Trump the markby digby
This is a great piece and a really exceptional insight from Josh Marshall. He talks about how Michael Wolff got into the White House through flattery and setting himself up as an adversary to Trump’s adversaries only to stab him in the back. It’s true. And it worked. But this is the insight that made my ears prick up:
Wolff is, in a word, vicious. He played Murdoch and then knifed him, all out in the open. And then he did more or less exactly the same thing to Trump a decade later, with the added bonus that Trump was talking to Murdoch regularly while Wolff had the run of the White House and was laying the ground work to shiv him as he had his new friend Rupert. None of this is terribly surprising given the Trump we know. But it wasn’t only his narcissism and neediness. The lack of any experienced staff and the organizational disarray that was particularly marked before John Kelly took over as Chief of Staff allowed Wolff to always be saying that he had the run of the place because someone else said it was okay. Because he was Trump’s best friend. Because Trump thought it was great. Because … well, didn’t you know that other person …
As I said, Trump got just the kind of vicious, shameless and canny biographer he deserved. “Joyously nasty” seems to capture it – precisely the person you want to write the book about someone you already despise.
But we don’t have to stop there. It is impossible not to look at the Wolff story and see many of the patterns we are now reading about which occurred over the course of 2015 and 2016 as various Russian nationals, cut-outs and intelligence officers inveigled their way into the Trump orbit. A key lure was the same: flattery. Another more amorphous draw was greed – whether for money or for damaging campaign material or positive press for a White House drowning in the worst press imaginable and abysmal public support. In both cases, the Trumpers were dealing with people who knew how to read a mark. And the Trumpers were easy marks.
Disorganization also clearly played a key role.
Earlier this month I wrote about what I see as the biggest question we face in trying to understand the Trump/Russia story. We know President Trump had longstanding ties to Russian capital, oligarchs and organized crime. These might be binds of greed or compromise or maybe both. But they run deep. This seems obviously tied to his and his minions’ machinations during the 2016 campaign. And yet the clearest threads we’ve found out about which point to collusion don’t suggest a organized conspiracy or a tight relationship so much as cold approaches, often to secondary members of the Trump entourage. As I noted in that January 8th post, there are various potential explanations for this seeming lack of fit. I’m still not sure what the explanation is. For our present purposes though what is key is that same role of inexperience, disorganization and greed…
It’s chaotic settings with corrupt individuals who always attract spies and grifters looking for an angle and a mark: the desperate and the greedy, the corrupt and the stupid. Similarly, they look for chaos and disorganization.
And, by the way, wily foreign leaders aren’t the only ones who would see the opportunity. Cunning domestic manipulators like Stephen Miller and Tom Cotton obviously have his number. And Lindsey Graham, who made the mistake of thinking that his naked attempt to flatter his golf swing and appeal to his “good side” were the kinds of flattery that makes him tick. Sure, he likes to be told that he’s a great athlete and a wonderful, generous man of the people. But what he needs is to be told that he is smart and tough and powerful.
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