He was in no mood to defend Trump
Even Ed Rogers, a Republican lobbyist who has been defending Trump in the Washington Post for months, is disgusted. Susan Glasser talked to him for a New Yorker piece.
And yet when I met Rogers, at his usual table in the back of the room at Tosca, the expensive but understated Italian restaurant across the street from his lobbying firm, where he goes to lunch almost every day, he was in no mood to defend Trump. The constant tweeting, the personal attacks on his own team, were taking a toll. “Every week!” Rogers said. “It’s surreal.” Then he paused, almost groaning when he asked, “Why does it have to be this way?”
Because Trump is what he is and not something else. He is what he is and what he has always obviously been – there wasn’t a better wiser more adult human being under the stuffed bladder of Public Trump. Under bloviating pinch-pointing fishmouth Donald Trump is just more of the same. He’s all exterior.
The weekend war of words between Corker and Trump had left Rogers, like many lobbyists in town, thinking not so much of the actual world war that Corker warned about (though he’s worried about that, too) but about the fate of Trump’s proposed tax-reform plan.
Good ol’ Republicans. “Yeah nuclear war would be a hassle but the real agony is losing the tax cuts for millionaires.”
Until now, Rogers and many other Washington Republicans have placed their hopes in the idea that sober-minded types like the new chief of staff, John Kelly, will somehow find a way to check Trump’s worst impulses, as was clear from a story he recounted. Rogers said that he remembered attending a session once with Steve Bannon, who was the President’s top White House strategist at the time, and who has returned to his previous roles as chairman of the conservative news site Breitbart and scourge of the Party establishment. Bannon had said, as Rogers remembered it, “ ‘There’s a bunch of people who think they have to protect the country from Trump.’ He said it in a belittling way.” At this, Rogers shook his head again and told me, “Well, it’s not heretical to say such a thing and think such a thing.”
Says the lobbyist who had been supporting him until just recently. If you know Trump has worst impulses that need to be checked, and those worst impulses are much worse than the normal routine worst impulses of presidents, then why did you ever support him in the first place? Weasel.
They all hate him, but they won’t all say it in public. That’s cool: it’s only the welfare of the 300-something million people in the US and also pretty much everyone else on the planet, apart from Putin and the odd oligarch.
As a Republican veteran of Capitol Hill explained to me, “The taxonomy of Washington Republicans is not a bright line of Never Trump versus pro-Trump.” There is, instead, “a continuum of people who are to varying degrees either outright supportive of the President or comfortable with the fact that getting things done requires working with the Administration to outright disgust and opposition.” As I have found, and with the exception of a small handful of officials who came to town with Trump, the private comments of even the most publicly pro-Trump Republicans often differ little from their more outspoken colleagues.
They know he’s shit but they won’t do anything about it. Impressive.
Yes, like a blowfish, extremely rare but deadly toxic.
But we knew that. Pity so many people chose to look the other way. Given a choise between death and taxes, umm … that’s real hard, huh?
And I once thought W was the rock bottom of stoopid: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice — umm, don’t do that!” I guess we lost count long ago.
Fuggu, fugu.
The Republican Party, the Modern Prometheus? (Pace Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly). Willing to wield Trump as a blunt instrument (and cast him aside once he was no longer useful) but unwilling to accept responsibility for doing so. Also unwilling to accept the instrument’s use against their own interests. Unable or unwilling to see that Trump has a (tiny) mind of his own and might not be that easy to wield in a precise or consistent way. Unable or unwilling to see that Trump has urges and impulses of his own that may not be controllable, and are not predictable based on any rational, political plan or ideology, since none of those concepts are in his limited repertoire of thought or behaviour. Deep down inside he’s shallow.
A friend sent me this on Friday (he saw it in the WaPo). You may have seen it already, but it certainly seems to fit here…
Beautiful prose. And apt.
By the way, here in Sveeden ve have a word for dirty old men: “Snuskhummer” — or filthy lobster.
Maybe that fits the bill too? ;-)
Parallels again. Here, most MPs know that Brexit is foolish and will likely cause nearly irreparable harm, but they continue to enable it.
What is it that seems to have affected the legislatures in both countries?
Anarcho-capitalism, with a side of dominionist theocracy. That’s been their agenda for decades, and there is nothing on earth they won’t sacrifice for it.
Rrr – Trump may be like a blowfish, but I don’t think he’s that rare. I am surrounded by the likes of Trump, I grew up with the likes of Trump, and I realize most people would like to think he is an aberration, an anomaly, but I am aware that there are waaaaaaayyyyyyy too many of him out there.
If only, if only he had given some kind of sign as to his nature!
A slight correction: “Yeah nuclear war would be a hassle [for other people] but the real agony [for ourselves] is losing the tax cuts for millionaires.” It’s all about greed and a ‘pull the ladder up, I’m alright’ mentality.
Holms, the joke could be on them. It is just possible that nuclear war could end up being quite a hassle even for them. After all, we are not the only country with nukes.
Really, it’s an extension of “I’m sorry for the language” type of not-pologies we’ve seen from people like Rush Limbaugh. Rush would call women ‘whores’ for wanting access to birth control pills and then apologize for the words (but not the sentiment) and that would make all the tsk-tsks from that side of the aisle stop, and they’d pretend there was nothing to be concerned about because an apology settles the matter. The difference between Trump and the rest is that he doesn’t ever apologize for the words, either, and that makes it harder to spin.