In today's news, Donald Trump is mad about a book. That's also yesterday's news, and the news from two years ago, and the news from 20 years ago, so let's all agree right off the bat that it's not exactly important news but it seems we're going to be obliged to still pay attention to this decompensating blubberer for some time, watching to see whether he can successfully overthrow U.S. democracy or whether his coronary arteries give up on him first.
When this Politico story was published, the book Donald Trump was mad about was the one that reported that Trump, according to former chief of staff John Kelly, cited Hitler as someone who "did a lot of good things." Trump is denying this, weakly, but because Trump literally lies about everything, all the time, and has a decades-long trail in this regard, his denial is irrelevant.
That episode was short-lived. The thing Trump is mad about now is the report that Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other military leaders were concerned enough over the possibility of Trump ordering them to stage a military coup rather than abide by the election results, that they began to make plans to resign rather than carry out those orders. This swiftly led to a high-school-mean-girls-clique-toned statement from Trump that "if I was going to do a coup, one of the last people I would want to do it with is General Mark Milley," and that Milley is mean and bad and "choked like a dog" and doesn't like the Confederacy and only got hired because Donald thought it would be funny to piss off James Mattis.
In addition to being both vaguely threatening and grossly pathetic, you might also note that "if I were gonna do that violent crime I'm accused of I can assure you I could get a much better victim than you to do it to" is the same denial Trump has trotted out to deny a good chunk of other things, because Donald's brain has, at this point, considerably fewer possible responses than a Magic 8-Ball.
Again: Ignore whether Trump denies something or doesn't deny something. The man is a compulsive liar. The only value his repetitive, almost rote insult-laden fulminations have is as momentary window to how close the man is to giving himself an aneurism.
Almost immediately after that new statement, yet another centipedal shoe dropped. The newest excerpt from The Washington Post's reporter's book gives an account of the White House during the Jan. 6 insurrection, and it's a slurry in which every last person who is not Donald Trump tries to paint themselves in the best possible light as a broken, delusional, nasty, television-absorbed Donald flits between administrative paralysis and active support for the violent mob. Much of it is hagiography of dear, wise Ivanka Trump, who portrays herself as terribly alarmed at her father's explicit attempts to overthrow government and who wants you to know that she was only in the places she was because she is literally the only person who can calm the thrashing, unbalanced, violent Donald so that he does not follow through on doing far worse things. It's maudlin.
This accounting pairs nicely with the central theme of Politico's story, which is not just that Trump is Mad about a Thing but that his advisers, both past and present, are in considerable freakout over how they are all going to be portrayed in the backstabbing books being penned by everyone else. Trump confidante and mega-liar Kellyanne Conway is allegedly causing the most consternation, as her book is expected to be the most tell-all of any of them.
It's true that Conway was in the room while Trump and his minions were plotting pretty much every evil or criminal thing any of them got tied up in, so she could share a lot if she wanted to. But there's been no plausible indication that she is going to do anything but continue her pattern of lying about all of it, so who the hell cares? Is there some even remote chance she's going to turn on Trump? No. It's going to be a fluffy book demonizing Conway's enemies, praising Trump for alleged secret brilliance that he has never once shown, and explaining that for sure Dear Leader-led conservative fascism will save the country the next time around so everybody should vote for it.
What do you get when thirty liars write thirty books? Thirty lying books.
It's important to remember that the reasons everyone around Trump is nervous are not the same reasons Trump is nervous. Trump is upset because anytime anybody portrays him as anything less than a genius doing brilliant things with sparkling majesty, his malignant narcissism overrides all other thought and he flies into a tantrum. Everyone else is anxious about the mountain of new books because they fully expect their hated "allies" to throw them under every possible bus as each person in Trump's orbit attempts to Pull An Ivanka and claim that they, and only they, were the sane ones as everyone else wandered through the hallways doing crimes or assisting Trump as he killed off a half-million Americans through incompetence.
What we won't get, in all likelihood, is a true accounting of the Trump presidency because there's simply nobody who lasted very long during Trump's White House tenure who wasn't hired specifically because they were brazenly dishonest people willing to gaslight the public all the time, for any reason. The man drew up fake hurricane maps and this collection of spineless hacks nodded along and pretended it was all normal. There's no recovering from that.
When this Politico story was published, the book Donald Trump was mad about was the one that reported that Trump, according to former chief of staff John Kelly, cited Hitler as someone who "did a lot of good things." Trump is denying this, weakly, but because Trump literally lies about everything, all the time, and has a decades-long trail in this regard, his denial is irrelevant.
That episode was short-lived. The thing Trump is mad about now is the report that Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other military leaders were concerned enough over the possibility of Trump ordering them to stage a military coup rather than abide by the election results, that they began to make plans to resign rather than carry out those orders. This swiftly led to a high-school-mean-girls-clique-toned statement from Trump that "if I was going to do a coup, one of the last people I would want to do it with is General Mark Milley," and that Milley is mean and bad and "choked like a dog" and doesn't like the Confederacy and only got hired because Donald thought it would be funny to piss off James Mattis.
In addition to being both vaguely threatening and grossly pathetic, you might also note that "if I were gonna do that violent crime I'm accused of I can assure you I could get a much better victim than you to do it to" is the same denial Trump has trotted out to deny a good chunk of other things, because Donald's brain has, at this point, considerably fewer possible responses than a Magic 8-Ball.
Again: Ignore whether Trump denies something or doesn't deny something. The man is a compulsive liar. The only value his repetitive, almost rote insult-laden fulminations have is as momentary window to how close the man is to giving himself an aneurism.
Almost immediately after that new statement, yet another centipedal shoe dropped. The newest excerpt from The Washington Post's reporter's book gives an account of the White House during the Jan. 6 insurrection, and it's a slurry in which every last person who is not Donald Trump tries to paint themselves in the best possible light as a broken, delusional, nasty, television-absorbed Donald flits between administrative paralysis and active support for the violent mob. Much of it is hagiography of dear, wise Ivanka Trump, who portrays herself as terribly alarmed at her father's explicit attempts to overthrow government and who wants you to know that she was only in the places she was because she is literally the only person who can calm the thrashing, unbalanced, violent Donald so that he does not follow through on doing far worse things. It's maudlin.
This accounting pairs nicely with the central theme of Politico's story, which is not just that Trump is Mad about a Thing but that his advisers, both past and present, are in considerable freakout over how they are all going to be portrayed in the backstabbing books being penned by everyone else. Trump confidante and mega-liar Kellyanne Conway is allegedly causing the most consternation, as her book is expected to be the most tell-all of any of them.
It's true that Conway was in the room while Trump and his minions were plotting pretty much every evil or criminal thing any of them got tied up in, so she could share a lot if she wanted to. But there's been no plausible indication that she is going to do anything but continue her pattern of lying about all of it, so who the hell cares? Is there some even remote chance she's going to turn on Trump? No. It's going to be a fluffy book demonizing Conway's enemies, praising Trump for alleged secret brilliance that he has never once shown, and explaining that for sure Dear Leader-led conservative fascism will save the country the next time around so everybody should vote for it.
What do you get when thirty liars write thirty books? Thirty lying books.
It's important to remember that the reasons everyone around Trump is nervous are not the same reasons Trump is nervous. Trump is upset because anytime anybody portrays him as anything less than a genius doing brilliant things with sparkling majesty, his malignant narcissism overrides all other thought and he flies into a tantrum. Everyone else is anxious about the mountain of new books because they fully expect their hated "allies" to throw them under every possible bus as each person in Trump's orbit attempts to Pull An Ivanka and claim that they, and only they, were the sane ones as everyone else wandered through the hallways doing crimes or assisting Trump as he killed off a half-million Americans through incompetence.
What we won't get, in all likelihood, is a true accounting of the Trump presidency because there's simply nobody who lasted very long during Trump's White House tenure who wasn't hired specifically because they were brazenly dishonest people willing to gaslight the public all the time, for any reason. The man drew up fake hurricane maps and this collection of spineless hacks nodded along and pretended it was all normal. There's no recovering from that.