Maryanne
Trump Barry, President Donald Trump's sister, is heard on secret audio
recordings made by his niece, Mary Trump, criticizing Ivanka and Eric Trump,
describing the former as a "mini-Donald."
Everything Trump Touches Dies review: a poison
dart in the neck of the Republican monster
Donald
Trump
Political consultant Rick Wilson is horrified by what
his party has done – and his book is much more than a brutally enjoyable
roasting of those responsible
Charles
Kaiser
Tue 21 Aug
2018 07.00 BSTLast modified on Tue 21 Aug 2018 16.16 BST
The
Republican political consultant Rick Wilson has filled his new book with more
unvarnished truths about Donald Trump than anyone else in the American
political establishment has offered. Wilson never holds back. That is
especially refreshing at a moment when so many mainstream journalists still
feel compelled to be “fair” to our psychotic president – and so few Democratic
officeholders have called for the impeachment that Trump so richly deserves.
A few
examples of Wilson’s eviscerations: “Everything about Trump’s opening speech
was moral poison to anyone who believed in any part of the American dream.
Everything about his nationalist hucksterism smelled like … a knock on the door
of authoritarian statism.”
The right
is “merrily on board with a lunatic with delusions of godhood”.
“There’s an
odds-on chance that our grandchildren will hear this tale while hunched over
guttering fires in the ruins of a radioactive Mad Max-style hellscape.”
“Washington
is the drug-resistant syphilis of political climates, largely impervious to
treatment and highly contagious.”
The tax
bill was a masterwork of “gigantic government giveaways, unfunded spending,
massive debt and deficits, and a catalogue of crony capitalist freebies”.
Trump's
far-flung empire of bullshit makes the Teapot Dome scandal look like a warm-up
act in the Corruption Olympics
Rick Wilson
Trump has
surrounded himself with Wall Street alumni “who have behaved with weapons-grade
venality … and Master of the Dick affects. They were there … only for the tax
bill. Nothing else ever mattered to any of them.”
The Trump
administration has been “a hotbed of remarkably obvious pay-to-play and crony
capitalist game-playing. How obvious? Think 1970s Times Square hooker on the
corner obvious … The degree to which this president has monetized the
presidency for the direct benefit of himself, his soft-jawed offspring, and his
far-flung empire of bullshit makes the Teapot Dome scandal look like a warm-up
act in the Corruption Olympics.”
The
presidency “hasn’t been an endless exercise in self-fellation, until now”.
While
people like the New York Times executive editor, Dean Baquet, wring their hands
in public because they worry that it
will lose its power, Wilson makes one brutally accurate judgment after another
about the men and women who have enabled this embarrassing excuse for a
sentient president.
The monster is
out of its cage, and its trainers encourage only its dumbest, darkest, most
cruel and violent behaviors
Rick Wilson
Wilson even
manages to give some of the blame to political consultants like himself: “The
creature that emerged after Sarah Palin crawled from the political Hellmouth in
2008 kept growing, hungry not for policy victories … but for liberal tears,
atavistic stompy-foot rages, and purity over performance … we fed the monster
and trained it …
“Then Trump
came along ... The monster is out of its cage, and its new trainers (both here
and in Russia) encourage only its dumbest, darkest, most capricious, cruel and
violent behaviors.”
His book is
intended as “one of a number of poison darts in the neck of the monster”. And
it’s hard to imagine many of his victims looking themselves in the mirror again
if any of them have the courage to read this volume.
“All the
things evangelicals had said for generations that made a candidate anathema
were suddenly just fine … Being a goddamned degenerate pussy-grabber with a
lifetime of adultery, venality, and dishonesty is not, to my knowledge, one of
the core tenets of the Christian faith … Trump has opened entirely new
theological avenues … There is literally not one aspect of Trump’s behavior as
a citizen, a husband, and as a man that shows the slightest scintilla of
repentance for anything, ever.”
A lifetime of
adultery, venality, and dishonesty is not, to my knowledge, one of the core
tenets of the Christian faith
Rick Wilson
His
judgments of Trump’s enablers are equally vicious. Ivanka is “the least
slow-witted of his adult children”. Her husband Jared looks “more like a court
eunuch than a crown prince”. Everything about Kushner is “bereft of ideas or
edges. He looks as if he was grown in a laboratory to deliberately not give
offense … [Ivanka and Jared’s] judgement about absolutely everything was
comically terrible from the start.”
No one else
who has penetrated Trump’s orbit fares any better here. Steve Bannon “looks
like the spokesmodel for a new line of gout medication … His rheumy-eyed stare
and an odd constellation of facial moles, warts, scrofula, weeping sores and
grizzled beard patches make him look vaguely piratical.”
But this
book is more than endless stream of vicious personal insults. It also unravels
the complete intellectual bankruptcy of the “ideology” of this mad
administration. Besides all the schadenfreude it will give to Trump’s enemies,
it contains a single, invaluable piece of advice for the Democrats, who Wilson
says are missing “a massive market opportunity in the era of Trump”.
Under this
president, the GOP has abandoned “any pretense” that it cares about the
national debt. The Democrats could “move votes and donations” by advertising
what they have really been for several decades already: the “real party of
fiscal sanity, probity and responsibility”.
After all,
Bill Clinton was the only modern president to end his second term with an
actual federal budget surplus – something destroyed by George W Bush’s tax cuts
and then made permanently unimaginable by Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan and Donald
Trump.
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