Now It Can Be Told!

"With the caveat that I don't know and that I could be proven wrong, I think he's backed himself into a corner where he has to run," @maggieNYT tells @jdickerson. https://t.co/01cx0V2bAw

— Michael Kruse (@michaelkruse) October 2, 2022

She said, "Donald Trump is generally the same, depending on the context. And he tended to treat the White House as if he was still in a real estate office dealing with local county leaders, as if it was still 1980."

"What are the elements in the Donald Trump playbook that he's had his whole life?" asked Dickerson.

"He has a handful of moves that he has used forever. And people tend to impute a ton of strategy to what he's doing. But really, there are these moves. And it's the quick lie, it's the backbiting with one aide versus another, it is the assigning blame to someone else. All of this, again, is about creating a sense of drama, a sense of chaos, and often, John, about keeping the responsibility off him."

I've seen a lot of Twitter badinage about Trump's psyche, his narcissism (undiagnosed, so far as I know; although I accept it as a description of his personality/explanation of his actions, purely from a lay point of view), his "clever" fascism or even strategic (!) thinking.  And I always thought it was pure moonshine.  Occam's Razor tells me Ms. Haberman's explanation (especially since she's been covering Trump since the turn of the century and has actually interviewed the man several times) is much closer to the truth.  Trump acts to keep the responsibility off of himself:  plain and simple.

Haberman offers new detail about Trump's refusal to accept defeat in 2020, quoting sources who heard Trump say, "We're never leaving." 

Dickerson asked, "Donald Trump's reluctance to leave office, was that part of that playbook that developed so many years ago, or is that something new?"

"It was both," she said. "It was part of the theme of him believing that everything was always going to work out with him, because it always had. Whether it was his father helping navigate systems for him or helping him financially, or elected officials lining up for him, he always believed things would work out. And after November 3, 2020, it became clearer with each passing day that that was not going to happen, and he did not know how to handle it."

Again, did his narcissitic ego collapse?  Did he decompensate and spiral out of control?  Did he do some other psychological sounding bafflegab?  Maybe.  I'm comfortable with "he did not know how to handle it," because it fits the public record, and it doesn't require me to think of Trump as some kind of Reynard the Fox trickster god.  He's a doofus with too damned much money and absolutely no scruples or moral principles ("Me first!" is not a moral principle.)

"When Donald Trump referred to things in the White House as his possessions, there was a long history of him doing that," Dickerson said. "Do you then think that that's why he took those classified documents?"

"I do, actually. I think it's also possible he took them for another reason, and we don't know what that is. He sees everything in terms of leverage, whether he can have an edge over someone else. He definitely likes trophies." 

So: 1) transactional; and 2) bragging rights.  Did he consider for a moment the peril to the country, or even legal peril to himself?  Nah!  He doesn't care about the first and the second's never happened to him before, why should it start now?  He still can't conceive it, as evidenced by his dance with death in a Florida federal court.  That it could end badly for him has clearly never crossed his mind.

"Has he essentially transferred the skills of the New York real estate world, as strange as that is, into a political party?" asked Dickerson.

"He has transferred how he views the New York real estate industry into the Republican Party," Haberman replied, "and not just the New York real estate industry, but the New York political system. We've seen it in ways that are overt with the Republican Party in terms of comments that get made at rallies, and we have seen it in subtler ways in terms of how candidates deal with journalists or how they engage with basic facts sets.

"Not everyone has reacted in some form of emulation to Donald Trump, but most of them have."

Haberman writes that Trump told her how much easier his life would have been if he'd never run for president. And he looked back not on what he'd accomplished, but on what the presidency had meant for Donald Trump.

Dickerson said, "When Donald Trump asked himself in your presence 'If I had to do it all over again,' what did he say?"

"What he said was the answer is yes," Haberman replied, "because the way he looks at it is, he has so many rich friends and nobody knows who they are. And it was very evident that he saw the presidency as the ultimate vehicle to fame."

Conclusion?  He's as parochial as the 6th generation family member living on the family farm who's never traveled further than the country store near the farm his/her entire life.  And it's all about him, because that's what fame is all about:  the famous individual.  Well, until the lights go out and you have to go home and nobody pays attention to you anymore.

Much as I admire Ms. Haberman's work, I wish that moment for Trump would come sooner rather than later.  All the attention on him is what's making him "important."  By any other standard he's an abject failure and last year's news.  His hand-picked candidates are going to hand control of Congress to the Democrats (again!).  His courtroom antics would make Bozo the Clown decide it was time to retire from public life,  and his schtick is so old that, while Twitter contiues to dissect every sentence and find MAGA's under everybody's beds, the reports from the local journos is that people were walking out from the 15 minute mark of Trump's speech to the 103 minute mark. He stole government documents and highly classified documents, and he has yet to offer even a thin gauze of a legal defense to that, or even to deny he had possesison of them.  His indictment on that crime alone is going to put him in a world of hurt that running for President again won't begin to shield him from (Haberman says he thinks it will.  Even she knows he's wrong.)

And MTG (the other bete noir of political Twitter for that night) has all the authority of a month-old ham sandwich, and about the same appeal to the electorate.  I know we aren't supposed to ignore these people because then they acquire a superpower in secret, but the truth is, public attention is their oxygen.

High time to cut off their supply.