There’s a new book out about the Trump campaign by Michael C. Bender of the Wall St. Journal. Here’s the money quote:
“I’ve done all this stuff for the Blacks—it’s always Jared telling me to do this,” Trump said to one confidante on Father’s Day. “And they all f—— hate me, and none of them are going to vote for me.”
Imagine that. The story recounts much of what we already know about Trump’s racism. But I thought the last part of this anecdote was especially juicy and I hadn’t heard it before. It happened after Trump gave his series of obtuse, rationalizations for Charlottesville:
Gary Cohn, the president’s top economic adviser—and a registered Democrat—was even more despondent. Raised Jewish on the East Side of Cleveland and a longtime New York resident, he stood next to Trump for the infrastructure news conference and grew increasingly alarmed and uncomfortable. Later, in a private meeting inside the Oval Office, Cohn unloaded on the president.
Cohn told Trump that his lack of clarity had been harmful to the country and that he’d put an incredible amount of pressure on people working in the White House. He told Trump that he might have to quit. No one backed Cohn up. Others in the room, including Pence, remained quiet.
Cohn returned to his office after the meeting broke up. Following a few minutes behind, Pence climbed the flight of stairs and appeared at the threshold of Cohn’s door.
“I’m proud of you,” Pence told him, safely out of earshot of the president.
What a little weasel.
The story goes on to discuss Trump’s response to the George Floyd murder and subsequent protests. Nothing too surprising except that in private he seemed to acknowledge that he knows cops can be vicious.(I think he gave that hint when he told Laura Ingraham that sometimes they “choke” like a golfer missing a putt.) But he felt that any sympathy for Floyd or criticism of the police would be seen as “weak” by his voters, which says a lot more about his own insecurities than about the sycophantic cult that worships him and believes he’s a super-hero no matter what he does. He needn’t have worried.
It also discussed that Tulsa rally that finally ended Brad Parscale’s grift and put what appears to be a permanent wedge between him and Jared Kushner. And it features this amazing quote. You may recall that he’d originally scheduled the Tulsa rally for Juneteenth (!) and then canceled it:
In our interview, one year ago this week, Trump tried to put a spin on the controversy. He told me that he had made Juneteenth a day to remember.
“Nobody had heard of it,” Trump told me.
He was surprised to find out that his administration had put out statements in each of his first three years in office commemorating Juneteenth.
“Oh really?” he said. “We put out a statement? The Trump White House put out a statement?”
Each statement, put out in his name, included a description of the holiday.
But such details were irrelevant to him. Instead, he insisted, “I did something good.”
“I made Juneteenth very famous,” he said.
All you can do is laugh at this point. And wonder once again how in the world 75 million of our fellow Americans could have voted for this dolt.