Shut it down, said Trump
Michael Lewis gives a glimpse of how Trump managed the transition from random real estate profiteer to idiot president.
[Chris] Christie volunteered himself for the job: head of the Donald Trump presidential transition team. “It’s the next best thing to being president,” he told friends. “You get to plan the presidency.” He went to see Trump about it. Trump said he didn’t want a presidential transition team. Why did anyone need to plan anything before he actually became president? It’s legally required, said Christie. Trump asked where the money was going to come from to pay for the transition team. Christie explained that Trump could either pay for it himself or take it out of campaign funds. Trump didn’t want to pay for it himself. He didn’t want to take it out of campaign funds, either, but he agreed, grudgingly, that Christie should go ahead and raise a separate fund to pay for his transition team. “But not too much!” he said.
Not too much! It’s only running the country! Watch the pennies!
So Christie got down to work.
The first time Trump paid attention to any of this was when he read about it in the newspaper. The story revealed that Trump’s very own transition team had raised several million dollars to pay the staff. The moment he saw it, Trump called Steve Bannon, the chief executive of his campaign, from his office on the 26th floor of Trump Tower, and told him to come immediately to his residence, many floors above. Bannon stepped off the elevator to find Christie seated on a sofa, being hollered at. Trump was apoplectic, yelling: You’re stealing my money! You’re stealing my fucking money! What the fuck is this?
Seeing Bannon, Trump turned on him and screamed: Why are you letting him steal my fucking money? Bannon and Christie together set out to explain to Trump federal law. Months before the election, the law said, the nominees of the two major parties were expected to prepare to take control of the government. The government supplied them with office space in downtown DC, along with computers and rubbish bins and so on, but the campaigns paid their people. To which Trump replied: Fuck the law. I don’t give a fuck about the law. I want my fucking money. Bannon and Christie tried to explain that Trump couldn’t have both his money and a transition.
Shut it down, said Trump. Shut down the transition.
And bring him two scoops of ice cream.
Christie pointed out that the media would disapprove, and Trump saw the point, so he let Christie get on with it.
With that, Christie went back to preparing for a Trump administration. He tried to stay out of the news, but that proved difficult. From time to time, Trump would see something in the paper about Christie’s fundraising and become upset all over again. The money that people donated to his campaign Trump considered, effectively, his own. He thought the planning and forethought pointless. At one point he turned to Christie and said: “Chris, you and I are so smart that we can leave the victory party two hours early and do the transition ourselves.”
Actually, Trump is so stupid that he thinks he’s smart.
Jeez, that entire midfle section is straight out of Casino or Goodfellas, with the sole exception that Bannon and Christie aren’t currently filling a couple of holes in the desert – or propping up a hotel somewhere.
Yeah. At no time was that money “his money”. That is one of the things many candidates have fallen on, misuse of campaign funds. These funds were not donated to buy him Big Macs or gold plate his children or buy him a new yacht. They were donated for the sole purpose of seeing Trump become president (which is horrifying in and of itself).
Now Trump probably regards the presidential discretionary budget as his “own money”, and probably also regards the entire federal treasury as “his money”. He thinks he is a king, he thinks the king gets the money, and he thinks he gets to decide who does what with the money. And he has those pesky Congressional Democrats and a handful of judges with integrity standing in his way. So he’s trying to get rid of them.
C’mon, give the guy a break. He’s refused to draw the president’s salary to save the country a few dollars, you can’t expect him to work harder and achieve more than any president – Hell, any ten presidents in history for nothing.
Just point to the door, I’ll let myself out.
AoS – I believe he has achieved more golf than any president – maybe any 10 presidents – in history. And that includes Gerald Ford.
True, and he got the U.N.G.A. laughing in unison, which has never happened before in that context.
Legacy secure, then.