My library actually posted on Facebook last night that they had e-book and audio copies available with no waiting list as of yet, and gave the link to borrow. I had no intention of reading the book until that moment, and I snagged the last e-book copy. My library has never before done this for a book, to my knowledge. I started reading it last night and I’ve already found two typos that I hope aren’t in the print version. I’ve also had to look up about six words that I’ve never come across before, so the e-book dictionary function is appreciated. The first few chapters have been excerpted on social media already, so the beginning was kind of boring, rereading all that again. I got through four chapters last night.
My big question is, if the Trump team was so convinced they were going to lose, and were actually hoping to lose in order to further their career ambitions, then that means they must have been comfortable with the possibility of a Hillary Clinton presidency and in fact looking forward to it, right? So where does that leave their whole commitment to the conservative agenda? Is it all an act?
My take on that: the thump team doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the conservative agenda except insofar as it makes rich people richer. (I hope this is really, really clear to you.) I think they would have been delighted with a Hillary win, because then they could have spent the next 4/8 years trashing her, with thump himself leading the tar and feather brigade, without having to come up with anything. Just like the Pubs did with Obama. But the car stopped, and now the dogs don’t know what the fuck to do.
In that Janice Min tweet, some guy jumped on her for starting the tweet with the word “so”. Feeling snarky, I mocked him by fixing his grammar, ending with “(This foolishness cuts both ways)” or something.
Well, that kind of derailed the conversation and a day later my tweet had 2,600 likes, was retweeted 40 times, and had 600,000 impressions. It was the most “straight dope” like thread I’ve ever participated in on the Twits, complete with threadjacking about grammar and a side group deciding to intercut the grammar discussion with wine suggestions. We completely ratioed her tweet with a discussion that had nothing to do with her OP. Just like, you know, this place.
It was a joke tweet about Trump being upset the White House tv didn’t have his favorite channel that features gorillas fighting, so staff cobbled together some documentaries for him and he watches it 17 hours a day on his knees from four inches away.
I’ll probably read it. It sounds hilarious. I just don’t plan on spending forty bucks, or whatever it costs, for a hardcover edition. I’ll wait for soft-cover / paperback.
More to the point, it was a joke tweet that incorporated a joke book excerpt about that.
It read to me like a copyright trap, such as street map publishers use, where they print a non-existent street onto their map, so as to have proof, should some other cartographer photocopy their work and attempt to claim it as his own.
It’s somewhere between a joke, a prank, and a hoax. The article I read explaining it pointed out how crazy things are today that people take the idea of a president wanting a Gorilla channel seriously.
I’m a little over halfway through the book and most of it is stuff I already knew. An anyone that claims it’s a pack of lies or total fiction just hasn’t read it, because most of what he talks about are incidents that were widely reported - he just adds some new details that explain some of the WTF. Buts it’s basically the story of the 3 factions - the Bannon Mercer white nationalists, the Priebus Ryan classic Tepublicans and the Kushner Cohn Wall St Democrats - their jockeying for power and their constant attempts at sabotaging each other
For example - I’m at the part now where they cover the Syrian bombing. And they talk about how no one could get Trump to care or focus on the details. Bannon wanted to do nothing. But the other two factions thought action was required. But no one could get Trump to pay attention because it involved battle plans and words and spreadsheets and numbers and stuff. Then Ivanka put together a presentation focusing on dying children foaming at the mouth.
None of it was surprising and it pretty much confirmed the speculation on what happened behind the scenes.
It pretty much what I expected, but I figured I would find out a couple of things I didn’t know. And I did. Wolff wrote about some of the undercurrents caused by Bannons anti-Semitism. He claims that assigning Jared to broker Mideast peace was sort of a dig at his religion as well as a passive-aggressive set-up for failure and an inside joke. And that Trump was in on it.
And from a factual POV, I didn’t know that Jared’s brother co-founded Oscar Insurance, using a lot of the family money. Oscar Insurance was founded in the wake of ObamaCare idealism and has taken a beating from the efforts to gut ObamaCare. I probably should’ve known this and I’m surprised I didn’t - but I didn’t.
Yeah, that was the point. The guy cobbled some crazy story together and pointed out that our expectations for Trump is so low that many would believe it, or at least find it plausible. Rather clever in that it speaks to Trump and his oppositions expectations.
It’s amusing to me that Trump’s latest blast of tweets aimed at the book pretty much confirm the book’s assertion that we’re dealing with a five-year-old mentality. His temper tantrums and lashing out indicate someone who has never matured. I have to wonder what his parents did to him to make him turn out like this.
In case anyone doubts that the gorilla channel story is plausible, here are the most recent three tweets from the man himself. How insecure do you have to be to proclaim your intelligence?
Edited to add, it sounds like what you’d expect the SNL parody of the man to say.
