monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

What Trump Might Do When He Realizes He’s Losing

What if Jimmy Carter had been a dimwitted madman?

No other alternate history would better illuminate what the next 1,404 days of President Donald Trump’s term have in store for us. But Carter was an intelligent, if politically bumbling (mis)manager, which is why comparisons between Trump and Carter, though compelling, don’t quite compute.

The chief popularizer of Trump-as-Carter analysis is leftist political scientist Corey Robin. In a fascinating essay earlier this year, he argued that Trump, like Carter, became president and will likely fail as president because the current order within his party is unwinding. Where Carter came to power before Democrats were prepared to make the transition from Ted Kennedy liberalism to Clintonian centrism, Trump is the avatar of ascendant, unabashed white nationalism, overtaking a sclerotic party still dominated by movement conservatives.

But differences mount from there, chief among them the fact that Trump is at bottom an unwitting agent of anyone who flatters him, until such time as they betray him. Where Carter’s bumbling technocracy fizzled out in a somewhat orderly way, Trump’s autocracy of dunces won’t necessarily conform to historical prologue.

There is an argument underway on the right over whether Trump is being led astray by his courtiers or is working in sync with them on an agenda that they lack the skill and public support to pass. We have no clear sense of what an erratic man like Trump will do if the agenda fails; and if he is by and large a poorly served dupe, we don’t know how he’ll react when he finally realizes it.

...Faced with roadblocks in every direction, and loath to become another Carter, it is unnervingly plausible to imagine him turning to the military levers of power over which he exerts singular control, and unleashing hell.

Zut Alors: Bannon’s Taste for Franco-Fascists

In the background of the daily political grind, there has been a back-and-forth battle of narratives over Trump’s senior strategist Stephen Bannon. The reason is pretty obvious: He (and his protégés in the White House) is the living link between Donald Trump and a netherworld of previously marginal people known as “nationalists” or “populists” or the “alt-right.” Trump supporters naturally want to mainstream Bannon, and his former bailiwick at Breitbart, as much as possible, while excluding entirely from the charmed circle of real influence the white-identity-politics types and open racists who are so present on social media and other gathering points for the mogul’s most avid fans.

So it’s of more than passing interest when Bannon himself tells the story (via The Wall Street Journal’s Michael Bender) of his own radicalization. When financial markets collapsed in 2008, Bannon, then just your average investment banker with a taste for conspiracy theory filmmaking, watched helplessly as his elderly father authorized a panic sale of stock in the company he served for many years, AT&T. None of Bannon junior’s Wall Street buddies went to jail for the betrayal of people like Bannon senior, and thus was born Stephen Bannon as a “divisive political firebrand.”

It’s a sad and heartwarming story. But a counter-narrative stubbornly keeps emerging of Bannon’s intellectual interests having as big an impact on his political thinking as that single incident in 2008. And two examples involve French writers from that country’s royalist and often racist authoritarian Right...

Seeking objective fact without bias .....why are then scientists fighting about this and that with and without facts?

Paul Ryan Begs Conservatives Not to Thwart His Boyhood Dream of Immiserating the Poor

Paul Ryan has been obsessed for his entire adult life by the single-minded goal of reducing distribution from the rich to the poor. But Ryan, who worked as a political aide before running for Congress himself, is savvy enough to recognize that social Darwinism is not a promising basis for a national platform. And so, when he burst onto the national scene, he positioned himself as an earnest, thoughtful policy wonk whose primary interest was in saving the country from a fiscal crisis. Subsequently, when the facts began to catch up to him, Ryan made a huge deal about his allegedly deep commitment to poverty, a messaging ploy that worked quite well. But, in an uncharacteristic fit of candor, he burst out today to National Review editor Rich Lowry, in support of his plan to cut spending on Medicaid, that “We’ve been dreaming of this since you and I were drinking out of a keg.”

Thompson "proved" that a few million was the limit because a sun powered by gravitational forces couldn't possibly last any longer. He was wrong on both counts.

Science means always seeking objective fact without bias. That's good enough for me.

Never has the anxiety of influence been captured so openly, and so vividly, as in the standoff between Chuck Berry and Keith Richards, when they rehearsed Berry’s song “Carol” in St. Louis thirty years ago. To watch Berry bully, instruct, and, finally, cajole Richards into getting things right is as unforgettable for the viewer as it was humbling for the veteran of the Rolling Stones. Watch it here Not that Richards was unaccustomed to the dynamic. Years before, Richards had dared to strum Berry’s guitar—the big Gibson ES-355—when Berry was out of the room. Berry returned and shouted, “No one touches my guitar!” and belted Richards in the mouth. Now Richards was getting the hard-ass treatment, even as he was trying to put together an all-star concert to celebrate Berry’s sixtieth birthday.

“Every time him and me got in contact, whether it’s intentional or not, I end up getting wounded,” Richards said. “Chuck has his own way of showing his appreciation.”

“A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.” (Winston Churchill)

Yes, I do mean that conversation ought to be engaged in elsewhere.

The New Yorker's David Remnick on Chuck Berry (how much do I love Remnick? A lot.)

Quote:

Never has the anxiety of influence been captured so openly, and so vividly, as in the standoff between Chuck Berry and Keith Richards, when they rehearsed Berry’s song “Carol” in St. Louis thirty years ago. To watch Berry bully, instruct, and, finally, cajole Richards into getting things right is as unforgettable for the viewer as it was humbling for the veteran of the Rolling Stones. Watch it here Not that Richards was unaccustomed to the dynamic. Years before, Richards had dared to strum Berry’s guitar—the big Gibson ES-355—when Berry was out of the room. Berry returned and shouted, “No one touches my guitar!” and belted Richards in the mouth. Now Richards was getting
hard-ass treatment, even as he was trying to put together an all-star concert to celebrate Berry’s sixtieth birthday.

“Every time him and me got in contact, whether it’s intentional or not, I end up getting wounded,” Richards said. “Chuck has his own way of showing his appreciation.”

NYer

NYT

Yes, I do mean that conversation ought to be engaged in elsewhere.

I am amazed at how guys like Beutler can sound almost Shakespearean when making these doomsayings regarding Trump and his effects on the worldwide political ecosystem. GAWDAMM.

Hard not to notice the alt right authoritarian overtones here. I'm slightly tempted to venture off in a riff about the Bannon-like psychodrama of the evolution of this dark underside of Blatham's psyche, and the drives that move him to spend much of his life searching favored magazines for material to paste here in pursuit of these obsessions.

However, I thought twice and poured a second cup of coffee.