US Politics

This Wolff book is gold.

I vaguely remember him dropping a teaser a few days after inauguration.

... anyone know which other journos have had access?

“So the snowflakes would show up at the airports and riot.” That was the way to crush the liberals: Make them crazy and drag them to the left.

It doesn’t feel good to see this spelled out. The left got played.

The book seems super juicy, but unfortunately it looks like this Wolff guy isn't the most reliable source of info:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/michael-wolff-tells-a-juicy-tale-in-his-new-trump-book-but-should-we-believe-it/2018/01/03/d46f31c6-f0b2-11e7-97bf-bba379b809ab_story.html

But how did the left get played? The president put out a prejudiced executive order and protesters (and lawyers) showed up to try to stop as best they could. If it was a troll move it was still one with tremendous negative ramifications for thousands, if not (eventually) millions of people.

Yeah but Spacey’s been fired before the end of the season and this reads like Curb Your House of Cards.

What's all this about the death penalty for Bannon's "espionage"??

But how did the left get played?

The reaction was calculated. Bannon wanted it as a wedge.

People underestimate Trump at their own peril. He played the Left and Liberals for suckers. He said ridiculous things in his speeches but he got the desired reaction from his opponents on the left. He provoked reactions and made them look more extremist than they really are. He was able to position himself as a centrist candidate, and get the right, far right, and centrist votes.

All those silly looking tweets are carefully tailored to his fan base. Read some of the replies and see how devoted his fans are. Celebrities who criticise him are written off as Hollywood Libtards. Academics who criticise him are written off as Ivory Tower Lefties.

In America there is a vast class of forgotten people, the middle class workers and tradesmen who are now lost and unemployable. They are angry. He gave them someone to blame. He promised big changes. They have been let down by both the Republicans and the Democrats, he was neither, or so he claimed. The regular two party system has failed them so an outsider was as good as anyone.

Just because he looks stupid to you, don't assume he really is stupid. He is totally evil and a master of deception and manipulation.

stupid/totally evil master of deception are not mutually exclusive imo

Did I just get mansplained?

S'alright pet. Calm down me duck. Etc...

That's funny, because I was just about to write exactly the same about Boris Johnson.
Or Hitler

I can't remember which

Just because he looks stupid to you, don't assume he really is stupid. He is totally evil and a master of deception and manipulation.

All the evidence points to him being the former.

Important details on Trump's hair (apparently in the book)

Ivanka Trump has spilled the beans to her friends on how her father's
unusual hairstyle came to be, author Michael Wolff's new book reveals.

'She often described the mechanics behind it to friends: an absolutely
clean pate – a contained island after scalp-reduction surgery –
surrounded by a furry circle of hair around the sides and front, from
which all ends are drawn up to meet in the center and then swept back
and secured by a stiffening spray,' Wolff wrote.

The book also claims that the president, at age 71, is no longer a
natural blond.

'The color, she would point out in comical effect, was from a product
called Just for Men – the longer it was left on, the darker it got,'
Wolff said.

Just for Men is usually used to hide gray hairs.

'Impatience resulted in Trump's orange-blond hair color,' the
forthcoming book, entitled 'Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White
House,' said.

I got that snippet (above) from the Daily Mail. As an aside I am genuinely astonished that the comments below the article are on balance predominantly supportive of Trump. It speaks volumes about either 'filter bubbles' or the level of activity of organised trolling/influencing.

‘all the evidence’ is a bit strong.

He is almighty POTUS and via the bigliest political coup in a generation on (relatively) little cash and even less political backing.

He is not a bright man - he just has way of appealing to the absolute worst in the nature of bad people that is accidentally effective.

Trump and Farage: Promising the moon on a stick for the left behind by posing as the "alternative" and blaming all the problems on another party.

And what kl said, appealing to the worst of people, creating outrage, re-inforcing conflicts, show politics...but it works. It does not matter that there are no solutions, it's all about "giving the finger"

When ‘ways’ are ‘accidentally effective’ to the degree it puts a non-candidate into elected government I think it’s probable their intelligence (the ability to aquire and apply skills) is around average or above.

Arrogance, ignorance and misplaced pride perhaps aren’t what most of us associate with intelligence but that’s partially cultural and to an unknown degree an artifice for twitter anyway.

if you want to give him the benefit of the doubt then you could concede that some of the people he's surrounded himself have the nous to enact the sort of mendacity that has come to characterise his tenure, but the man himself is a cornfed, blue ribbon fucking idiot of the first water.

His true strength has nothing to do with ideology or strategy but with his intuition and perception. He basically has the best “dog ears” of anyone since Nixon; his ability to rile up the base is uncanny. Something like the controversy over football players kneeling hardly registered to most people in America. Yet to those 20% of Americans who are Trump or Die people and to another probably 20% quietly harboring at least some racist notions as well as discontent about their own lot in life it was absolutely on the money. And sometimes he can do that for non-prejudice related things too.

pretty sure you don't need to be particularly intuitive or perceptive to get a bunch of racist idiots riled up. in fact, if anything upsets racist idiots, it's intuition and perception.

from that nymag link from the prior page, this quote in that book from Katie Walsh, initial deputy chief of staff:

"He didn’t process information in any conventional sense. He didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-­literate. He trusted his own expertise ­— no matter how paltry or irrelevant — more than anyone else’s. He was often confident, but he was just as often paralyzed, less a savant than a figure of sputtering and dangerous insecurities, whose instinctive response was to lash out and behave as if his gut, however confused, was in fact in some clear and forceful way telling him what to do. It was, said Walsh, “like trying to figure out what a child wants.” "

so yeah. probably in the same way he handles business affairs, nothing is read everything is from the gut and based on his perception of the person he is talking to. and that person being below him.

It’s George Wallace versus Richard Nixon. One was about as blatantly racist as any presidential candidate since Reconstruction. He lost. Richard Nixon wasn’t much better but he understood how to appeal to out and out racists as well as people who wouldn’t openly espouse such views but who nonetheless subscribed to them privately.

You can say that Trump is an idiot and an incompetent but that line of thought being held by his opponents has already resulted in him being elected once.

Worth noting she has denied saying that. Link on same page.