Starr, Dershowitz, Gingrich, Manafort, Giuliani , Penn … back in the saddle.
This piece by Peter Beinert about all the has-beens in Trump’s inner circle is very instructive. He makes the point that it’s really about fame for these people which I would contrast with the Bush has-beens who all had serious unfinished business. (Bill Barr would be more in line with those earlier had-beens.) These are people who are merely seeking to relive their glory days.
Beinert writes:
Trump’s recklessness, cruelty, and corruption have led many Republicans in the prime of their career to avoid working for, or publicly defending, him. “Help Wanted,” read a 2017 Washington Post headline: “Why Republicans Won’t Work for the Trump Administration.” In 2018, CNN reported that Trump was experiencing “an unheard-of problem: The president can’t find a lawyer.”
This has provided the has-beens their opening. One early example was Paul Manafort, who in the Ronald Reagan era helped run a lobbying firm that Newsweek once called “the hottest shop in town.” But by 2016, as my colleague Franklin Foer has detailed, this once “indispensable man,” now in his late 60s, was no longer “missed in professional circles. He was without a big-paying client, and held heavy debts.” The Trump campaign, which Manafort briefly ran, offered a “return to relevance.”
While Manafort was angling to be Trump’s campaign manager, Newt Gingrich was angling to be his running mate. Two decades earlier, Time had named Gingrich, then the 52-year-old Republican speaker of the House, its Man of the Year. But after a failed 2012 presidential bid, Gingrich’s star had dimmed, an excruciating prospect for a man who once said, “If you’re not in The Washington Post every day, you might as well not exist.”
Gingrich didn’t get the vice president’s job. But his incessant defenses of Trump—particularly on Fox News—have afforded the 76-year-old what Politico has called “a rare third political life.” He has already published three Trump hagiographies. He’s appeared on Fox News or written op-eds for its website nine times so far in 2020 alone. All this apologizing for Trump, however, has its reputational costs.
I think we all know the stories of Starr, Dershowitz and Giuliani. They are so obviously desperate to be back in the spotlight in their dotage that they are making utter fools of themselves.
I hadn’t heard about this one, though:
In November, The Washington Post reported that Mark Penn—the most influential pollster of the Clinton era, who became a pariah among Democrats after Hillary Clinton’s 2008 defeat—had visited the White House to give Trump political advice. Penn, 65—who now appears regularly on Fox News and depicts Trump as a victim of the “deep state”—is “finally being talked about again,” according to Politico.
That figures. Speaking of which, why hasn’t Dick Morris been able to get a foothold? The last I heard he was the “political editor” of the National Inquirer.
Beinert spoke with a psychologist who studies fame and she said this:
When I asked Rockwell what allows the once famous to reconcile themselves to comparative obscurity, she said the transition was hard. There’s a “lot more amygdala activation when you’re famous,” she said, adding, “It takes the neurology a really long time to work through that, to reframe it as a graceful end to a beautiful career.” The people who manage the process best, she has written, focus on “becoming part of something larger than oneself,” thus “countering fame’s natural tendency toward narcissism,” and “dedicating all one’s drives and ambitions into making a real difference, in a meaningful way, in the world.”
It’s a lovely sentiment. But Giuliani’s approach—which he summed up in his December interview with Nuzzi as “My attitude about my legacy is Fuck it”—is much more likely to get you on Fox News.
Trump has been chasing fame since he was a teenager. And he will never have enough of it. Even now he whines when someone other than him is given credit for anything. No wonder he’s surrounded by all these pathetic fame whores. They all understand each other.