Another Trump book on the way

[Bijou_Drains]

This one covers a lot of the transition. The author is Michael Lewis who also wrote Moneyball and other books.

‘F--- the Law’: 4 Alarming Bits From the Next Trump Tell-All

Turns out Trump did not even want a transition since he thought he would have to pay for it .

[BobLibDem]

Trump allegedly said, “Fuck the law. I don’t give a fuck about the law. I want my fucking money.”

This is a gem. Not only is this the only true words he has ever spoken, it tells you every thing you need to know about him- that there is only one thing that matters to him: money.

[Chefguy]

@Bijou_Drains

This one covers a lot of the transition. The author is Michael Lewis who also wrote Moneyball and other books.

Speed Read: The 4 Most Alarming Revelations From Michael Lewis’ New Trump Tell-All ‘The Fifth Risk’

Turns out Trump did not even want a transition since he thought he would have to pay for it .

That was also discussed in Woodward’s “Fear”, which I’m reading now.

[John_Mace]

@BobLibDem

This is a gem. Not only is this the only true words he has ever spoken, it tells you every thing you need to know about him- that there is only one thing that matters to him: money.

Not true. Fame also matters to him. One could certainly argue that fame is just a means to make money, but that does show he can reason about cause and effect, so there’s that.

[wolfpup]

@John_Mace

Not true. Fame also matters to him. One could certainly argue that fame is just a means to make money, but that does show he can reason about cause and effect, so there’s that.

So can my dog, but he’s a happy well-adjusted nice guy who isn’t a danger to the entire world.

[Ann_Hedonia]

@Bijou_Drains

This one covers a lot of the transition. The author is Michael Lewis who also wrote Moneyball and other books.

Speed Read: The 4 Most Alarming Revelations From Michael Lewis’ New Trump Tell-All ‘The Fifth Risk’

Turns out Trump did not even want a transition since he thought he would have to pay for it .

I preordered this book several weeks ago and I’m looking forward to it. Supposedly the focus is on the Trump Administration’s decimation of government agencies because if he doesn’t understand it. We don’t need it.

[Snowboarder_Bo]

The Guardian has posted a lengthy excerpt.

The first time Trump paid attention to any of this was when he read about it in the newspaper. The story revealed that Trump’s very own transition team had raised several million dollars to pay the staff. The moment he saw it, Trump called Steve Bannon, the chief executive of his campaign, from his office on the 26th floor of Trump Tower, and told him to come immediately to his residence, many floors above. Bannon stepped off the elevator to find Christie seated on a sofa, being hollered at. Trump was apoplectic, yelling: You’re stealing my money! You’re stealing my fucking money! What the fuck is this?

Seeing Bannon, Trump turned on him and screamed: Why are you letting him steal my fucking money? Bannon and Christie together set out to explain to Trump federal law. Months before the election, the law said, the nominees of the two major parties were expected to prepare to take control of the government. The government supplied them with office space in downtown DC, along with computers and rubbish bins and so on, but the campaigns paid their people. To which Trump replied: Fuck the law. I don’t give a fuck about the law. I want my fucking money. Bannon and Christie tried to explain that Trump couldn’t have both his money and a transition.

Shut it down, said Trump. Shut down the transition.

[Kimstu]

Wow.

It wasn’t just Christie who had been fired. It was the entire transition team – although no one ever told them so directly. As Nancy Cook reported in Politico, Bannon visited the transition headquarters a few days after he had given Christie the news, and made a show of tossing the work the people there had done for Trump into the bin. Trump was going to handle the transition more or less by himself. Not even Bannon thought this was a good idea. “I was fucking nervous as shit,” Bannon later told friends. “I go, ‘Holy fuck, this guy [Trump] doesn’t know anything. And he doesn’t give a shit.’”

They were about to take control of the portfolio of existential risks managed by the US government. Only they weren’t. On the morning after the election the hundreds of people who had prepared to brief the incoming Trump administration sat waiting. A day became a week and a week became a month … and no one showed up. […] You could walk into almost any department of the US government and hear people asking the same question: where were these people who were meant to be running the place?

The department of agriculture was an excellent case study. […] Among other things, the department essentially maintained rural America, and also ensured that the American poor and the elderly did not starve. Much of its work was complicated and technical – and yet for the months between the election and the inauguration, Trump people never turned up to learn about it. Only on inauguration day did they flood into the building, but the people who showed up had no idea why they were there or what they were meant to do. Trump sent, among others, a long-haul truck driver, a telephone company clerk, a gas company meter reader, a country club cabana attendant, a Republican National Committee intern and the owner of a scented candle company. One of the CVs listed the new appointee’s only skill as “a pleasant demeanor”.

All these people had two things in common. They were Trump loyalists. And they knew nothing whatsoever about the job they suddenly found themselves in. A new American experiment was underway.

[Bijou_Drains]

a good excerpt:

Before any of the calls could be made, however, the president of Egypt called in to the switchboard at Trump Tower and somehow got the operator to put him straight through to Trump. “Trump was like … I love the Bangles! You know that song Walk Like an Egyptian?” recalled one of his advisers on the scene.

[Steve_MB]

“Why study for a test you will never need to take?” Lewis wrote. “Why take the risk of discovering you might, at your very best, be a ‘C’ student? This was the real part of becoming president of the U.S. And, Christie thought, it scared the crap out of the president-elect.”

If he’d had any sense, he would have delivered a speech declaring that everybody thought he’d lose but he won, repeated a few variations on “neener-neener!”, and then announced that medical issues, perhaps a bone spur flare-up, have forced him to step down.

[Ulfreida]

@BobLibDem

This is a gem. Not only is this the only true words he has ever spoken, it tells you every thing you need to know about him- that there is only one thing that matters to him: money.

This is so untrue. He also loves fame, and ass-licking adulation never comes amiss either.

[Ann_Hedonia]

I finished it in one day. Michael Lewis is one of my favorite writers and I found this book very compelling.

It’s not really “another Trump book”. The quoted anecdotes about the transition are really the only direct mention of Trump in the book. (I’m guessing Chris Christie was the source behind those.)
The book is an exploration of the missions behind the various federal agencies (DOE, USDA, Dept of Commerce) that compose the “Deep State” and the ways in which they are being threatened by an incompetent executive branch.

For example, the USDA underwrites billions of dollars in loans for rural development. These loans are made to municipalities and private businesses for things like fire stations and medical clinics and water treatment in small towns and rural areas - services that are needed but aren’t necessarily profitable enough to attract private investment.

The thing is, the beneficiaries of these loans often don’t even know that they are getting a government loan. The loans are administered via banks, who identify applicants that qualify for these loans.

In the name of streamlining, this program is being moved into the Office of the Secretary. The official Lewis interviewed suspects that they want to get their hands on the 200 billion dollar loan portfolio in order to sell it to their Wall Street friends. The program will become privatized and benefits will go to bankers instead of to the citizens that the programs are supposed to help.

There is a similar situation happening with the vast amount of data accumulated by the Department of Commerce. This data is used heavily in weather forecasting, firefighting and farming applications. Private industry wants to restrict the free availability of this data as they greatly profit from applications that use this data. And it’s important, for example, if it weren’t for journalists poring through publicly available Medicare and Medicaid data we probably wouldnt even know we had an opioid epidemic.

The one thing that struck me was that the large majority of the vast number of programs that are being threatened exist to benefit areas that are typically very politically conservative. Because business and industry in urban areas have much better access to capital markets and are much less dependent on the vagaries of climate and weather. Which made me feel better and worse at the same time.

TLDR - I think he should’ve called the book “You Didn’t Build That”. This is a important book, you need to read it. It’s NOT about Trumps personal behavior, it’s about mission vs money.

[Bijou_Drains]

just like a lot of people in red states like Obamacare and Trump and the GOP want to get rid of it.

They don’t really care who they hurt unless it means they are voted out of office.