aNewDomain
— For over a year I’ve been saying that Donald Trump is a dog who caught a car: He wanted to run for president, not be president.
Michael Wolff’s new book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, proves it. He writes:
“Shortly after 8 p.m. on Election Night, when the unexpected trend — Trump might actually win — seemed confirmed, Don Jr. told a friend that his father, or DJT, as he calls him, looked as if he had seen a ghost. Melania was in tears — and not of joy …There was, in the space of little more than an hour, in Steve Bannon’s not unamused observation, a befuddled Trump morphing into a disbelieving Trump and then into a horrified Trump.”
Obviously, Trump has pivoted. And not just pivoted: the celebrity real estate magnate and reality TV host looks like he’s stopped worrying altogether.
Long forgotten are his reluctant move to D.C., his fantasies of governing from his brass-trimmed Manhattan aerie.
Trump, in other words, has learned to love love love the bully pulpit. The presidency even comes with the ultimate Christmas gift for the megalomaniacal narcissist in your life: the power of life and death over humans, animals and plants!
Wolff’s revelation by way of Steve Bannon is worth reflecting upon.
That’s because Trump may be America’s first certifiably insane president. He is probably the most ignorant — and we’ve had some doozies. He is certainly the first without any political or high-level military experience whatsoever. What we now know is at least as remarkable as those bullet points: Trump is effectively the first president drafted into the position.
Vice presidents have been elevated to the Oval Office unexpectedly. But the possibility of winding up behind the big desk was always on their minds. They were political creatures.
If Wolff and Bannon are to be believed — and so far, there is no reason not to — Trump didn’t want the job. His team wanted him to lose. “Once he lost, Trump would be both insanely famous and a martyr to Crooked Hillary,” Wolff writes. “His daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared would be international celebrities. Steve Bannon would become the de facto head of the tea-party movement. Kellyanne Conway would be a cable-news star. Melania Trump, who had been assured by her husband that he wouldn’t become president, could return to inconspicuously lunching. Losing would work out for everybody. Losing was winning.”
Wanting to lose explains Trump’s refusal to contribute to his own run. It explains his barebones campaign, with its weird lack of field offices, his sleepy national HQ and his cheapskate approach to TV ads. The dude ran for president yet refused to spend the night in a hotel room.
As Hillary Clinton might ask: What happened?
The voters insisted upon Trump.
It’s difficult for Democrats to hear, but it’s true.
Republicans voted for Trump because Republican voters always vote Republican. But it was the swing voters who put him over the top. They voted for Trump despite his crazy rhetoric, his violent rallies and his incoherent promises. They were determined to howl their ballotbox cris de coeur. After decades of NAFTA and outsourcing and Rust Beltification and H1-B visas for foreigners while American tech workers can’t find work, they demanded to be heard. They did that by voting for Trump.
Trump isn’t merely devoted to his base. He is beholden to them. They put him in the White House even though he didn’t want to go.
The second takeaway here is that Hillary was an even worse candidate than her biggest detractors (cough cough) believed. Ruminate on this: she lost to a man who tried to lose.
A man with no experience.
With no campaign.
A nut.
Why not leave Hillary alone at this point?
You may be asking yourself here, why keep bashing Hillary? She will never run for office again, after all. Why not leave her alone and move on?
Because Clinton won’t leave us alone. Because Clintonism, centrism, Third Waye-ism, DLCism are still running the Democratic Party. Because her corporate neoliberal BS was discredited at the polls yet the party bosses and Dem-aligned media outlets keep shoving it down voters’ throats. Because progressivism and socialism are more popular but can’t get any air until a big sharp stake is driven through the undead heart of soulless centrism once and for all (I’m looking at you, Tim Kaine and Kamala Harris.)
So think on that a while.
My takeaway: Hillary Clinton was so sucky that she lost to the suckiest, stupidest, losing-est candidate anyone ever dreamed of.
For aNewDomain, I’m Ted Rall.
