A Song of Dementia and McDonalds: The Trump Book

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Chiwie: Oct 21, 2010; DROP YOUR COAT AND GRAB YOUR TOES, I'LL SHOW YOU WHERE THE WILD GOOSE GOES!!!!

Preordered, the audio book is going to make an interstate move a breeze.

# ? Jan 5, 2018 08:00

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ? Apr 29, 2024 19:10

Comrade Blyatlov: Aug 4, 2007; should have picked four fingers

M_Gargantua posted:

I feel like I should just screenshot this rather than give them the view impressions.

https://twitter.com/samanthamaiden/status/949116620684771328

But no, enjoy raw

It's actually kinda believable

# ? Jan 5, 2018 08:08

M_Gargantua: Oct 16, 2006; STOMP'N ON INTO THE POWERLINES; Exciting Lemon

Yeah, I cant tell if thats a sky news Australia reporter trying to be humorous, or an actual passage.

"Things people can say about Trump and be considered credible"

# ? Jan 5, 2018 08:11

Eugene V. Dubstep: Oct 4, 2013; Can't post for 8 years!

M_Gargantua posted:

Yeah, I cant tell if thats a sky news Australia reporter trying to be humorous, or an actual passage.

"Things people can say about Trump and be considered credible"

no, some guy on twitter made it up

https://twitter.com/pixelatedboat/status/949100087350710272

https://twitter.com/pixelatedboat/status/949118287480111104

# ? Jan 5, 2018 08:23

M_Gargantua: Oct 16, 2006; STOMP'N ON INTO THE POWERLINES; Exciting Lemon

Nothing goes over my head, my reflexes are too fast

of course I follow dril, Kt Nelson,pixelated boat, and other weird Twitter

# ? Jan 5, 2018 08:26

mlmp08: Jul 11, 2004; Prepare for my priapic projectile's exalted penetration; Nap Ghost

at the date posted:

no, some guy on twitter made it

And the last horse crosses the line.

# ? Jan 5, 2018 13:13

facialimpediment: Feb 11, 2005; as the world turns

Click through for the highlights of Wolff's interview on Today.

https://twitter.com/DavidWright_CNN/status/949254789938012160

# ? Jan 5, 2018 13:35

Godholio: Aug 28, 2002; Does a bear split in the woods near Zheleznogorsk?

That's a loving statement. The content isn't all that surprising, but that's a brazen quote.

# ? Jan 5, 2018 16:28

Acebuckeye13: Nov 2, 2010; If you or someone you know has a gambling problem, crisis counseling and referral services can be accessed by calling
1-800-GAMBLER; Ultra Carp

https://twitter.com/axios/status/949269660918337536

# ? Jan 5, 2018 16:32

pantslesswithwolves: Oct 28, 2008; Ba-dam ba-DUMMMMMM

My preorder just went live on my iPad. It�s cold AF today and I�m just planning on lounging at home, so I�ll try to post some spicy excerpts as I find em.

# ? Jan 5, 2018 16:35

Comrade Blyatlov: Aug 4, 2007; should have picked four fingers

Mine unlocked at midnight. Time to spend a day in bed reading!

# ? Jan 5, 2018 17:53

Ceiling fan: Dec 26, 2003; I really like ceilings.; Dead Man’s Band

Damnit, why did I order a big block of paper I have to wait for two days to get here?

# ? Jan 5, 2018 18:13

EBB: Feb 15, 2005

Ceiling fan posted:

Damnit, why did I order a big block of paper I have to wait for two days to get here?

Heh, look at this old with his paper books. Spoiler alert: the piss tape is real

# ? Jan 5, 2018 18:24

pantslesswithwolves: Oct 28, 2008; Ba-dam ba-DUMMMMMM

Donald Trump: lovely dad, lovely husband:

quote:

�Donald Trump�s marriage was perplexing to almost everybody around him�or it was, anyway, for those without private jets and many homes. He and Melania spent relatively little time together. They could go days at a time without contact, even when they were both in Trump Tower. Often she did not know where he was, or take much notice of that fact. Her husband moved between residences as he would move between rooms. Along with knowing little about his whereabouts, she knew little about his business, and took at best modest interest in it. An absentee father for his first four children, Trump was even more absent for his fifth, Barron, his son with Melania. Now on his third marriage, he told friends he thought he had finally perfected the art: live and let live��Do your own thing.

# ? Jan 5, 2018 21:04

bloops: Dec 31, 2010; Thanks Ape Pussy!

Don Jr and Eric being nicknamed Uday and Qusay is hilarious. God I hope that�s true.

# ? Jan 5, 2018 21:22

pantslesswithwolves: Oct 28, 2008; Ba-dam ba-DUMMMMMM

If you've ever been to the wretched hive of scum and villainy that is Atlantic City, you'll love this one:

quote:

�Trump�s understanding of his own essential nature was even more precise. Once, coming back on his plane with a billionaire friend who had brought along a foreign model, Trump, trying to move in on his friend�s date, urged a stop in Atlantic City. He would provide a tour of his casino. His friend assured the model that there was nothing to recommend Atlantic City. It was a place overrun by white trash.
�What is this �white trash�?� asked the model.
�They�re people just like me,� said Trump, �only they�re poor.�

Edit: holy gently caress

quote:

�Trump liked to say that one of the things that made life worth living was getting your friends� wives into bed. In pursuing a friend�s wife, he would try to persuade the wife that her husband was perhaps not what she thought. Then he�d have his secretary ask the friend into his office; once the friend arrived, Trump would engage in what was, for him, more or less constant sexual banter. Do you still like having sex with your wife? How often? You must have had a better gently caress than your wife? Tell me about it. I have girls coming in from Los Angeles at three o�clock. We can go upstairs and have a great time. I promise�� And all the while, Trump would have his friend�s wife on the speakerphone, listening in.�

pantslesswithwolves fucked around with this message at 21:27 on Jan 5, 2018

# ? Jan 5, 2018 21:22

Casimir Radon: Aug 2, 2008

I don't know that he's that insightful.

cowboy elvis posted:

Don Jr and Eric being nicknamed Uday and Qusay is hilarious. God I hope that’s true.

I've been calling them that for a couple years now.

# ? Jan 5, 2018 21:27

BadOptics: Sep 11, 2012

I HAVE GOOD AIDS posted:

If you've ever been to the wretched hive of scum and villainy that is Atlantic City, you'll love this one:

Edit: holy gently caress

I've heard people say he's a poor person's idea of a rich man, but lol if he's actually self aware enough to realize it.

Lots of good stuff in this book and I'm only 15% of the way through according to my Kindle.

# ? Jan 5, 2018 22:11

M_Gargantua: Oct 16, 2006; STOMP'N ON INTO THE POWERLINES; Exciting Lemon

https://twitter.com/anamariecox/status/949428752664186880

# ? Jan 6, 2018 01:43

bloops: Dec 31, 2010; Thanks Ape Pussy!

Haha just read that passage. To think those CIA employees had their Saturday ruined by listening to that guy.

# ? Jan 6, 2018 02:02

FrozenVent: May 1, 2009; The Boeing 737-200QC is the undisputed workhorse of the skies.

Book coulda used another round of editing, at last in the Kindle version there�s repeated prepositions all over the place.

# ? Jan 6, 2018 05:57

Nostalgia4Butts: Jun 1, 2006; WHERE MY HOSE DRINKERS AT

FrozenVent posted:

Book coulda used another round of editing, at last in the Kindle version there�s repeated prepositions all over the place.

first us edition of lord of the rings spelled it dwarves, when tolkein specifically refers to them as dwarfs

# ? Jan 6, 2018 06:06

Nostalgia4Butts: Jun 1, 2006; WHERE MY HOSE DRINKERS AT

sorry i got sativa by accident from the dispensary

its really nice but goddamn

# ? Jan 6, 2018 06:23

M_Gargantua: Oct 16, 2006; STOMP'N ON INTO THE POWERLINES; Exciting Lemon

It's actually dwarves.

# ? Jan 6, 2018 06:55

Laranzu: Jan 18, 2002

Had a 30 day audible free trial with a free book on amazon.

Totally picked this one.

# ? Jan 6, 2018 07:37

shame on an IGA: Apr 8, 2005

I'm about halfway through, and God help us all, this book is making me feel empathy for Steve Bannon.

This white house is Dwarf Fortress IRL

# ? Jan 6, 2018 15:48

bloops: Dec 31, 2010; Thanks Ape Pussy!

I'm roughly 35% through. The book has re-framed Steven Bannon from "insightful right-wing strategist" into "career loser who suckers rich people" quite well.

# ? Jan 6, 2018 15:54

Casimir Radon: Aug 2, 2008

Is it depressing? I want to spend spite dollars, but don't want to get depressed.

# ? Jan 6, 2018 15:57

shame on an IGA: Apr 8, 2005

I actually feel kind of hopeful, it paints Trump as so, SO mercurial and easily manipulated that the first year of the administration was consumed by a bitter three way tug-of-war for his attention by Bannon & Co, Priebus/Ryan, and Kushner/Ivanka. If one of those power centers is able to consolidate and basically lock him in a room where nobody else can talk to him this thing might be halfway salvageable.

We think he's been doing a speedrun of Stupid Nixon but maybe it's more a speedrun of Bizzaro LBJ

shame on an IGA fucked around with this message at 16:08 on Jan 6, 2018

# ? Jan 6, 2018 16:05

bloops: Dec 31, 2010; Thanks Ape Pussy!

Casimir Radon posted:

Is it depressing? I want to spend spite dollars, but don't want to get depressed.

Nah. It's a fun, shocking read.

# ? Jan 6, 2018 16:05

shame on an IGA: Apr 8, 2005

OMFG

quote:

His daughter and son-in-law, their urgency compounded by Charlie Kushner’s panic, encouraged him, arguing that the once possibly charmable Comey was now a dangerous and uncontrollable player whose profit would inevitably be their loss. When Trump got wound up about something, Bannon noted, someone was usually winding him up. The family focus of discussion—insistent, almost frenzied—became wholly about Comey’s ambition. He would rise by damaging them. And the drumbeat grew.

“That son of a bitch is going to try to fire the head of the FBI,” said Ailes.

During the first week of May, the president had a ranting meeting with Sessions and his deputy Rod Rosenstein. It was a humiliating meeting for both men, with Trump insisting they couldn’t control their own people and pushing them to find a reason to fire Comey—in effect, he blamed them for not having come up with that reason months ago. (It was their fault, he implied, that Comey hadn’t been fired right off the bat.)

Also that week, there was a meeting that included the president, Jared and Ivanka, Bannon, Priebus, and White House counsel Don McGahn. It was a closed-door meeting—widely noted because it was unusual for the Oval Office door ever to be closed.

All the Democrats hate Comey, said the president, expressing his certain and self-justifying view. All the FBI agents hate him, too—75 percent of them can’t stand him. (This was a number that Kushner had somehow alighted on, and Trump had taken it up.) Firing Comey will be a huge fundraising advantage, declared the president, a man who almost never talked about fundraising.

McGahn tried to explain that in fact Comey himself was not running the Russia investigation, that without Comey the investigation would proceed anyway. McGahn, the lawyer whose job was necessarily to issue cautions, was a frequent target of Trump rages. Typically these would begin as a kind of exaggeration or acting and then devolve into the real thing: uncontrollable, vein-popping, ugly-face, tantrum stuff. It got primal. Now the president’s denunciations focused in a vicious fury on McGahn and his cautions about Comey.

“Comey was a rat,” repeated Trump. There were rats everywhere and you had to get rid of them. John Dean, John Dean, he repeated. “Do you know what John Dean did to Nixon?”

Trump, who saw history through personalities—people he might have liked or disliked—was a John Dean freak. He went bananas when a now gray and much aged Dean appeared on talk shows to compare the Trump-Russia investigation to Watergate. That would bring the president to instant attention and launch an inevitable talk-back monologue to the screen about loyalty and what people would do for media attention. It might also be accompanied by several revisionist theories Trump had about Watergate and how Nixon had been framed. And always there were rats. A rat was someone who would take you down for his own advantage. If you had a rat, you needed to kill it. And there were rats all around.

(Later, it was Bannon who had to take the president aside and tell him that John Dean had been the White House counsel in the Nixon administration, so maybe it would be a good idea to lighten up on McGahn.)

E: shortly after that, the most complete and cogent breakdown of Trump's psyche I've seen anywhere.

quote:

Here was, Bannon saw again, the essential Trump problem. He hopelessly personalized everything. He saw the world in commercial and show business terms: someone else was always trying to one-up you, someone else was always trying to take the limelight. The battle was between you and someone else who wanted what you had. For Bannon, reducing the political world to face-offs and spats belittled the place in history Trump and his administration had achieved. But it also belied the real powers they were up against. Not people—institutions.

To Trump, he was just up against Sally Yates, who was, he steamed, “such a oval office.”

Since her firing on January 30, Yates had remained suspiciously quiet. When journalists approached her, she, or her intermediaries, explained that per her lawyers she was shut down on all media. The president believed she was merely lying in wait. In phone calls to friends, he worried about her “plan” and “strategy,” and he continued to press his after-dinner sources for what they thought she and Ben Rhodes, Trump’s favorite Obama plotter, had “up their sleeves.”

For each of his enemies—and, actually, for each of his friends—the issue for him came down, in many ways, to their personal press plan. The media was the battlefield. Trump assumed everybody wanted his or her fifteen minutes and that everybody had a press strategy for when they got them. If you couldn’t get press directly for yourself, you became a leaker. There was no happenstance news, in Trump’s view. All news was manipulated and designed, planned and planted. All news was to some extent fake—he understood that very well, because he himself had faked it so many times in his career. This was why he had so naturally cottoned to the “fake news” label. “I’ve made stuff up forever, and they always print it,” he bragged.

shame on an IGA fucked around with this message at 19:17 on Jan 6, 2018

# ? Jan 6, 2018 19:07

The Eyes Have It: Feb 10, 2008; Third Eye Sees All
...snookums

Relentlessly personalizing everything is a good phrase. Like whackjobs who can't conceive of something not being the purposeful result of (for example) the government / CIA / whatever planning and executing some kind of plan.

# ? Jan 6, 2018 20:11

shame on an IGA: Apr 8, 2005

Finally getting to The Mooch chapter: he basically just kept showing up every day until somebody gave him a job to get him out of their drat way

E:

quote:

Almost from the beginning, the president had been interviewing potential new press secretaries. He appeared to have offered the job to various people, one of whom was Kimberly Guilfoyle, the Fox News personality and cohost of The Five. Guilfoyle, the former wife of California Democrat Gavin Newsom, was also rumored to be Anthony Scaramucci’s girlfriend.

Unbeknownst to the White House, Scaramucci’s personal life was in dramatic free fall. On July 9, nine months pregnant with their second child, Scaramucci’s wife filed for divorce. Guilfoyle, knowing that Spicer was on his way out but having decided not to take his job—or, according to others in the White House, never having been offered it—suggested Scaramucci, who set to work convincing Jared and Ivanka that theirs was largely a PR problem and that they were ill served by the current communications team.

Scaramucci called a reporter he knew to urge that an upcoming story about Kushner’s Russian contacts be spiked. He followed up by having another mutual contact call the reporter to say that if the story was spiked it would help the Mooch get into the White House, whereupon the reporter would have special Mooch access. The Mooch then assured Jared and Ivanka that he had, in this clever way, killed the story.

Now Scaramucci had their attention. We need some new thinking, the couple thought; we need somebody who is more on our side. The fact that Scaramucci was from New York, and Wall Street, and was rich, reassured them that he understood what the deal was. And that he would understand the stakes and know that an aggressive game needed to be played.

On the other hand, the couple did not want to be perceived as being heavy-handed. So, after bitterly accusing Spicer of not defending them adequately, they suddenly backed off and suggested that they were just looking to add a new voice to the mix. The job of White House communications director, which had no precise purview, had been vacant since May, when Mike Dubke, whose presence at the White House had hardly registered, resigned. Scaramucci could take this job, the couple figured, and in that role he could be their ally. “He’s good on television,” Ivanka told Spicer when she explained the rationale for hiring a former hedge fund manager as White House communications director. “Maybe he can help us.”

It was the president who, meeting with Scaramucci, was won over by the Mooch’s cringeworthy Wall Street hortatory flattery. (“I can only hope to realize a small part of your genius as a communicator, but you are my example and model” was one report of the gist of the Scaramucci supplication.) And it was Trump who then urged that Scaramucci become the true communications chief, reporting directly to the president.

On July 19, Jared and Ivanka, through intermediaries, put a feeler out to Bannon: What would he think about Scaramucci’s coming on board in the comms job? So preposterous did this seem to Bannon—it was a cry of haplessness, and certain evidence that the couple had become truly desperate—that he refused to consider or even reply to the question. Now he was sure: Jarvanka was losing it.

...

And then another call came, this one from Sam Nunberg. He, too, was calling about Scaramucci, and his words caused something like stupefaction in Bannon: “No loving, loving way.”

Bannon got off the phone and said, “Jesus. Scaramucci. I can’t even respond to this. It’s Kafkaesque. Jared and Ivanka needed somebody to represent their poo poo. It’s madness. He’ll be on that podium for two days and he’ll be so chopped he’ll bleed out everywhere. He’ll literally blow up in a week. This is why I don’t take this stuff seriously. Hiring Scaramucci? He’s not qualified to do anything. He runs a fund of funds. Do you know what a fund of funds is? It’s not a fund. Dude, it’s sick. We look like buffoons.”

The ten days of Anthony Scaramucci, saw, on the first day, July 21, the resignation of Sean Spicer. Oddly, this seemed to catch everyone unawares. In a meeting with Scaramucci, Spicer, and Priebus, the president—who in his announcement of Scaramucci’s hire as communications director had promoted Scaramucci not only over Spicer, but in effect over Priebus, his chief of staff—suggested that the men ought to be able to work it out together.

Spicer went back to his office, printed out his letter of resignation, and then took it back to the nonplussed president, who said again that he really wanted Spicer to be a part of things. But Spicer, surely the most mocked man in America, understood that he had been handed a gift. His White House days were over.

For Scaramucci, it was now payback time. Scaramucci blamed his six humiliating months out in the cold on nobody so much as Reince Priebus—having announced his White House future, having sold his business in anticipation of it, he had come away with nothing, or at least nothing of any value. But now, in a reversal befitting a true master of the universe—befitting, actually, Trump himself—Scaramucci was in the White House, bigger, better, and grander than even he had had the gall to imagine. And Priebus was dead meat.

That was the signal the president had sent Scaramucci—deal with the mess. In Trump’s view, the problems in his tenure so far were just problems about the team. If the team went, the problems went. So Scaramucci had his marching orders. The fact that the president had been saying the same stuff about his rotten team from the first day, that this riff had been a constant from the campaign on, that he would often say he wanted everybody to go and then turn around and say he didn’t want everybody to go—all that rather went over Scaramucci’s head.

Scaramucci began taunting Priebus publicly, and inside the West Wing he adopted a tough-guy attitude about Bannon—“I won’t take his bullshit.” Trump seemed delighted with this behavior, which led Scaramucci to feel that the president was urging him on. Jared and Ivanka were pleased, too; they believed they had scored with Scaramucci and were confident that he would defend them against Bannon and the rest.

Bannon and Priebus remained not just disbelieving but barely able not to crack up. For both men, Scaramucci was either a hallucinatory episode—they wondered whether they ought to just shut their eyes while it passed—or some further march into madness.

shame on an IGA fucked around with this message at 20:38 on Jan 6, 2018

# ? Jan 6, 2018 20:26

mlmp08: Jul 11, 2004; Prepare for my priapic projectile's exalted penetration; Nap Ghost

shame on an IGA posted:

Finally getting to The Mooch chapter: he basically just kept showing up every day until somebody gave him a job to get him out of their drat way

Has a lot in common with the author, then.

# ? Jan 6, 2018 20:35

shame on an IGA: Apr 8, 2005

lol

quote:

On the way back from the trip, Priebus and the president talked on the plane and discussed the timing of his departure, with the president urging him to do it the right way and to take his time. “You tell me what works for you,” said Trump. “Let’s make it good.”

Minutes later, Priebus stepped onto the tarmac and an alert on his phone said the president had just tweeted that there was a new chief of staff, Department of Homeland Security chief John Kelly, and that Priebus was out.

In fact, Kelly—who would soon abjectly apologize to Priebus for the basic lack of courtesy in the way his dismissal was handled—had not been consulted about his appointment. The president’s tweet was the first he knew of it.

# ? Jan 6, 2018 23:40

bird food bathtub: Aug 9, 2003; College Slice

shame on an IGA posted:

lol

The poor, pathetic excuse for a human being is just pathologically incapable of firing people in person. I really don't get this one. It was his god drat tag line for years on 'The Apprentice', yet he can't do it. He lived his life trying to portray himself as a hard-rear end, bigly successful businessman, yet he can just not bring himself to fire people.

# ? Jan 7, 2018 06:56