That's what I was thinking. Also, although a lot of people criticized this
author's methodology for his first book on Trump, Fire and Fury, my feeling is
that he understands him a lot better than many of the people who've written
about him.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Wednesday, June 19, 2019 3:00 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Wolff Says Mueller Didn't Indict Because Trump
Was Ready to "Blow Up Everything"
How can we compare Donald Trump to the great despots of recorded history, if we
can't say, "Adolf Hitler"?
While their early years were much different, their Personas have merged in
later life.
Carl Jarvis
On 6/18/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Wolff Says Mueller Didn't Indict Because Trump Was Ready to "Blow Up
Everything"
By Chauncey DeVega, Salon Published June 18, 2019
President Trump speaks to press on the South Lawn of the White House
on June 7, 2019, in Washington, D.C.
President Trump speaks to press on the South Lawn of the White House
on June 7, 2019, in Washington, D.C.
Chen Mengtong / China News Service / VCG via Getty Images
It is not an easy task to discern the truth when confronting a
president and his allies who have created their own reality, one in
which truth and lies have no absolute meaning and are, for them,
ultimately interchangeable.
Donald Trump does this on a personal level: he has lied at least
10,000 times while president.
During his recent interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos, Donald
Trump continued to lie in public, asserting that he did not try to
fire special counsel Robert Mueller. As multiple sources and witnesses
agree, this is not true. Trump also asserted that he can do anything
that he wants, according to the Constitution: He apparently believes
he is a king or emperor. This too is a lie. The Constitution grants
the president no such powers, and was drafted by the framers to stop
demagogues and would-be tyrants such as Donald Trump.
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Trump has told his followers not to believe their eyes and ears or the
news media, but only to trust him. In Trump's political cult he is the
ultimate arbiter of reality and facts. This represents Orwell's
warnings about totalitarianism in 1984 made real in the age of Trump.
In all, Trumpism is both a form of collective narcissism and mass
delusion for its leader and followers.
How does one craft a biography or other factual narrative about a
person like Donald Trump, his presidency and the people embedded in
it? Despite his obvious criminal and dangerous behavior, how is Trump
always able to escape?
Why did Robert Mueller decline to indict Donald Trump for obstruction
of justice, or even to state his conclusions clearly? If Trump is
forced from the White House, either by defeat at the polls in 2020 or
impeachment and conviction, will he leave peacefully?
In an effort to answer these questions I recently spoke with Michael
Wolff, the controversial reporter, author and biographer who has
written for Newsweek, USA Today and Vanity Fair. Wolff is the author
of numerous books including the bestseller Fire and Fury: Inside the
Trump White House. He continues that story in his new book, Siege: Trump
Under Fire.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. My
conversation with Michael Wolff can also be listened to through the player
above.
Chauncey DeVega: If someone wrote this story of Trump's presidency as
fiction, would you believe it? It seems so fantastical and impossible.
Michael Wolff: I would come at it a different way. This really is an
incredibly good story. All good stories are in a sense unbelievable
until you make them believable. Trump is a classic example of that in a way.
Donald Trump, who is the president of the United States, is a madman.
Donald
Trump is a psychopath. This is something to be afraid of. What the
American people and the world did not realize about Donald Trump is
the nature of this kind of madness. It is so egocentric, attention
deficit-like and self-centered.
Is Donald Trump making everyone around him sick and pathological,
giving them permission for horrible behavior? Or is Donald Trump just
a reflection of deeper problems in America?
There is a third possibility. Donald Trump is wholly aberrant. He is a
person the likes of which we have never seen before in America. Just
imagine a man who for 45 years has lived a totally external life. No
private life, no family, no intimacy for many years. And he doesn't
care about it. I used to see Trump in New York, every night, he would
be out somewhere like a shark, moving through these gatherings. He was
looking for acknowledgement and attention. In the Woody Allen movie
"Celebrity," Trump plays himself.
In
the movie he is a soulless celebrity. There's no mystery here about
who and what Donald Trump is.
Does Donald Trump really exist? He seems to be a type of human cartoon
character that is somehow now president.
Donald Trump is an actor. His greatest success in life is not in the
real estate business but rather as a reality TV show performer. Trump
is also, in my opinion, a bit crazy. This may be from an organic
disturbance in his brain or he literally made himself crazy in the
pursuit of attention. That happens to actors on occasion. But Donald
Trump is a more extreme example because he had to do more to command
all this attention. He has spent more time at it. This is all a fluke
circumstance. Trump was not supposed to become president of the United
States, so he has been catapulted into essentially a fictional role.
So in that way, I think you can argue that he does not really exist -
most certainly as the president of the United States.
By all indications Donald Trump is rarely alone. If a person is never
alone, there is no time for critical self-reflection.
The idea of critical self-reflection and Donald Trump does not exist.
If Trump's time is not filled with other people or him talking to
someone else and doing a monologue, motor-mouthing, he is watching
television. There is no moment of silence. There is no moment in which Trump
is alone.
The other surreal aspect of Donald Trump is that he listens to the
television, literally. It is as though Fox News is telling him what to
do and he slavishly obeys. The president should be driving the agenda,
not having it set by TV personalities and a right-wing entertainment machine.
There may be a silver lining there. If someone is telling Trump what
to do, he's actually incapable of hearing them. It's not as if Trump
is truly capable of doing anything. No. 1, he has no real goal other
than just attention for himself. He has no real ability to follow
things from one moment to the next. When I toured Europe to talk about
my book "Fire and Fury," I would get all these questions about Trump
staring a war: Is he going to take America and the world into some
catastrophic military action that more rational people would avoid?
My response was, that is not impossible except that modern war is a
very complicated thing, it is very data-driven. Complexity is beyond
Donald Trump. It would be a nightmare for him to be in a room and have
to make decisions. For Trump it is a nightmare to have to consider
what the implications of a large set of data might be.
He would actually rather do the opposite - and in fact he did the
opposite with the North Korea situation. This is not a situation of a
politician creating war to distract from other things. North Korea is
an example of a politician who created peace to distract from other
things. Now, in fact, it was not peace; it just wasn't a war. The
North Korea situation is exactly the same now as it was when Trump was
threatening them with all kinds of bellicose language. Now he embraces
North Korea with all kinds of soothing language. But the situation on
the ground has not changed whatsoever. It's just the spin that Trump
has weaved around it.
We should not deny Trump agency and responsibility for his behavior.
But in writing your two books on the Trump White House you've had
access to many people. Is Donald Trump being manipulated by the likes
of Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, the plutocrats who just want more tax
cuts, Christian nationalists and other opportunists?
Yes, they are trying to manipulate Trump. But again, the peculiar
inverted silver lining here is that you cannot really manipulate
Donald Trump. He doesn't listen. He can't absorb information. He's
completely uninterested in the desires and views of other people.
Therefore, what gets through his filter is very little. Sometimes what
does get through does influence him.
But this is not very much information, and it does not last for very long.
How do you write a book about the Trump White House and his cabal when
the people who are closest to Trump are so fundamentally dishonest?
Donald Trump himself has publicly lied at least 10,000 times during
his time as president. How do we sort out truth from fiction when
dealing with these people? How does one go about crafting an authentic
narrative?
There are two issues here. How do you select sources that you want to
trust?
I think that just comes from getting to know these people. Getting to
see what their track record is of telling you information that later
on is proved to be true, Like any relationship, how do you trust it?
But then the other part of the narrative is about the distance you're
always moving away from reality. And whether you're moving from
reality because somebody is lying to you or you move away from reality
because the subject you are writing about can't recognize reality.
Another possibility: Is the principal involved with remaking reality
themselves, either because they're unglued in time and space, or
because the truth doesn't matter to them? What if this person just
lies about everything?
How does Trump always seem to survive? The Mueller report is damning,
even with William Barr's redactions. Yet Trump soldiers on.
Primarily because the bar is now set at a different level for Trump's
behavior. It is now about what he can get away with. Trump's whole
career has been about what he can get away with. All presidents set
the bar in a different way. The bar is about getting parts of their
agenda accomplished; it's about their place in history; it's about
getting re-elected. On that level, Trump's bar is about getting away
with his bad behavior. The Mueller report is incredibly damning, but
Trump, at least for the moment, seems to have gotten away with it all.
Trump is a survivor who is all about living to fight another day. It
is not about his reputation or what he has accomplished. It's
certainly not about Trump's place in history. What ultimately matters
for Donald Trump is not going to jail. If you make yourself into a
kind of person who no one understands, then no outsider can game out
what you will do, what your reactions and behavior will be. No one can
count on your response. Such a person is very scary.
Mueller was thinking that Donald Trump wears a suicide vest of sorts.
If Mueller had pushed Donald Trump into a corner he would blow up everything.
Donald Trump would take the country's political institutions down with him.
Trump would take down the Department of Justice. Trump would not care.
For somebody like Robert Mueller, this was a reality he had to confront.
Mueller
was likely thinking to himself, "I have to deal with the fact that
somebody who has as much power as I do, or more, can use this power in
a way that could harm everybody in a much greater way." Robert Mueller
decided it was much better to let Donald Trump just run out the clock
than to give Trump the opportunity and the cause to destroy
everything, the country's political institutions.
In my several years of writing and doing interviews about Donald Trump
I have been trying to warn the public that Robert Mueller believes in
America's political institutions. Consequently, Mueller would only
take his investigation and his findings so far.
You were absolutely correct. After the Mueller report came out, Steve
Bannon said to me, "Never send a Marine to do a hitman's job." Robert
Mueller is an institutionalist. He plays by the book. He plays by the
rules. Robert Mueller sees a larger picture than just his assignment
to go and get Donald Trump.
In your new book Siege: Trump Under Fire, you claim that Robert
Mueller had actually written a draft document indicting Donald Trump
for obstruction of justice. Obviously, Mueller then decided to not go down
that path. Why not?
I don't know what was on Robert Mueller's mind. The Mueller
investigation was two years behind closed doors - which is in itself a little
odd.
Mueller
came out and said, "The report speaks for itself." In fact, the report
is not very clear. I may not know what was on Robert Mueller's mind,
but I do know that among the documents that I have are a set of
research papers on the nature of the special counsel's office itself.
These papers conclude that the Office of the Special Counsel is a pretty
fragile construct.
Can the president of the United States directly fire the special counsel?
These researchers concluded the answer is "yes." If the special
counsel's office is closed down, what happens to the work product? The
answer is not clear. But is it possible that in this case, Mueller's
findings could have been destroyed? Just run through the shredder?
Yes. So I think Mueller came to focus on his own vulnerability. I
think that Mueller came to see his goal here as not just holding
Donald Trump accountable but as not being fired.
Because if Mueller is fired then he is not able to hold Trump and his
inner circle accountable in any way.
Remember, there are people within the special counsel's office such as
Andrew Weissman, who are among the most aggressive pursuers of
white-collar criminals. It would have been perfectly logical for the
special counsel's team to formulate the kind of indictment that they
thought might have been possible and then to make the argument that
the special counsel - despite standing Justice Department policy -
could in fact indict a sitting president.
So where does Bob Mueller come out on that? I think in the end Mueller
decided, "Let's stay in business." Mueller's decision was to be
Delphic, really, rather than prosecutorial.
How do you think Trump's presidency ends? Will Trump even leave if
forced out of office?
Trump is not going to let himself lose. Therefore, if it looks like
he's going to lose, Trump will declare victory and get out.
As some have speculated, will Donald Trump then cause general mayhem?
Donald Trump's mission is to attract attention to himself. So yes,
Trump will be a voice which people will find either impressive or incredulous.
Trump is not going to disappear until he dies or goes to jail. As we
have always been, we, the American people and the world, are stuck
with Donald Trump.
Should the Democrats impeach Donald Trump? What advice would you give
Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic leaders?
The important thing is pulling back the layers of Donald Trump. I
would like someone to do this in a very methodical way. There is
Donald Trump's financial history. What Donald Trump has done since
Jan. 20, 2017, to get in the way of people trying to investigate him.
What is happening in the Middle East, as the Trump family and the
Kushner family try to arrange future financing for themselves. Nancy
Pelosi and Congress should be laying this all out for the public. They
have an opportunity to tell the story of Donald Trump in another way,
and I think probably in a more forceful way. We need to see the
smoking guns.
