Here it is. It’s by journalists Susan B. Glasser and Peter Baker. Hopefully it’s not paywalled. It’s pretty devastating.
Although I do look at New Yorker online, I’m unfamiliar with these journalists. Googling shows they’re pretty famous.
My question: how are they getting their information? Are they quoting insiders who were witnesses to the conversations that went on?
CNN interview with Susan Glasser.
That’s one helluva article. Frightening.
Thanks for the CNN link. And I now see this same article being quoted over in the “How has Trump pissed you off” thread, too.
I’ve had time to look around, and it’s a chapter from a book coming out in September, called “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021”. It does look like Glasser and Baker have insider people feeding them quotes and anecdotes. Scary, huh?
70 years old with the honesty and immaturity of a 7 year old…
From the article:
[Milley’s] wife told him she was shocked that he had not been cashiered outright when he made his apology.
Assuming that they’re not sued for libel, the clear and easy answer would be that they called a whole bunch of people and that some of those answered. If they know what his wife was doing in the morning then either she talked, Milley talked, or a close friend of the family talked.
They pretty clearly quote Robert Gates and Bob Bauer; Milley seems to have discussed some amount of his thinking with Schumer, Pelosi, Adam Smith, and others in Congress – all of whom are very likely to talk to the reporters; likewise, they report that he’s said to have communicated some of his thoughts with Dunford, Dubik, Pompeo, Esper, etc.
Every name that you see in there is credibly a source. If not exactly that person, though, then probably someone who works alongside them.
At some point, the media is an extension of the US government. It’s not managed by the government - rather it is a strong mechanism for people to float ideas, lobby for a position, try to shut down a bad idea, etc. If you talk to the media, you can amplify your ideas by a thousand times and force everyone to consider what you’re saying more seriously, for a day.
In return, though, you’ll someday get called in to the New Yorker and they’ll ask you to pay them back for giving you a blow on the giant bullhorn. That’s where they get news like this.
I’ve thought that what this country really needs is an 12-part dramatized HBO series devoted to the Trump presidency. You can hold all the hearings you want, but if its just news no one will pay attention. However there is enough drama and entertainment coming out from all of these behind the scenes exposés to really grab popular attention and seeing it all of his petty maliciousness and idiocy laid out in an organized entertaining fashion might finally do him in.
Great article. Falls a bit into the trap of letting defensive insiders re-paint their own roles, but not any worse than the usual. Takes a lot of fragments we knew about, adds a bunch more we didn’t, and carves a coherent (and scary) narrative.
I just finished reading the article. As when I read similar reporting, I don’t really know how to process it. After vivid descriptions of people and events there’s a lot of, “Such and such person issued a statement denying most or all of it.”
It all SOUNDS plausible, and some of it is clearly factual based on prior reporting of real events. But how big a grain of salt should be taken here? Believe me, I’m no fan of Trump and his ilk and would be glad to know this is further evidence of their incompetence and malice. But I just don’t know how to take this - how much do we think is reliable reporting, and how much is hearsay, second or third party recollections of events?
Sometimes, articles will tell how many people reported that particular event. If you have five people telling, effectively, the same story then it’s probably pretty exact. If you’ve just got just one then who knows.
This article doesn’t give us that sort of information so, as you say, it’s a bit questionable.
We can be certain on the direct quotes from Gates and Bauer. We can be certain about Milley’s resignation letter. Everything else…who knows? Based on Milley’s letter and the crazy things that have been confirmed, it all seems like if these exact things didn’t happen exactly like that then, regardless, things of that level and general flavor were certainly occurring.
Holy guacamole. I knew it was bad; I hadn’t realized just how horrifying, how close to the brink again and again, it was with trump in power.
Data point of one, but…
I’ve subscribed to The New Yorker for more than 35 years. I mean, never missed an issue.
The main reason why is because you can take their reporting to the bank. Their sources are impeccable and on the rare occasion they get something factually wrong, they are quick to correct the error and own it.
Peter Baker is a long-time, well-respected reporter, chief White House correspondent for the New York Times currently. He has good sources. Prior to his employment at the Times, he was a reporter for the Washington Post for 20 years. He has built a good reputation over many years and is unlikely willing to sacrifice it to publish a dishonest account.
Susan Glasser is his wife and has journalistic chops in her own right. She was a reporter at the Washington Post as well as a managing editor there. She was also the editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy magazine.
The New Yorker doesn’t hire hacks. I trust this reporting.
The Gilt Crown?
With these reports that are later intended for books, I sometimes wonder “Why not share it earlier? What good does this information do us now?” I guess reading a book about how horrid Trump was after the fact seems useless and just adds to the swollen shelves about the Grifter-In-Chief.
The President’s loud complaint to John Kelly one day was typical: “You fucking generals, why can’t you be like the German generals?”
“Which generals?” Kelly asked.
“The German generals in World War II,” Trump responded.
“You do know that they tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off?” Kelly said.
But, of course, Trump did not know that. “No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him,” the President replied.
Umm, Mr. Kelly? The appropriate response here was not a history lesson.
Apparently John Kelly spent a lot of time keeping Trump’s love of Hitler a secret. This isn’t a new thing.
I need to avoid reading the SDMB first thing in the morning.
I’m so tired I read the thread title as, “Article in New Yorker about Trump’s internal war with his genitals”.
That would be a very different article.
To be fair, a large contingent of Republicans at the moment are people who think that being told what to do is such an extreme crime that you should go against that rule, regardless of what the rule is, what the reason for it is, or what the ramifications are of not doing it, just to piss off the person who told you to do it. I could easily see Trump discovering that Kelly and other military types are annoyed by any endorsement of Hitler and it was his way of needling them for telling him what to do.
Note for people out there: Get at least six hours of sleep every night. Fauci says so! You better do it, doctor’s orders!
The problem with making it an HBO television show is that people will believe, or insist, that HBO inserted its own fictional dialogue into the story out of anti-Trump bias. Many things that Trump said in real life (within the rooms of the White House) are/were no doubt so wild that Trump supporters themselves couldn’t believe that he said them, and would insist that the TV show was some smear campaign against him that put fake words in his mouth.
Sure Trump supporters wouldn’t believe it, but they aren’t the target audience, they are basically unreachable. The target audience is the disinterested voters, who knows the favorite food of every Kardashian, but can’t name a supreme court justice.