I’ve seen enough crime movies to know every criminal outfit has to have a guy nicknamed “The Brain.” The question is, who would possibly qualify for that sobriquet in Trumpworld? Certainly not the genius who thought it would be a great idea to release the Comey memos. It took all of one hour from the time the Republicans in Congress got hold of them for the memos to show up on Fox News, because, bizarrely, RWNJs somehow got the impression the documents make Trump look good. Normal humans, otoh, think they bolster Comey’s account, and make Trump’s obsession with Russian hookers stand out even more than usual. GOP operative Rick Wilson said, “The stink of guilt is all over him.” No, Mr. Wilson. That smell is urine.
So what were Republicans thinking? Always hard to tell unless you’ve received a lobotomy, but Slate’s Jeremy Stahl has a plausible theory: Based on false Fox News reporting, they might have thought they caught Comey releasing classified information.
Anybody who paid attention has known for 30 years that Donald Trump was lying about his wealth. All the evidence you needed was the fact that he bragged about it, though there’s also plenty of documentation in things like casino licensing investigations. Most people on the Forbes list of richest people wanted to downplay their net worth, but Trump lobbied the magazine relentlessly to increase his standing, as Jonathan Greenberg extensively documents in this WaPo story. Greenberg was a young reporter with Forbes back in the ’80s, and he comes clean about it here, complete with tapes of “John Barron” phone calls (here’s one that’s not behind a paywall).
Like so many others in Trump’s orbit, Rex Tillerson is a reprehensible human being who looks a lot better when he’s standing with his erstwhile boss. Ronan Farrow interviewed the oilman-turned-diplomat, who wasn’t shy about identifying the fingerprints on the knife in his back. Spoiler alert: It rhymes with Kared Jushner.
In turn, Trump is starting to look like a garden-variety psychopath when compared to Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens, whose refusal to step down after his rapey ways became public is dragging down the entire GOP in a state that has gone from purple to red in recent years.
Amy Chozick’s new book on the Clinton campaign, “Chasing Hillary,” doesn’t appear to have any big revelations in it, but it does offer some revealing glimpses into the miscalculations that led to her defeat.
“A week earlier, she’d cut off Joel and the pollster John Anzalone, as they walked her through the almost daily reminder that half the country disliked her,” Chozick writes. “You know, I am getting pretty tired of hearing about how nobody likes me,” she said. “‘Oh, what’s the point? They’re never going to like me,’ Hillary told this friend.”
That sense of resignation about the candidate’s limitations infected her campaign, writes Chozick. “After the convention, donors asked what they planned to do to pull Hillary’s trust numbers out of the toilet. The answer was always the same: nothing. Podesta would explain ‘I remember no one trusted Bill Clinton and he won twice.’”
I wonder which person on the campaign was known as The Brain?