Donald Trump proved long ago that Americans are as hooked on him as they are on drugs. This explains cable stations covering his asinine tweets like drug dealers pushing dime-bags as treats. But it also explains publishers peddling books about his presidency like cartels shipping cocaine in bulk.
Trump’s presidency has spawned a cottage industry of tell-alls. America’s addiction to his antics is such that these book sales are tantamount to opioid sales.
As I noted in “Mary Trumps John in Battle of Trump Tell-Alls,” it’s only a matter of time before another tell-all dethrones Mary’s book. Most notably, publishers are lying in wait to push fixes by Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen and Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward.
The problem is that, just as it is with addictive drugs, it doesn’t take long for the high from each book to wear off. This leaves the addict chasing the proverbial dragon, trying in vain to recapture the feeling of that first high.
Despite the thrill of buying each new book, the Trump addict invariably finds the joy of reading it never lives up to the hype. But an addict is as an addict does.
Simply put, the publication of each new book presents an irresistible temptation. Continuing the analogy, each one sells like a new cut of crack cocaine. For example:
Since it was released in May, the latest book in the Hunger Games series, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, has sold 1.3 million copies, a home run of a best seller by publishing’s standards.
Mary L. Trump’s memoir about her uncle, Too Much and Never Enough, outsold it in its first week.
[S]ince President Trump entered office, books about his campaign, his administration, his family, his business, his policies, even his golf game have poured out of publishing houses big and small.
(The New York Times, August 31, 2020)
This is why publishers can be forgiven their expectation that the two scheduled for release this week will prove equally addictive. They are Disloyal by the aforementioned Michael Cohen and Compromised by Peter Strzok, the FBI agent referenced in the title.
For purely blogging purposes, I’ve been obliged to take public-spirited tokes from previous books. But I’m no dragon-chasing junkie. And I shall prove it by eschewing any comment on Cohen’s book.
Except that I am constrained to note that we did not need his book to tell us that Trump is “a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man.” After all, Trump has provided incriminating evidence, time and again throughout his presidency, that he’s all those things and more.
His open and notorious behavior provoked me to write “Cohen: Trump is ‘a Racist, a Con Man, and a Cheat.'” I assure you, it provides as much of a fix as anyone can hope to get from reading Cohen’s book.
Incidentally, the same holds for that report in The Atlantic that has everyone acting all “shocked, shocked.” This, because it quotes Trump ridiculing people who serve in the military as “suckers,” and those who die in combat as “losers.”
You’d never know that this is the same Trump who repeatedly denigrated the late Sen. John McCain, a bona-fide war hero, as a loser. Not to mention the infamous way he tormented Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the Gold-Star parents of Army Captain Humayun Khan, who was killed in Iraq.
This brings me to Strzok’s book. I am equally inured to its temptation. Except that I’d be remiss not to acknowledge the unimpeachable integrity and authority he lends to the gravest of all allegations anyone can make against Trump.
Former FBI agent Peter Strzok alleges in a new book that investigators came to believe it was ‘conceivable, if unlikely’ that Russia was secretly controlling President Trump after he took office — a full-fledged ‘Manchurian candidate’ installed as America’s commander in chief. …
Strzok describes how the FBI had to consider ‘whether the man about to be inaugurated was willing to place his or Russia’s interests above those of American citizens,’ and if and how agents could investigate that.
(The Washington Post, September 5, 2020)
Remarkably, Trump foiled that investigation — not only by willfully mischaracterizing it as “a hoax,” but also by using leaked text exchanges between Strzok and his FBI lover to get him fired.
But, frankly, I smell a rat. I get that “Trump’s Roy Cohn,” Attorney General William Barr, threw a monkey wrench in Robert Mueller’s attempt to investigate this aspect of Trump’s collusion with Russia. What I don’t get is that career agents never picked up where Strzok left off as if the security of the nation depended on it… because it did (and still does, for Christ’s sake).
I said from the outset of his presidency that history will judge Trump’s Republican enablers more harshly than Trump himself. But imagine the ass-kissing nature of Barr’s mal-and-misfeasance that he has us longing for the halcyon days of Jeff Sessions.
I mean this SOB had a furloughed Cohen thrown back in prison at Trump’s behest in a brazen attempt to extort his promise not to publish his tell-all. Think about that…
Nonetheless, Strzok’s allegation must resonate with anyone who is not a die-hard member of Trump’s cult. It is, after all, the only thing that explains why, with Trump, “all roads lead to Putin.” I am still relishing the finger-wagging way House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made this charge to his face during that now famous meeting at the White House last October.
But here too, with all due respect to Strzok, I proved long ago that you did not have to be an FBI special agent to harbor treasonous suspicions about Trump. I preempted this gravest of all allegations over two years ago when I wrote about Trump’s treasonous behavior in releasing fake memos to frame the FBI.
I observed that Trump was behaving like a Manchurian president. Moreover, I asked readers to imagine Trump’s tweets about treason if Obama had taken the word of any foreign leader over the unanimous word of the directors of US intelligence agencies.
Significantly, that was even before he famously exposed himself as Putin’s useful idiot, which I commented on in “Helsinki Summit: Trump Hails Russian Propaganda, Rejects American Intelligence.”
As it happens, though, nothing proves the truth of Strzok’s allegation quite like Trump doubling down on his allegation that Barack Obama is the treasonous one for spying on his campaign. This clearly makes no sense. But Trump can’t help his congenital impulse to react to any damning allegation against him by projecting the same elsewhere.
I presaged this trait before people with far greater authority and standing (like the aforementioned Speaker Pelosi) began attributing it to him.
As I explained in my analysis of Trump’s projection psychology, he has a congenital impulse to attribute his own faults to others. So when he calls opponents crooked, weak, or liars, he’s revealing self-conscious truths about himself.
Hillary Clinton might not have known it, but she famously triggered this impulse when she ridiculed him as a Putin puppet during their presidential debate on October 19, 2016. Because Trump could not help projecting: “No puppet, no puppet … you’re the puppet, no you’re the puppet.”
Alas, no revelation in any of these books will prove the trigger that deprograms any member of Trump’s cult. Ominously, that cult has hijacked the Republican tribe, as I discussed in “Impeachment Vote Is as Much About Tribalism as Trumpism.”
The point is that Trump has revealed thousands of things about himself, which should compel any person of sound mind to not only vote against him but damn him to prison for the rest of his life. On the other hand, with every revelation, big lie, or shattered norm, he gave credence to this bold assertion:
I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s, like, incredible.
(NPR, January 23, 2016)
Except that it’s no longer incredible. For, as the late Maya Angelou might have despaired, this man showed them who he was, and they still voted for him. This is why I maintain that every outrage that has littered the Trump presidency says far more about the Americans who support and enable him than about Trump himself.
As it happened, I explained his crazy Fifth-Avenue assertion just months later in “Humping Trump Exposes News Anchormen as Worse than Used Car Salesmen.” I observed that he figured out from his days as a Reality-TV star that an alarming number of Americans just want to be entertained — even in politics. And that the more gauche and scandalous the entertainment, the better.
Sadly, it has been self-evident for years that his supporters couldn’t care less that, among many other destructive things, he is
- taking away their healthcare;
- normalizing brazen lies and self-enrichment in American politics;
- stoking racial tensions and otherwise dividing the nation against itself; and
- making enemies of America’s friends and friends of America’s enemies.
In other words, the general welfare be damned, so long as they’re being entertained.
I have often drawn analogies in this regard to the rise of Adolf Hitler during the 1930s. I suspect you too have wondered how so many Germans could have supported him. Except that, in fairness to Germans back then common knowledge was not as common as it is today.
By damning contrast, the prevalence of social media now is such that no sentient being could fail to know about all the diabolical ways Trump is transforming American democracy into his American dystopia. We are all marching along… eyes wide shut. And it hardly matters that some of us are jeering while others are cheering.
Indeed, I fear our only consolation is that history will judge Trump’s willing enablers (like Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, William Barr, and Rupert Murdoch) even more harshly than it has judged Hitler’s willing executioners (like Heinrich Himmler, Albert Speer, Herman Goring, and Joseph Goebbles).
But I will end with this: In “Karmic Irony: Trump Pardons Cronies but He and Kids End Up in Prison…” I advised him to cop a plea with state and federal authorities. The “art of the deal” would call for him to resign before mid-October in exchange for their promise never to file any criminal charges against him.
Cohen suggests that Trump should resign and have Pence pardon him. The problem with that is that the presidential pardon power does not cover state criminal charges. And those are the ones now hanging over Trump’s head like a Damoclean sword.
Note: Instead of wallowing in the hackneyed revelations contained in Trump books, iPINIONS urges you to take a little time to bank your vote. Vote early and in person!
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