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Vanity Fair's Graydon Carter on "Trump's White House: The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight"
Remember, Trump already hates Carter for starting the talk about his tiny hands:
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/02/graydon-carter-on-trumps-white-house
We aren’t even a third of the way through the administration’s 100-day honeymoon period and let’s face it: we’re plumb exhausted. We’re exhausted from the flurry of rash executive orders. Exhausted from the human carnage in the wake of the president’s ban on travelers from majority-Muslim countries. Exhausted from the battles with neighbors, allies, and strategic adversaries on the world stage. Exhausted from the lies, the alternative facts, the boasts, the conflicts, and the scandals from this “fine-tuned machine.” Exhausted from our president’s cavalier habit of belittling our judiciary and intelligence services. Exhausted from having craven boneheads chosen to lead departments governing the environment, the Treasury, education, and the interior. Exhausted from an administration that turns a blind eye to Russian intrusions into Crimea, our election, and the imminent elections in Europe. Exhausted from the West Wing circus of misfits, clowns, and ghouls—politics’ answer to the Kardashians. Exhausted from the preening arrogance of the members of the First Family. Exhausted from waking up and not knowing what fresh hell this new president and his birdcage of a mind have cooked up overnight.
Trump fatigue has set in, and set in hard. Even the Republicans, who have ridden this stalking horse into office, holding their noses in the hope that they can manipulate him into furthering their agenda, are now mulling their options. Perhaps we’re all wrong, though. Perhaps the president is playing a game of chess and the rest of us are simply moving checker pieces around. Perhaps he intended his Muslim ban to create such havoc and misfortune that we would be looking the other way as he went about the business of dismantling the assets of proper governance. Perhaps he has just taken the crazy-driver approach to new extremes: when there is an erratic, swerving driver up ahead on the highway, you tend to pull back and give him the road. At a certain point, though, you wait for your moment and pass him, relaxing only when you can see him in your rearview mirror. Or perhaps he’s just trying to figure out which chess piece is which, and he really is a crazy driver.
-snip-
As it stands, the president’s wife is not turning out to be the paparazzi bait one would have expected. Aside from her strained appearances on Inauguration Day, walking politely behind her husband or working up a forced smile when he looked in her direction, she has been as quiet as he has been loud. She gamely showed up for the post-inauguration balls—which on television looked about as festive as a Walmart on a Sunday morning. And as for the First Couple on the dance floor, I’ve seen cozier body language in a hostage situation.
Presidential style has historically filtered down to the middle masses. John F. Kennedy’s preference for going hatless has been blamed for single-handedly killing the men’s hat industry. One can only hope that the style of the current inhabitant of the White House doesn’t filter in any direction. It starts with a button. There is a reflex among men when a woman or even another man enters a room: they get to their feet, and if they are wearing a suit or a blazer, they instinctively button it up. This custom has apparently been lost on our new leader. With all the grace of a Mob boss, he charged out of his motorcade car ahead of his wife when meeting the Obamas and later swaggered through the Capitol on the way to his swearing-in. It’s rare when you see a man with both his jacket and his overcoat unbuttoned. When you couple that with the enormous length of a clearly overcompensatory red tie—the stubby end underneath held in place with cellophane tape—well, it was a spectacle that only Tony Soprano would have appreciated.
The Constitution-straining conflicts surrounding the president, some of his children, and his licensing-and-development business are a problem with no end in sight. Make no bones about it. The First Family are interested in one thing: furthering themselves and the so-called Trump brand. The Office of Government Ethics—the agency that criticized White House adviser Kellyanne Conway for her public endorsement (“Go buy Ivanka’s stuff”) of the First Daughter’s clothing and accessories line, which had been dropped by Nordstrom—is going to have its hands full. And arcane strictures like the Logan Act and the Emoluments Clause are now familiar to people who are not constitutional scholars.
In mid-February, on a weekend when the North Koreans appeared to have successfully launched an intermediate-range ballistic missile, the commander in chief of our armed forces was uncharacteristically reasoned in his response. The president discussed the launch while dining with the Japanese prime minister and his wife and New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft on the terrace of his baroque Palm Beach club. His consultation with White House aides was conducted in full view of other diners. When photos and video of a meeting between the president and his closest aides start appearing on social media—along with a photo on Facebook of a club member posing with the military aide who carries the nuclear codes—you begin to realize just how uncharted the waters around us are. The president’s muted response to the North Korean launch could have something to do with the fact that he may understand that he has more in common with his counterpart in that country than he would care to admit. Goofy haircut? Check. Boxy frame and ill-fitting suits? Check. Erratic and unstable personality? Check. Simplistic way of looking at the world? Check. Primitive vocabulary? Check. Hates the country to the south? Check. Brooks no opposition from underlings? Check. Thin skin and a tendency to disproportionately lash out at critics? Check. Father gave him his career? Check.
The West Wing is already a groaning, leaking sieve as competing factions battle for TV face time, the boss’s limited attention, or their own ends. The leakfest is a boon to journalists covering this administration, but calamitous incompetence is something of an impediment to running the most powerful nation on earth. The description in The New York Times of a staff unable to figure out how to turn on the lights in the Cabinet Room of the White House was image enough. The paper also reported that Trump stalks the halls of the private quarters at all hours of the night in his bathrobe, firing off Twitter missives. I don’t know how that bathrobe description plants itself in your mind, but I think less Noël Coward silk and tassels and more leisure fabric with food stains, a high hemline, and karate sleeves. Those nocturnal tweets reflect a scattershot mind and a temperament ill-suited to the job at hand. When he is not tweeting lunatic complaints about the nation’s security services, or CNN, or the Times, he’s slamming Nordstrom for dropping Ivanka, or a fellow reality-TV personality for not being “smart enough” to challenge him in 2020, or Joe Scarborough’s shoe size. Actually, I made that last one up.
-snip-
The America I see is not the grim dystopia that our new president described during his campaign and in his inaugural speech. It’s not perfect. Democracies seldom are. But with this man’s agenda now under way, it may well become the barren plain he has imagined. Since the inauguration, it seems that the world has suddenly become a room filled with gas. And in our leader we have an ignorant strongman about to light a $20 cigar with a match.
Trump fatigue has set in, and set in hard. Even the Republicans, who have ridden this stalking horse into office, holding their noses in the hope that they can manipulate him into furthering their agenda, are now mulling their options. Perhaps we’re all wrong, though. Perhaps the president is playing a game of chess and the rest of us are simply moving checker pieces around. Perhaps he intended his Muslim ban to create such havoc and misfortune that we would be looking the other way as he went about the business of dismantling the assets of proper governance. Perhaps he has just taken the crazy-driver approach to new extremes: when there is an erratic, swerving driver up ahead on the highway, you tend to pull back and give him the road. At a certain point, though, you wait for your moment and pass him, relaxing only when you can see him in your rearview mirror. Or perhaps he’s just trying to figure out which chess piece is which, and he really is a crazy driver.
-snip-
As it stands, the president’s wife is not turning out to be the paparazzi bait one would have expected. Aside from her strained appearances on Inauguration Day, walking politely behind her husband or working up a forced smile when he looked in her direction, she has been as quiet as he has been loud. She gamely showed up for the post-inauguration balls—which on television looked about as festive as a Walmart on a Sunday morning. And as for the First Couple on the dance floor, I’ve seen cozier body language in a hostage situation.
Presidential style has historically filtered down to the middle masses. John F. Kennedy’s preference for going hatless has been blamed for single-handedly killing the men’s hat industry. One can only hope that the style of the current inhabitant of the White House doesn’t filter in any direction. It starts with a button. There is a reflex among men when a woman or even another man enters a room: they get to their feet, and if they are wearing a suit or a blazer, they instinctively button it up. This custom has apparently been lost on our new leader. With all the grace of a Mob boss, he charged out of his motorcade car ahead of his wife when meeting the Obamas and later swaggered through the Capitol on the way to his swearing-in. It’s rare when you see a man with both his jacket and his overcoat unbuttoned. When you couple that with the enormous length of a clearly overcompensatory red tie—the stubby end underneath held in place with cellophane tape—well, it was a spectacle that only Tony Soprano would have appreciated.
The Constitution-straining conflicts surrounding the president, some of his children, and his licensing-and-development business are a problem with no end in sight. Make no bones about it. The First Family are interested in one thing: furthering themselves and the so-called Trump brand. The Office of Government Ethics—the agency that criticized White House adviser Kellyanne Conway for her public endorsement (“Go buy Ivanka’s stuff”) of the First Daughter’s clothing and accessories line, which had been dropped by Nordstrom—is going to have its hands full. And arcane strictures like the Logan Act and the Emoluments Clause are now familiar to people who are not constitutional scholars.
In mid-February, on a weekend when the North Koreans appeared to have successfully launched an intermediate-range ballistic missile, the commander in chief of our armed forces was uncharacteristically reasoned in his response. The president discussed the launch while dining with the Japanese prime minister and his wife and New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft on the terrace of his baroque Palm Beach club. His consultation with White House aides was conducted in full view of other diners. When photos and video of a meeting between the president and his closest aides start appearing on social media—along with a photo on Facebook of a club member posing with the military aide who carries the nuclear codes—you begin to realize just how uncharted the waters around us are. The president’s muted response to the North Korean launch could have something to do with the fact that he may understand that he has more in common with his counterpart in that country than he would care to admit. Goofy haircut? Check. Boxy frame and ill-fitting suits? Check. Erratic and unstable personality? Check. Simplistic way of looking at the world? Check. Primitive vocabulary? Check. Hates the country to the south? Check. Brooks no opposition from underlings? Check. Thin skin and a tendency to disproportionately lash out at critics? Check. Father gave him his career? Check.
The West Wing is already a groaning, leaking sieve as competing factions battle for TV face time, the boss’s limited attention, or their own ends. The leakfest is a boon to journalists covering this administration, but calamitous incompetence is something of an impediment to running the most powerful nation on earth. The description in The New York Times of a staff unable to figure out how to turn on the lights in the Cabinet Room of the White House was image enough. The paper also reported that Trump stalks the halls of the private quarters at all hours of the night in his bathrobe, firing off Twitter missives. I don’t know how that bathrobe description plants itself in your mind, but I think less Noël Coward silk and tassels and more leisure fabric with food stains, a high hemline, and karate sleeves. Those nocturnal tweets reflect a scattershot mind and a temperament ill-suited to the job at hand. When he is not tweeting lunatic complaints about the nation’s security services, or CNN, or the Times, he’s slamming Nordstrom for dropping Ivanka, or a fellow reality-TV personality for not being “smart enough” to challenge him in 2020, or Joe Scarborough’s shoe size. Actually, I made that last one up.
-snip-
The America I see is not the grim dystopia that our new president described during his campaign and in his inaugural speech. It’s not perfect. Democracies seldom are. But with this man’s agenda now under way, it may well become the barren plain he has imagined. Since the inauguration, it seems that the world has suddenly become a room filled with gas. And in our leader we have an ignorant strongman about to light a $20 cigar with a match.
Devastating combination of both personal and political attacks on Trump, from someone he's been unable to ignore in the past.
Will be interesting to see if Twitler can ignore this.
6 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
