I thought I would share some good stuff I read this morning with gift links. This article in the NY Times is well worth reading in full. In fact, it’s delicious:
Late in the summer of 2003, a team of television producers stepped off the elevator on the 26th floor of Trump Tower eager to survey the set of their next reality show. After years filming “Survivor” in jungles around the world, training cameras on exotic spiders and deadly snakes to evoke danger, they came looking for a different set of sensory clues, the tiny details that would convey wealth and power.
Right away, they knew they had a problem.
The first thing they noticed was the stench, a musty carpet odor that followed them like an invisible cloud. Then they spotted scores of chips in the finish of the wooden desks and credenzas. The décor felt long out of date, making the space seem like a time capsule from when Donald J. Trump opened the building early in his first rise to fame.
The place did not exactly buzz with energy either. Fewer than 50 people worked at Trump Organization headquarters in midtown Manhattan. At the office’s spiritual center, Mr. Trump’s own desk bore no evidence of work, no computer screens or piles of contracts and blueprints, just a blanket of news articles focused on one subject: himself.
“When you go into the office and you’re hearing ‘billionaire,’ even ‘recovering billionaire,’ you don’t expect to see chipped furniture, you don’t expect to smell carpet that needs to be refreshed in the worst, worst way,” recalled Bill Pruitt, one of the producers of the new NBC show.
Interesting, no? Here’s the NY Times gift link.
Here’s another one you should read, from Huffington Post:
Key allies and advisers aren’t mincing their words: In order to carry out Trump’s mass deportation agenda, the United States will need enormous prison camps for immigrant families, part of an effort to deport millions of people at a record pace.
The mass deportation operation will be a “bloody story,” Trump said last weekend. And key advisers have promised a historic infrastructure project to churn people out of the country.
The camps will be built “on open land in Texas near the border” and should have the capacity to house as many as 70,000 people, which would double the United States’ current immigrant detention capacity, Stephen Miller, the main point man on immigration in Trump’s White House, said last year. In multiple interviews, Miller has gleefully described daily flights out of the camps to all corners of the world, an undertaking he said would be “greater than any national infrastructure project” in American history.
“Trump comes back in January — I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,” Thomas Homan, who served as acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the Trump administration, said in July at a conference for Trump-aligned conservatives.
“They ain’t seen shit yet,” Homan said. “Wait until 2025.”
Yeah, Read the whole thing.
Here’s one from Adam Serwer in the Atlantic on the real DEI candidates:
Conservatives have taken to referring to DEI as “didn’t earn it.” But to the extent that the candidates are running on unearned advantages related to personal biography, this better describes Trump and Vance than it does Harris, who worked her way up from local to state to federal office over the course of decades.
Trump was born a multimillionaire who drove one business after another into the ground, and his reputation as a brilliant businessman is largely due to him playing one on television. His term as president was mired by incompetence and corruption despite being relatively uneventful, and when faced with a real crisis—the coronavirus pandemic—he proceeded to bungle it in a catastrophic fashion that led to needless deaths and economic calamity. Vance has spent very little time in elected office, an office he won mostly on the success of his memoir and a Trump primary endorsement in a red state. He appears to have been selected as the vice-presidential nominee on the basis of his willingness to debase himself on Trump’s behalf. Neither of them has a compelling record of public service.
Trump is still unqualified even after serving as president for four years because he is incapable of learning anything. JD Vance is a 39 year old dilettante who has serve 1 year and 8 months as a Senator.
Plue they are both monsters.