Quote:
Originally Posted by Rococo
You are talking about the Michael Wolff book. I haven't read it.
two books - basically the same so i have trouble remembering who covered what
i have both in audiobook format and can post to a dropbox and pm the link if you like
it's really interesting because both books extremely anti trump
and yet, two books diving deep into the woodwork of who trump was both as a campaigner and as a president and exposing just how dysfunctional and outright idiotic most of it was - it's also deeply humanizing
he stops being a caricature and he's suddenly a real person and it's actually impossible to not view him more positively after reading those books because your mental image of him previously just viewed him as this evil and stupid tyrant whereas now he's a selfish and stupid person who at times is able to see through the bs
for example a big thing he does as president is just assume the status quo is not optimal and can be improved - so things like longstanding deals for military access or trade deals are cosnidered perfect and he's like "let's renegotiate because we can do better" and everyone from staffers to the bureacrats running the relevant departments give him these doomsday scenarios as to why he can't do that but never show their work
i found it very similar to religion - everyone says there is a heaven and we must all act accordingly in order to get into heaven and discussion of "how do we know there is a heaven or what the criteria for entrance are?" is met with non-answers but rather ridicule "you need to have faith" "god has told us there is heaven" etc etc etc
you may recall the entire thing with him looking into cancelling our military treaties with south korea - the news headlines were trump saying the land we got was bad land - which is a "lol you stupid idiot" kind of moment because that's strategic land for the military and he's looking at it with an eye to developing a hotel or golf course on it
yes, he did actually say that, but that was some random stream of conscious statement he said that had nothing to do with the greater picture of "each year we spend billions protecting south korea and get nothing in return and we even have a massive trade deficit with them to boot and we need to change that by either fixing the trade imbalance and/or getting them to pay for their own defense" and he was universally met with "WW3 will start tomorrow if we pull troops out of South Korea" this was coming from the military, from his staffers, from anyone in the room. Everyone was saying it's cheaper to defend America through proxies like Korea than to deal with the nukes that'll strike down upon us if we don't.
I found that line of reasoning insane. Sure we can up the monthly risk of ww3/nuclear attack on usa from one in 50 million to say 1 in 49 million if we withdrew from Korea, but to treat it like a foregone conclusion was just assinine.
You found this echoed everywhere. "No you can't renegotiate our trade treaty, the global ecosystem will collapse"
most of the books is about how he wanted to change things and then everyone would spend all their time talking him out of it and taking advantage of how forgetful and adhd he was that you could be told to do something and just not do it and he'd forget about it so long as it didn't come back up again in the news or someone mentioning it to him - that's how his staffers would control and restrict who get access to him "can't let Bob see Trump again, he's going to mention NAFTA again" and a week later, Trump asks the very person who stopped Bob from visiting the oval office why Bob doesn't come around anymore and he likes Bob and the guy just shrugs his shoulders and then Trump just moves on to the next thing.
Like his staffers would genuinely go to his desk and take executive orders waiting for him to sign off his desk and hide them. They did that knowing that if he didn't see it on his desk, he'd forget about it and if he remembered about it again, in the day or so it took to draft the order, he'd again forget about it and that same person could just swing by his desk and intercept it once more
amazing books, both are brief and light reads