  As an investment banker representing casino bondholders angry at Trump in 1990, Ross had struck a deal with Trump that acknowledged the value of his famous name and allowed him to avoid bankruptcy.”

“‘I thought you were a killer…When you were on Wall Street, you made some of these deals.  But you’re past your prime.  You’re not a good negotiator anymore.  I don’t know what it is, but you’ve lost it.  I don’t trust you.  I don’t want you doing any more negotiations.'”

29. Steve Bannon warned Trump that firing Comey was a mistake and would not end the Russia investigation.

According to Woodward at the start of Chapter 20, Trump wanted then-FBI Director James Comey fired “at the beginning of” his first term.  As he planned to finally terminate him in May 2017, his soon-to-exit advisor Steve Bannon issued this prescient warning about such a move.

“The moment you fire him he’s J. fucking Edgar Hoover.  The day you fire him, he’s the greatest martyr in American history.  A weapon to come and get you.  They’re going to name a special fucking counsel.  You can fire Comey.  You can’t fire the FBI.  The minute you fire him, the FBI as an institution, they have to destroy you and they will destroy you.”

Despite being told that “a special counsel” has “sweeping powers…to investigate everything a president touched,” Trump had already made up his mind:

“Don’t try to talk me out of it…because I’ve made my decision, so don’t even try.”

30. Rod Rosenstein wasn’t a Comey fan, either.

“Rosenstein told Trump that he thought Comey should be fired.  He had no problem writing a memo outlining his reasoning.”  It was a 3-page document entitled “RESTORING PUBLIC CONFIDENCE IN THE FBI.”

Rosenstein opposed the way Comey handled the Hillary Clinton private server investigation.  In the memo, “He quoted five former attorneys general or deputy attorneys general agreeing that Comey had violated the rules,” announcing his own conclusions about the case “pre-empting the decision of the prosecutor”.

Trump now had the cover to do what he had already planned to do anyway before Rosenstein even walked into the Oval Office.

31. Bannon thought Trump fired Comey because he was concerned about his son-in-law.

“Bannon believed, ‘100 percent,’ that the reason for firing Comey was because the FBI was seeking financial records from Jared.  It was pure speculation.  Ivanka had complained to her father about the FBI.”

32. Trump lawyer John Dowd had previously investigated Pete Rose and defended John McCain.

“In the 1980s, he was special counsel to the commissioner of baseball.  He ran several investigations, the most prominent leading to the banning of Pete Rose of the Cincinnati Reds for betting on baseball games.  After that, as a defense attorney, Dowd represented Wall Street and political figures, including Senator John McCain in the Keating Five ethics investigation.”

33. Trump told an unnamed friend his personal philosophy on responding to accusations of philandering, harassment and assault.

From Chapter 21:

“Trump gave some private advice to a friend who had acknowledged some bad behaviour toward women.  Real power is fear.  It’s all about strength.  Never show weakness.  You’ve always got to be strong.  Don’t be bullied.  There is no choice.

‘You’ve got to deny, deny, deny and push back on these women…If you admit to anything and any culpability, then you’re dead.  That was a big mistake you made.  You didn’t come out guns blazing and just challenge them.  You showed weakness.  You’ve got to be strong.  You’ve got to be aggressive.  You’ve got to push back hard.  You’re got to deny anything that’s said about you.  Never admit.”

34. Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner played a major role in Steve Bannon’s departure.

From Chapter 23:

“Ivanka and Jared gave a newspaper story to the president with highlighted quotes from an unnamed White House source.  You know who this is?  This is Steve Bannon, they said.  In a West Wing filled with leakers, these tactics slowly but surely planted a distrust of Bannon with the president.”

35. Trump attorney John Dowd pretty much gave Special Counsel Robert Mueller anything he wanted with no objection from the President:

From Chapter 24:

“Mueller received 1.4 million pages of documents from the Trump campaign and 20,000 pages from the White House.  Dowd believed no documents had been destroyed.  In all, 37 witnesses gave interviews to Mueller’s team voluntarily.”

There was also a “six-page White House summary of the entire Flynn matter from contemporaneous recollections.  Dowd considered it the Bible on Flynn…”

36. The 2017 federal budget would not pass unless Trump instituted anti-trans military policies.

“In July, the Freedom Caucus, a bloc of 30 strong conservatives in the House, threatened not to vote for the budget unless President Trump instituted some prohibition on paying for gender reassignment surgeries and hormone treatments for transgender people serving in the military.”

37. Trump made a private transphobic remark.

“During the campaign, Trump had proclaimed himself a supporter of LGBT rights.  Now he told Bannon, ‘What the fuck?  They’re coming in here, they’re getting clipped’–a crude reference to gender reassignment surgery.”

38. Trump studied his own tweets to determine which ones were the most popular.

From Chapter 25:

“He ordered printouts of his recent tweets that had received a high number of likes, 200,000 or more.  He studied them to find the common themes in the most successful.  He seemed to want to become more strategic, find out whether success was tied to the subject, the language or simply the surprise that the president was weighing in.  The most effective tweets were often the most shocking.”

39. Trump is a deep thinker.

“Coming back from the [2017] G20 summit, Trump was editing an upcoming speech with Porter.  Scribbling his thoughts in neat, clean penmanship, the president wrote, “TRADE IS BAD.”

40. Why economic advisor Gary Cohn initially tried to quit before being convinced to stay on until a terrible tax bill was passed.

From Chapter 30:

“On Friday, August 18, [2017,] Gary Cohn flew by helicopter from East Hampton, Long Island, to Morristown, New Jersey, where it was raining heavily.  He had to wait on the tarmac to get clearance to Bedminster.  He was carrying a resignation letter.  This was too much.  Someone had put a swastika on his daughter’s college dorm room.”

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Sunday, October 7, 2018
8:01 p.m.

Revelations From Bob Woodward’s Donald Trump Book (Part Four)

20. Barack Obama seriously contemplated bombing North Korea’s nukes and missiles.

Near the end of his Presidency, Barack Obama wondered whether a “surgical strike” against North Korea’s nuclear capabilities would be successful.  (There were no legal considerations, apparently.)  In September 2016, the Kim Jong Un regime resumed underground testing of its nuclear weapons.  Endlessly worried about the resumption of the still active Korean War (and with good reason), the North Korean leader wasn’t taking any chances even if his threats of striking America (if they attack his country first) with long range supposedly nuke-tipped ICBMs is highly unlikely.  (They would definitely reach the South and Japan, if they struck first, however.)

Obama was hoping to make his successor’s life a lot easier by finally dealing with this issue.

“From the outset President Obama had authorized several Special Access Programs (SAP), the most classified and compartmented operations conducted by the military and intelligence, to deter North Korean missiles.  One program pinpointed cyber attacks on the command, control, telemetry, and guidance systems before or during a North Korean missile test launch.  These high-risk cyber attacks had begun in his first year as president.  Their success rate was mixed.

Another highly secret operation focused on obtaining North Korean missiles.  And a third enabled the United States to detect a North Korean missile launch in seven seconds.  Officials have asked that I not describe the details in order to protect national security operations deemed vital to the United States.”

Obama asked his National Security Council if bombing North Korea’s nukes and missiles was doable.  In short, no.  It wasn’t clear if their ICBM’s were even nuclear.  (“Current intelligence assessments could not answer definitively.”)

“The intelligence assessment also showed that a U.S. attack could not wipe out everything the North had.  There would be lost targets because they did not know about them, and partial destruction of other targets.”  What about the deleterious effect on North Korean civilians?  That curiously goes unmentioned.

There were numerous other problems with the unwarranted attack.  But this was the biggest one:

“A single North Korean nuclear weapon detonated in response could mean tens of thousands of casualties in South Korea.”

The Pentagon noted the obvious.  There would have to be “a ground invasion” on top of the bombing which of course would justify North Korea retaliating “likely with a nuclear weapon”.

“Frustrated and exasperated, he rejected a preemptive strike.  It was folly.”

Too bad Obama didn’t feel the same way about drones.

21. James Clapper warned Obama that North Korea would not go for denuclearization and they want a peace treaty with South Korea.

The then-Director of National Intelligence made a trip to North Korea in late 2014 “to retrieve two U.S. citizens who had been taken prisoner.  From his discussions with North Korean officials he was convinced that North Korea would not give up their nuclear weapons.  Why would they?  In exchange for what?  North Korea had effectively bought a deterrent.  It was real and powerful in its ambiguity.”

Clapper “argued to Obama and the NSC that for the United States to say that denuclearization was a condition for negotiations was not working, and would not work.”

“Also, Clapper said, he understood the North Korean desire for a peace treaty to end the Korean War, which had been formally resolved with an armistice in 1953–a truce between the commanders of the militaries involved, not the nations at war.

The United States needed to understand how North Korea looked at the situation:  The U.S. and South Korea seemed permanently poised, dramatically at times, to attack and to do away with the Kim regime.”

Clapper noted that the North Koreans told him that America “has no permanent enemies” which gave him hope that it would be possible “to set up an interest section in Pyongyang” in order to establish “an informal” diplomatic “channel in which another government with an embassy in the North Korean capital would act as intermediary.”  There “would be less than full diplomatic relations, but it would give the U.S. a base, a place…they could obtain information and also get information into North Korea.”

Clapper’s view was a lonely one on the National Security Council:

“No one agreed.  Obama was hard-line:  North Korea would have to agree to give up its nuclear weapons,” a policy that has been stubbornly maintained by the Trump Administration.

22. Obama also thought about increasing cyber attacks against North Korea.

“Some” in the Obama Administration “viewed cyber [attacks] as the below-the-radar magic wand that might mitigate the North Korean threat.”

But there were two major problems, besides the clearly illegal and unwarranted plan of attack itself.

One:

“To launch broader cyber attacks effectively, the [NSA] would have to go through servers that North Korea had in China.  The Chinese would detect such an attack and could conclude it was directed at them, potentially unleashing a cataclysmic cyber war.”

Two:

“The use of cyber could trigger escalation and set off a round of attacks and counterattacks that could cripple the Internet, financial systems like banking and credit cards, power grids, news and other communications systems, potentially bringing the American or even the world economy to its knees.”

The foolish plan was thankfully abandoned.

23. Lindsey Graham urged Trump to bomb North Korea even if it meant killing a whole lot of South Korean civilians.  He also mended fences with John McCain during a private dinner.

Despite being humiliated by Trump during the 2016 primaries, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham was urged by then-Chief of Staff Reince Priebus to forge a relationship with the new President.  (“You’re a lot of fun.  He needs fun people around him.”)

They ultimately bonded over North Korea, one of Graham’s pet issues.  At the same time, Trump was trying to make peace with another infamous warmonger John McCain who he derided for being captured in Vietnam (instead of committing war crimes by bombing civilians before that happened).

He invited McCain and his wife Cindy to a private dinner at The White House where he offered a “teared up” Cindy a job being “my ambassador at large for human trafficking”.

Trump than proceeded to kiss up to John who was “visibly touched” by the offer to his wife:

“I just want to get to know you…I admire you.  You’re a very tough man.  You’re a good man.”

“McCain again seemed touched…’We want to help you.'”

That led to a discussion with Graham about North Korea.  When Trump asked McCain’s opinion on what to do, he replied:

“Very complicated…They can kill a million people in Seoul [South Korea] with conventional artillery.  That’s what makes it so hard.”

To which Graham responded:

“If a million people are going to die, they’re going to die over there, not here.”

Even Trump was taken aback:

“That’s pretty cold.”

24. America is deliberating fighting a stalemate in Afghanistan to avoid conceding the rest of the country back to The Taliban.

Throughout Fear: Trump In The White House, the Republican President expresses outrage over the disastrous Afghanistan invasion.  (“We’ve got to figure out how to get the fuck out of there.”)  Launched a month after 9/11 with significant public support, the unpopular occupation has since faded into the background.  Almost 20 years old now, it is America’s longest ever war with no end in sight.

In Chapter 15, Woodward lays out the big problems with the current strategy.  The Taliban remain resilient and continue to rule over “significant” parts of the country.  The thoroughly corrupt puppet regime has no legitimacy.  The opium trade and illegal mining make up much of the otherwise struggling economy.  Having a permanent US military presence won’t solve anything.  There are numerous tribes at war with each other.

“A larger question loomed:  Should the United States be playing to win in Afghanistan, or merely not to lose?”

Despite protests from the soon to be departing Steve Bannon, Trump reluctantly agreed with a request to add more troops (just a few thousand) even though everybody in the government, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions, sees the occupation as a failure that needs to draw to a close.

Everybody except the perennially war hungry Lindsey Graham who tried to scaremonger Trump into keeping the ongoing quagmire going:

“Do you want on your resume that you allowed Afghanistan to go back into the darkness and the second 9/11 came from the very same place the first 9/11 did?”  15 of the 9/11 attackers were Saudi Arabian but I digress.

When Trump asked Graham, “Well…how does it end?”

“‘It never ends,’ Graham said. ‘It’s good versus evil.  Good versus evil never ends.  It’s just like the Nazis.  It’s now radical Islam.  It will be something else one day.'”

When Pence urged Graham to tell Trump “how this ends,” Graham would not budge.

“It would never end, Graham repeated.”

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Sunday, October 7, 2018
3:23 a.m.