Note this excerpted book is understood to be written with Bannon as the primary source. I didn't know anything about Wolff either, but if he's someone who can get Bannon's trust...
Sarah Kendzior comments:
[Wolff] has a long history of fabricating quotes and exaggerating events to make his stories more fun to read. I've been reading him since he was NY Mag's media critic. He's an entertaining writer, occasionally insightful, but not who I'd trust on something this complicated.
--and links this on his reputation and former books.
And: always a good sign when a press release clearly personally dictated by Trump comes out.
With Wolff and Bannon as the authors, it's surprising they don't go on to reveal that everyone involved was actually a Lizard Alien.
Such a reluctant, benevolent leader, brought to the head of government not through his own strivings, because he's bigger than that, above all that, but through public acclamation. Is not his glorious victory, made possible by the prescience of the Founders whose perfect union was designed to check the unbridled, immoral desires of those unfit to govern, who so often fall prey to the wiles and wickedness of slick demigods like the Clintons, by giving greater weight to the will of the states, a sign of some higher power at work?
Somebody pointed out years ago that you could always tell who Woodward's main source was by how well that came across. By that same rule, this book's source sure sounds like it's Bannon. Katie Walsh looks to be another major source.
Its too bad Trump can read, because this would piss him off nicely.
I bet Trump can read things that are about him.
WaPo reaction to the story.
[M]any [of the claims] are of the kind that has been whispered about but never reported on with any authority or certainty. Wolff has taken some of the most gossiped-about aspects of the Trump White House and put them forward as fact -- often plainly stated fact without even anonymous sources cited.
...
In some ways, this is the tell-all that Trump's post-truth presidency deserves. Trump's own version of the truth is often subject to his own fantastic impulses and changes at a moment's notice. The leaks from his administration have followed that pattern, often painting credulity-straining images of an American president. As the New York Times's Maggie Haberman notes, that makes claims in Wolff's book that would ordinarily seem implausible suddenly plausible.
...
For whatever reason, Wolff seems to have arrived at a stunning amount of incredible conclusions that hundreds of dogged reporters from major newspapers haven't. Whether that's because he had unprecedented access -- Wolff says he had "something like a semi-permanent seat on a couch in the West Wing" -- or because his filter was just more relaxed than others, it's worth evaluating each claim individually and not just taking every salacious thing said about the White House as gospel.
I would say this is about as credible as the Pee Tape Dossier. Which is to say it can't be confirmed, but everybody knows its basically true.
Remember Donna Brazile's book? This is like that only cheesier.
Who wants pizza for dinner? I don't feel like cooking.
I propose a new measure be created to assess the reliability of Trump-related information, to be known as the pee-value.
Michael Wolff is the kind of guy (i.e., is the guy) who brags, in print, about being able to get Barry Diller on the phone.
The value of pee is an irrational number.
The challenge is getting Barry Diller off the phone.
"One is the opposite of 'e who is raised to the power of 'I pee!'" bragged Tom third-person self-referring voiceless glottal fricatively.
I feel the need to point out 21 was not me.
OT exemption due to politics thread.
The Moores' Jew lawyer voted like one.
But the Birmingham-based attorney in question told the Washington Examiner on Tuesday that he was actually one of the reasons Moore was ultimately defeated by Democrat Doug Jones. "There could not be a more passionate supporter of Doug than me!" said Richard Jaffe, who was hired by the Moores in 2016 to defend their son against drug charges.
My thanks to the 'tariat for sparing me the reading of that incredibly long article.
I pee, you pee, we all pee for IP!
For whatever reason, Wolff seems to have arrived at a stunning amount of incredible conclusions that hundreds of dogged reporters from major newspapers haven't. Whether that's because he had unprecedented access -- Wolff says he had "something like a semi-permanent seat on a couch in the West Wing" -- or because his filter was just more relaxed than others, it's worth evaluating each claim individually and not just taking every salacious thing said about the White House as gospel.
Or because when somebody writes that melodramatically you can't believe a word they say. I know which camp I'm in.
The perfect Trump White House memoir title would be "What I Saw At the Revulsion"
"Some things don't come out of your butt without a trip to the emergency room" by Jeff Sessions.
You know, the DC press corps could wait to see whether people deny specific quotes before jumping in saying that surely some of the quotes must be fabricated.
The guy doesn't have any credibility, sure. That's no reason at all to be going around saying that the emperor has a nice suit.
I think the emperor likes showing people his penis.
My thanks to the 'tariat for sparing me the reading of that incredibly long article.
Oh, but its so juicy. Did you know Jared thinks he is a Jewnitarian?
I'm just going to wait for the final War Crimes Tribunal report.
Or would, if it weren't for the "short-fingered" part of "short-fingered vulgarian."
And I'll probably be dead by then. Time management!
I don't doubt that the President did grab some women from time to time, but I cannot believe that he tried the 'make the wife go into a jealous rage and then move on her' more than once, or that it ever worked. This, then, is the real 'locker room talk.'
Remember when people called Bill Clinton the first Black president? What if Trump is the first woman president?
Earlier (yesterday? this morning? it feels so long ago, before this article), I figured by talking about the stupidity of Kushner and the failsons around the Russian meeting, Bannon was making a Hail Mary to help push out all the people Trump trusts the slightest bit and give him a glorious restoration. I don't know what this constituted, maybe too much coke, but apparently Rebekah Mercer has cut him off from funds, so my guess is he sinks beneath the waves.
One of the guys running against Sen Tester went out of his way to identify with Bannon. I wonder how that plays out in the primary.
40: It seems to be a widespread issue, anyway. Not clear how it'll play out.
Aren't most Republicans who still ID as Republicans likely to not really care about minor details like supporting Bannon, or hanging around malls looking for high schoolers while in their thirties? I guess maybe Strange could have won the primary if the Moore news broke back then?
This might be different. I think those who voted for Moore told themselves the accusations against him were a liberal trick. No liberals to blame in Bannon-Trump.
He just put more material in the Hollywood Reporter. Assuming it's not actually made up, it provides significantly more evidence of actual early dementia, like not recognizing multiple friends at Mar-a-Lago over the holidays.
There have been quite a few instances, on camera, of him not recognising people he clearly knows. With him it's hard to tell if that's dementia/alzheimers or just narcissism, though.
46: That's right. If Trump were to go senile, how would we know?
Assuming it's not actually made up
But a lot of it is obviously made up: huge stretches of actual dialogue in quotes. Why should we think the rest isn't?
The part that I picture as breaking Trump's cold cold heart is when Ivanka makes fun of his hair.
Why should we think the rest isn't?
Most of the people mentioned are behaving as if it's not made up. Katie Walsh is the only on-the-record denial thus far, supposedly.
50: She's probably denying it, because it's so clear she was a source.
44: I think McConnell is right to be pleased by the whole rift, but as with anything Trumpy, there's no reason to suppose it will last. This isn't a Trump pivot toward sanity; it's just a reaction to being insulted.
Republican lunacy exists independently of Trump anyway. Moore got the nomination despite Trump's opposition. Bannon (like Moore) can still credibly claim to represent the real Trump.
53: It does. So much is sourced to her that her providing information to Wolff couldn't have been the result of mere indiscretion. She had to have understood what she was doing, and so is forced to deny having done it at all.
Bannon (like Moore) can still credibly claim to represent the real Trump.
Yes, until science invents feces that can talk.
Do I need to figure out who Katie Walsh is? The name doesn't trigger anything in my brain.
Probably not the one from Gray's Anatomy?
32-year-old Katie Walsh, the newly appointed deputy chief of staff
Walsh, who came to the White House from the RNC, represented a certain Republican ideal: clean, brisk, orderly, efficient. A righteous bureaucrat with a permanently grim expression, she was a fine example of the many political professionals in whom competence and organizational skills transcend ideology
Just because I love you, Moby.
Katie Walsh gets a +3 to all rolls for saves from improperly filed paperwork.
Interesting alternative (complementary?) hypothesis from JMM:
The most damaging and also questionable anecdote in the New York excerpt of Wolff's book is when, according to Wolff, Trump, in response to Roger Ailes' post-election recommendation of John Boehner as chief of staff, says, "Who's that?" The suggestion is that Trump didn't even know who Boehner was.
In the Washington Post, Paul Fahri points to prior tweets that Trump had made about Boehner, which certainly doubt on Wolff's anecdote. Here without any reporting is my speculative interpretation of what actually happened: Ailes did recommend Boehner, and then Trump, who, it turns out, is hard of hearing - he has complained several times about not hearing or mishearing reporters' questions - asked "Who?" not "Who's that?" As someone who is hard of hearing, I am often asking "Who?" to people. But I broke down and got hearing aids. I strongly suspect Trump is too vain to admit he needs them.
Deaf, blind, senile, stupid, and evil.
Hopefully his fingers can't quite reach The Button.
The Button is a rounded, about the size and shape of an overturned teacup without a handle. Reagan wanted to be able to launch a nuclear war even if he had to just fall on it.
Am I right in assuming that Trump's threat to sue to halt the publication of the book will be laughed out of court if actually filed? I don't know about his threat to sue Bannon because I figure Bannon signed some kind of non-disclosure agreement.
I don't believe they're suing to stop publication in the sense of obtaining an injunction. They're threatening to sue to (ostensibly) get them to back down from publishing in the first place. The litigation would be seeking damages and a retraction.
I see. The injunction is just for Bannon maybe. I saw the word "injunction" somewhere.
I haven't seen the Bannon letter, but I don't see any mention of an injunction in the Wolff one. Conceivably they could seek an injunction against further inducements to breach?
Because there are too many C-sections.
Even Trump's loyal, longtime body guard Keith Schiller -- for reasons darkly whispered about in the West Wing -- was out.
Hmmmmm.
He wasn't shilling hard enough?
I said repeatedly and confidently before the election that I did not believe Trump wanted to win, mostly in an effort to comfort my increasingly worried non-USian friends who could not appreciate from long media exposure what a lazy grifter Trump has always been.
So, I'd love to be enjoying a told-you-so moment with this news except that I guess we're not supposed to take Michael Wolff seriously and more to the point, that such an obvious moron who did *not even want the job* could end up president is the opposite of comforting.
Ugh, I just can't envision 3 more years of this motherfucker.
Trump is now suing to prevent release of the book. If that doesn't work maybe next he can have his supporters burn them at his rallies.
If he does actually sue Wolff for damages it could conceivably result in Trump being called as witness and inevitably getting himself held in contempt, right? I mean, I doubt that would bring him down, but it might stop him from blowing up the world for a bit.
Trump always threatens to sue but he never actually does. He's afraid of discovery.
Well past any fear of self-discovery, though.
Perhaps an NDA could cover activities during the campaign, but once all people are involve are employees of the Federal Government, how could that possibly be enforceable?
After they're in office, it's legal to betray America to the Russians.
When you're a star they just let you do it.
72: Yeah. That is the one that struck my eye. If there were a real dead body, Schiller would be the one to know, IIRC he did testify before some committee and said that the Russians had offered some form of sexual favor to Trump but they savvily turned it down.
I guess I was wrong to think large stretches of dialogue were necessarily fake. Now I'm astounded that Ailes and Bannon would have that conversation in front of a reporter.
It turns out that the "functional" in "functional alcoholic" is graded on a curve.
What does 85 actually mean? Americans keep using that phrase and I am never quite sure.
Probably varies from person to person, but I'd say that it means an alcoholic who is still able to hold down a job, especially a high status job.
I understand it to mean an alcoholic that can still show up and keep a job despite ongoing drinking. And maybe the spouse hasn't left.
86: When you use a bell curve distribution to assign scores on a test to keep everybody from getting a D-.
Enough people on Twitter are saying things like "if even one-half of what Wolff says is true..." which minds me to the gospel of dsquared:
...the futility of attempts to "shade" downward a fundamentally dishonest set of predictions. If you have doubts about the integrity of a forecaster, you can't use their forecasts at all. Not even as a "starting point"
90: But we're already learning that some of it definitely is true, including bits that people dismissed as obviously made up (e.g. the woman on Twitter saying, "I was one of 6 people at the dinner party in question, and Wolff's quotes are completely correct"). And We're not trying to decide whether Wolff's policy proposals are correct, or whatever. The point is that, if any substantial portion of what he relates is correct, then basically Trump is just as stupid and senile as we thought.
Which isn't really news, of course. But it kind of is, in two ways: 1. the rapidly cycling, repetitive stories are, in fact, news to me, and especially illustrative; 2. it really, really eliminates the arguments that people still make that Trump is, on any level, a mastermind. Just this week, Lakoff is sending around some sort of chart about the "purpose" of Trump's tweets, as if they're some sort of clever tactic and not the rantings of a senile bastard. People want to believe that, and it's counterproductive (you could even call it a distraction).
What are the parts people think aren't true?
The dialogue? I don't really care if the dialogue is word for word what was said if the substantive allegations are basically in line with everything else we already know about the administration.
I read it as something akin to a "True Crime" novel. Yes, a bit dramatized - and I wouldn't admit it as evidence in a court of law - but that's not the same thing as being completely fake.
90 - the Wolff book isn't a prediction, though. It's a purportedly historical account. I don't doubt that it's largely bullshit but so is most journalism, at least IME in any situation where I've known enough to know more than the journalist (usually through sins of omission or missing context, not just made-up quotes, but still). Seems to me that the discounting 100% rule here probably isn't wise, though I also wouldn't rely on the account in any strong sense.
94: what do you think of the tapes referenced in 71?
If there are tapes then the quotes probably aren't made up. But there still could be the usual journalistic sins of omission and failure to describe context. Use, but discount and use cautiously, is what I'd say.
In this context, though, these cavils aren't very significant because the bottom line -- the Trump white house is a chaotic shit-show, Trump himself is both evil and an idiotic, selfish child who may be suffering dementia -- isn't exactly hidden knowledge.
I'm behind the curve on vindications.
89 s/b "The British term is 'queen mother'".
The John Dean thing is too good to be true.
86 was unclear; 89 explains it. Thanks. So "graded on a curve" just means "even if you're crap, as long as you're better than 90% of the others we will still give you an A".
Halford, don't think that *journalists* aren't aware of the sins of omission and decontextualisation. But there is a sense in which they are fundamental to the project. As soon as you look at any event from a third person perspective you are omitting some things and decontextualising, at least from the PoV of the participants. And this is as much true of police reports as of newspaper ones. Only the novelist can tell the truth, not because of any bullshit about fiction being "truer" than fact, but because only they have access to all the relevant information about their characters' motives. At least in the ideal case they do.
And I second ajay's thanks for the explanation of "grading on a curve"
101 - yes, that makes sense. And my description of journalism as "bullshit" was itself bullshit comment shorthand and way too strong. Journalisn is legitimately a hard and important job and priblems of perspective, context, etc are unavoidable. And there are good reasons for conventions that leave out gossipy narrative Wolff like stuff from ordinary responsible journalism. I just meant that one should discount with some skepticism the belief that any journalistic account is giving you the whole truth, more so in the case of Wolff than others, but it's all just (necessarily) blind prostitutes feeling up different parts of the elephant, or however that fable goes.
Under Halfordismo, even the parables will be sexier.
But they will illegal in the UK.
Under Halfordismo, people will be so badass "illegal" will be a verb. We illegaled his vegan ass right out the door.
Obviously the Brits were looking for the definition of "grading on a curve", of course they know the meaning of "functional alcoholic".
of course they know the meaning of "functional alcoholic".
"Person".
The Russians really have taken over London, no?
Are there still functional Brits?
ttaM, the Queen, my mate Colin, Ridley Scott. I think that's it.
Eh, I agree he's not directing great cinema any more these days, but then neither are the Queen or my mate Colin, or (AFAIK) ttaM.
The queen's processing speed is restricted to ensure continued functioning despite an aging battery.
It doesn't matter if Wolff book is gospel or would have been rejected by National Inquirer due to unreliability. Republicans will support Trump absolutely no matter what and control Congress until 2018. In 2018, they might lose the House, and maybe the Senate if Democrats work hard, but they'll still have enough people to filibuster. Also, a sizable fraction of the population have convinced themselves that this is how a president is expected to behave, or at least, that it's adequate presidenting. We're doomed.
In this context, the Wolff book and the reactions to it are entertaining and that's about it.
re: 114
I can't even direct a 1 minute youtube film of me playing guitar badly.
Way to humble-brag about your guitar skills.
One cold afternoon in March I went outside for cigarettes with Bannon and Miller. Rumour had come around that the President was looking to fire FBI Director Comey. Neither of the Steves really gave a shit about what happened to Comey - they knew it was a dumb move, but that was Priebus' fire to fight. They looked upon the affair with a distanced bemusement.
Steve Miller took a drag. "The thing is," he said, "the old man is stupid enough to do it."
My friend Bannon laughed. "Sure, he's all wound up that Comey won't take his loyalty oath. The guy isn't even pretending to bend the knee. He hands us the election, now he thinks he's too good for this shit. He thinks he's a Boy Scout."
There was a hacking cough from behind a nearby column. It was Kellyanne. She took a last puff and flicked her butt into the lawn. "Loyalty," she muttered, "that pig fucker wants loyalty."
I think Chait is right here: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/01/republicans-turn-on-bannon-for-telling-the-truth-about-trump.html
At least until the filing deadline for primaries, the strongest incentives for House Republicans point to standing with Trump, to avoid Mercer funded nutball primary opponents.
The don't really have any further legislative agenda, so it's all going to be Trump-protection theater through June or so.
Meanwhile, the plutocrats can get what they want from the administrative state.
I don't doubt that some true believer House committee chairs will do stuff like propose entitlement cuts, but no one will treat this is going anywhere. At least not in the short run.
Somebody please explicitly tell me 119 isn't an excerpt.
I still don't understand why no one has (apparently) even tried to explain to Trump that the best way to cement his legacy is to fill up the subcabinet positions and have a bunch of rulemakings. They don't want to explain that executive orders don't actually work, maybe? It's not like he has to do anything with a rulemaking, just preside over the celebrations.
They could put it in terms he understands: you have to have cooks and waiters to get the meal he orders off the menu he writes to his table.
If you believe everything you read, Trump only orders meals already made before he orders them (e.g. McDonald's) in order to avoid poisoning. He might not understand that.
re: 117
Heh.
That wasn't how it was meant. I can play badly, I just can't film it.
They could put it in terms he understands: you have to have cooks and waiters to get the meal he orders off the menu he writes to his table.
KFC doesn't have waiters.
112. !!!! PJ Harvey and JK Rowling, does Zadie Smith still count? Hanif Kureishi, a handful of scientists in two towns outside London.
Brexit is apparently a complete disaster for UK science, lots of which is funded via the EU.
The US and UK are making a gift of the future to China.
Lindsay Graham suddenly remembers: "Hey, wait, I'm a completely amoral asshole!" What was he ever thinking when he denounced Trump?
Not all amoral assholes are consistent about it.
They get the occasional attack of "Destroy the earth? But that's where I keep all my stuff!"
"I don't know," Bannon shrugged. "I've always thought of him as more of a goat fucker, myself."
Taking this joke as an invitation to stick around, Kellyanne took another Virginia Slim from her cigarette case. The case was gold, with a Trump/Pence 2016 logo on it. It was a memento of the time when she had once held sign-off power over the campaign's swag budget.
Bannon fished out a flask from inside one of his shirts. It too had the Trump/Pence campaign logo on it. He took a drink and offered it to Kellyanne. "You look like shit, Kellyanne," he said.
Kellyanne took the flask and tipped it back for a long pull. She considered it for a second as some life returned to her face. Returning the flask to Bannon, she asked, "Peppermint schnapps?"
"Yup," said Bannon. "The President likes the smell. He thinks I'm using breath mints."
I'm glad I don't have to spend money to read the whole book.
Bannon offered the flask to Steve Miller. Miller declined. "I've got to talk to the press corps in less than an hour," he said.
Kellyanne shot Miller a withering look, with something close to hatred in her eyes. Miller took it in stride. "Yeah, you think you're mad at me," he said flatly. "You should have seen Spicey's reaction."
Just then, a familiar electronic chime was heard, and all three of them rolled their eyes.
"What's he tweeting about at this time of day?" Kellyanne asked, taking out her iPhone. Her eyes bugged slightly as she read the tweet. Then, with a saccharine smile, she showed the screen to Miller. "Oh, this will make your press briefing fun," she said to him.
Steve Miller slowly exhaled as he regarded the tweet. "On second thought," he said to Bannon, "I think I would like some of that schnapps."
119 & 131 are great. Reminded me of the ending of the Kung Fu Monkey's great L33T Justice post:
I cannot help but think that as Nixon walked to the chopper, somewhere in the darkened hallways of the White House Dick Cheney shook his head, spit, and whispered: "Pussy."
It's been 2 days now and the "very stable genius" tweet has gone unremarked upon here. This is how normalization happens people.
I don't cook* so my eyes must have glazed over at the talk of chili recipes.
*I used to and I'd like to again but not in the kitchen of my current apartment, one reason why I intend to move in the spring.
Personally, I greatly enjoy pointing out that president is a complete piece of shit without needing evidence beyond his own words. But I don't thing that will be sufficient to win 2018 because plenty of people are comfortable with a complete piece of shit as long as he's a piece of shit more to non-white people.
Of all the shitty little things that wikileaks could do, putting out a pdf of the book strikes me as a particularly nasty one.
Because they eat from the pay of the czar, nobody who makes money without the czar has really earned it.
141: They've really dropped the mask, no?
Of all the shitty little things that wikileaks could do, putting out a pdf of the book strikes me as a particularly nasty one.
oops. sorry; this is what happens when you put the laptop away on the train and then open it an hour and a half later
Given enough laptops on trains, you could recreate the entire works of Shakespeare.
Did they do that, or is it just a hypothetical?
Nobody has done the trains thing, but I'm sure somebody has tried with monkeys.
Wikileaks dropped the mask during the election. The organization withheld information in order to maximize its political impact -- the opposite of what is done by a group that is interested in "radical transparency" and not partisan politics.
It was the media that dropped the mask when it gobbled this shit up as though it was substantive information produced by a nonpartisan organization.
I hadn't realized until Moby's comment made me curious just how unlikely the monkeys-typing-Shakespeare thing is.
Even if every proton in the observable universe were a monkey with a typewriter, typing from the Big Bang until the end of the universe (when protons might no longer exist), they would still need a still far greater amount of time - more than three hundred and sixty thousand orders of magnitude longer - to have even a 1 in 10^500 chance of success. To put it another way, for a one in a trillion chance of success, there would need to be 10^360,641 universes made of atomic monkeys.
147: Yes, linked to a PDF of the book within the last 24 hours. Basically a raft full of Ellsbergs up there.
150: Wow.
An episode of 2 1/2 Men, OTOH...
Also monkeys know what's up
In 2003, lecturers and students from the University of Plymouth MediaLab Arts course used a £2,000 grant from the Arts Council to study the literary output of real monkeys. They left a computer keyboard in the enclosure of six Celebes crested macaques in Paignton Zoo in Devon in England for a month, with a radio link to broadcast the results on a website. Not only did the monkeys produce nothing but five total pages[11] largely consisting of the letter S, the lead male began by bashing the keyboard with a stone, and the monkeys continued by urinating and defecating on it.
A nice summary of the irredeemability of Bitcoin both conceptually and technically, dragging libertarians.
It's because Bitcoin is largely traded by macaques urinating and defecating on computer keyboards.
150: "There are more keyboards in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
I had a nice visit over the weekend with my brother, who works in the charitable giving division of a big finance outfit. You can donate your bitcoin, and take a nifty tax deduction before it all vaporizes. Maybe get something named after you, maybe just improve some lives.
Improved a lot, or just a bit?