A former Trump executive asks the right question
by digby
Barbara Res wonders the same thing I wonder. What in the hell are all these Trump former staffers so afraid of? Why won’t any of them except Omarosa stand up and be counted?
On this particular day, the architect had come to Donald Trump’s office to show him what the interior of the residential elevator cabs would look like.
Trump looked at the panels where the buttons you push to reach a floor were located. He noticed that next to each number were some little dots.
“What’s this?” Trump asked.
“Braille,” the architect replied.
Trump told the architect to take it off, get rid of it.
“We can’t,” the architect said, “It’s the law.”
“Get rid of the (expletive) braille. No blind people are going to live in Trump Tower. Just do it,” Trump yelled back, calling him weak.
The more the architect protested, the angrier Trump got. Donald liked to pick on this guy. As a general rule, Trump thought architects and engineers were weak as compared to construction people. And he loved to torment weak people.
But did he think the architect would remove the Braille from the panels? Never.
I had seen him do this kind of thing before and would again. He would say whatever came into his head. Ordering an underling to do something that was impossible gave Trump the opportunity to castigate a subordinate and also blame him for anything that “went wrong” in connection with the unperformed order later. A Trump-style win-win.
Trump did this with outrageous or just plain stupid ideas, both legal and illegal. Sometimes those lines were blurred.
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Trump is really not all that different now, but the stakes are higher. And there aren’t many order refusers anymore either. Off the record, staffers tell reporters that Trump is out of control.But what have they done to try to control him? Steal a memo off his desk so he will forget to sign it?
How about not preparing the memo in the first place? And who refuses to lie for him when he makes his outrageous claims?
They are not saying something silly like Princess Diana is buying an apartment in Trump Tower; they are misleading and deceiving the American public on matters of great importance.
The “just do its” are getting done. And they are not directed at carpenters and painters or fan magazines. Now they’re about alienating allies, cozying up to dictators and employing dangerous nonsensical economic tactics.
The self-aggrandizing Anonymous wants the world to know that there are adults in the room. Really? What the hell are they doing?
They are dancing as fast as they can to salvage their own reputations without ever taking the slightest risk that Trump or his mob of deplorables will turn on them.
There have been decades of academic studies about how a government turns authoritarian, wondering how it can be that so many people would just go along until it’s too late. We’re watching it happen right now. Trump is such a dolt that he will likely not be able to deliver unless he re-elected. But the new generation of GOPers that Trump is empowering — DeSantis, Meadows, Jordan, Tom Cotton etc — are learning how to be fascist in America. They will be a lot better at it than Trump is.
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