Wolff At the Door

If any one book takes Trump out of office prematurely, it will be this one.

Michael Wolff's "Fire and Fury" is shaking things up, both for its controversial source material and for its stunning revelations about the Trump White House.  Some of the "revelations" are facts we already know, like Rex Tillerson saying that Trump is a moron.  But other so-called allies can't find nice things to say about Trump's intellect of lack thereof either; Reince Priebus and Steven Mnuchin both said he's an idiot, economic adviser Gary Cohn called him "dumb as sh--," and national security adviser H.R. McMaster thinks he's a dope.  Another aide couldn't get Trump to understand the Bill of Rights.  Wolff confirms that New Jersey governor Chris Christie was slated for a job in the administration but was denied on the basis of his success at putting Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner's banker father in jail  when Christie was U.S. Attorney for New Jersey in the two thousand zeroes.

There's more - too much for me to repeat in this space.  Among other tidbits, Trump eats fast food to avoid being poisoned (these jokes write themselves, folks!), Melania never wanted to be First Lady, and the only reason we lucked out with Tillerson - our most avuncular Secretary of State since Dean Acheson - at the State Department when we could have gotten Trump's fellow xenophobe John Bolton is because Trump didn't think Bolton would go over well because of . . . his moustache.  (Our last mustachioed Secretary of State?  Dean Acheson.)

Steve Bannon doesn't look to good in this book . . .  to those who like the guy.  He apparently had a problem or two - or more - with all those Trump campaign meetings with the Russians at Trump Tower, calling some campaign members "treasonous" and "unpatriotic," adding that Trump had to have known about the meeting involving Paul Manafort, Kushner, and Donald Trump, Jr. Bannon even suggests that the President may have met with the Russians himself, and he even thought that the way Trump handled the Charlottesville incident in August 2017 might have been "25th-Amendment bad," requiring his removal of office due to a loss of sound mental capacity.

Trump didn't like that.  He's since turned on Bannon, even though many in the administration agree that it is Trump, not Bannon, who, as Trump said about Bannon, has "lost his mind."  But here's the kicker: Trump was hoping to lose and planning on losing.  The Guardian reports that, according to Wolff's book, Trump "expected to leverage his defeat for wealth, fame and a Trump-branded TV network," and "key advisers wanted jobs in television or politics."

And if that shrew Debbie Wasserman Schultz had given Martin O'Malley a fair chance at the Democratic presidential nomination instead of backing Hillary, we'd still be in the Paris Agreement now. >:-(  

How did Wolff get so much access to the Trump White House?  They gave it to him, carte blanche, and practically let him wander around interviewing everyone he could find.  Trump knew a little about Wolff's reputation and was actually expecting a favorable report.  

So what effect will Wolff's book actually have?  Sadly, despite the first sentence of this blog entry, little if any whatsoever.  First, many people found Wolff's sources to be highly suspect, and some of his stories may be exaggerated.  Second, even if these stories are completely and thoroughly true, the people who should read this book won't.  And, as  I wrote in this blog entry from December 2015, Donald Trump, like Madonna, has a knack for maintaining and even increasing his popularity with fans after saying and doing outrageous and offensive things that no one else would have gotten away with.  The idea of Trump's opponents hoping for Wolff's book to destroy his Presidency reminds me of us Madonna-haters hoping that her career was through after her movie Body of Evidence tanked.

And her cover of Don McLean's "American Pie" was the pop-music equivalent of Trump hypothetically shooting someone on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue.

The United States of Stupid

Recently Bill Maher said on CNN, and again on his own HBO show, that America is a stupid country. And even though that got a lot of right-wingers angry, Maher was armed with plenty of evidence. Among the facts supporting his opinion:

Polls show that a majority of Americans cannot name a single branch of government, or explain the Bill of Rights.

Seventy percent of Americans thought in 2003 that Saddam Hussein was behind the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks on September 11, 2001. While it's now down to one out of three Americans (about 34 percent), that's still too high, and it corresponds with the number of people who still approved of George Walker Bush's job at the end of his Presidency.

Nearly a quarter of Americans could not name the country we fought in the American Revolution. (Well, we know it was an English-speaking country, that should give 'em a hint!)

Nearly half of Americans don’t know that each state has two senators, and more than half can’t name their own congressman.

A Gallup poll says 18% of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth, a theory disproved by Copernicus, a Polish astronomer - that's right, a dumb Polack! - in the sixteenth century.

And these are just statistics on what passes for common knowledge. Consider examples of America's dumbness in the big picture. Look at our living pattern. We spent the past sixty years and may spend another sixty years building human settlements that are accessible and easy to get around in by car, leaving no opportunity for public transportation and walking, as if everyone in America can own and drive a car. And what kind of vehicles do many of us drive? Big cars and SUVs, the kind of cars that Heinz Nordhoff, Volkswagen's CEO in the fifties and sixties, said had more power than could be used and "thus violate every principle of engineering and technical science."

Among other American feats of engineering are bridges that collapse and domed stadiums with roofs that cave in.

How about all the money invested in the athletic programs of colleges and universities, which made many of our institutions of higher education more expensive to attend because of all that overhead and turned them into health spas where literature and math are only occasionally studied? That's what makes Title IX in the 1972 Education Act an example of American stupidity. Instead of giving women more opportunities in scholastic athletics, why not give them more opportunities in education?

And don't get me started on our obsession with violence, from handguns to nuclear missile warheads. Or our belief that weapons keep the world safe. What other country could have developed a cannon in the 1840s (a faulty demonstration of which almost killed President John Tyler and did kill his Secretary of State) and a long-range missile in the 1980s and called both the "Peacemaker?"

It doesn't surprise me that Americans are so dumb. Back in 1987, high school seniors were polled on questions of common knowledge. Asked who wrote "The Grapes of Wrath," many said Ernest Hemingway. (It was John Steinbeck.) Asked who wrote "A Christmas Carol," many named the story's character, Ebenezer Scrooge, as the author. (It was British author Charles Dickens, who famously satirized Americans in one of his novels.) And many thought the Civil War began in 1492. Well, I got news for you; these high school seniors of the late eighties are adults on the edge of turning forty, and they're just as dumb. Their high school diplomas and, where applicable, their college degrees aren't worth the paper they're printed on.

And some of them may even vote.

Many of them have parents who oppose health care reform because they don't want the government taking over their Medicare plans.

We may be of different races, creeds and colors, but we Americans are uniformly dumb all over.