Re Trump blaming others when things don't go well, I'm listening to an audiobook about the Battle of Berlin at the moment. As the Reich crumbles around him, Hitler spends his time finding scapegoats. Specifically in a section I listened to today, he ranted that all of Germany's lack of success on the Eastern Front was due to "treachery". It's more or less constant though, he's just nonstop talking about what failures all the soldiers are, replacing commanders, etc etc. I was very struck by the resemblance to Trump. At least Hitler had the excuse that he was getting injected with fearsome quantities of drugs and that his country was in the process of being annihilated.

Would just like to say Twitter links are greatly appreciated, as the embedding doesn't show up in my browser.

I agree of course that Trump is an unhinged fascist bozo. However the problem with this line of thinking is that "blaming others when things don't go well" and idling away trying to find scapegoats when things are going bad is like what a huge percentage of leaders do. In business, politics, whatever. One of the things that maybe liberals suffer from a little bit is turning everything Trump does into mini-Hitler stuff, you know, everything about Trump in exceptional apocalyptic terms and akin to the great figures of history.

I agree maybe Trump is a mini Hitler of sorts but I think it's more correct to say Trump seems to instead embody all the pedestrian, normal human failings of bad leadership: thin-skinned, conspiratorial, a lack of self reflection, prone to incuriosity about the thing he's leading and passing on blame. He's frighteningly common in politics, in institutions, in business -- many times at the highest levels because being really 'good' at this in institutions or companies or (I guess countries) where many of the employees or members are like this too. Trump's really just the embodiment of lots of unexceptional, common bad characteristics rather than excelling in any one area in historic ways imo. Trump might yet be Hitler, or he might aspire to that, but I think the more frightening and difficult problem is that he just seems like a normal unqualified idiot in way over his head, and he's doing what unexceptional people do when it goes bad.

Greenwald's definitely upping the Whataboutism in his last 2 articles. If they were in Russian, I'd think Putin himself ordered them written that way.

Trump hits all the common tropes of the "awful boss" on TV shows. That's one reason it was so weird to see Scott Adams fall in love with him so easily. Does Scott Adams not see the pointy-haired boss when he's literally staring him right in the face? And the weird thing is Adams built the first part of his career on solid humor about characters exactly like Trump. Buffoons too big for their positions, that had more bluster and style than knowledge and patience.

It's also something black and PoC Americans can't get away with and still rise to positions of power like Trump. That's why the phrase "white mediocrity" is becoming popular very quickly right now. Trump's entire team matches this phrase so perfectly it's almost absurd.

Sure. It's a matter of degree though. It's egregious in both cases, in Hitler's case because that's seemingly what he spent his entire time doing during the downfall of the Reich, and because scapegoating is so frowned on in military affairs. What would Winston Churchill have done if Britain had fallen to the Nazis? It's hard for me to imagine him doing anything other than taking full responsibility. Not because he was a perfect human being, but because he would have seen that as his last duty. And in Trump's case, the scapegoating is egregious because a lot of the time nothing is really that wrong, it's just the free press criticizing the President like normal and Trump just can't deal with it. So yeah, scapegoating is normal, but the similarity to me was how they both elevated it to farcical levels.

Trump Advisor Roger Stone Launches Into Vulgar Twitter Rant, Suggests Back Channel To Assange During Clinton Leaks
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/...b0fa65b844b44f

Trump's in many ways the right President for the right time. I don't mean that he's good. I mean that he fits the cultural and political zeitgeist of our era. Tons of mediocre white people took the built-in advantages and wealth they had and squandered it on overpriced educations if they even bothered with educations at all (assuming they could just skate on working with their hands forever or whatever), bad investment schemes cribbed from cable TV like house flipping, or wedding themselves or their towns to manufacturing or extraction careers. They of course got help from similarly short-sighted careless business leaders, civic leaders, and politicians who had the same mix of desires to enrich themselves at any cost and then aggrandize the worst impulses of the marks they were scamming from, or leading, or whatever.

Obviously Trump ****s up consistently and then flails around looking for a scapegoat, but I mean his tens of millions of voters think they're not yet millionaires because of illegal immigrants, welfare queens and foreign aid so what really can we say about Trump that isn't shared by tens of millions of his voters.

The Pod Save America guys made this point recently, we see stuff like this on Twitter and we think yeah, everyone gets that Trump acknowledging he was being surveiled requires that a court thought he was a threat. But the bulk of Trump's support, old white people, aren't on Twitter and they are getting informed exclusively by media sources which are actively avoiding mentioning important details like that. Like, I checked out one Breitbart article that had a timeline of supposed Obama administration interference, and it repeatedly said that it was the Obama administration that sought wire taps and not the FBI.

Even NPR keeps calling Jeff Sessions's lies to Congress "misleading Congress" rather than giving false information or lying. That is very very troubling.

Trump definitely would be the first to get on the life raft.

Sure but the contra to Trump is someone considered an extraordinary war-time leader like Churchill. I don't doubt for a second Churchill would react differently than Trump to a crisis, but my point is Churchill would have reacted differently and probably far better than millions of other people; even people known for being successful leaders.

I think we could have some long posts determining why or even if the assumption is true if it's not simply luck, but liberal democratic countries in the post French Revolution world have done well avoiding truly historic inept leaders that threaten to cripple their own societies like Trump. But it's also not unprecedented, and not all idiots who shirked blame and endlessly sought scapegoats were Hitler; and leaders like Trump are everywhere in private and public institutions. The exceptional, dangerous thing seems to be that he's President of the world's most powerful country but I don't know that he's exceptional because he's a paranoid fascist, although he's probably those things too. That is to say: I think he *is* a little bit of a deranged fascist lunatic but the far deeper problem is that he possesses exceedingly normal reactions when things go bad leading a complex institution.

Also I think einbert got my point because I think Trump is emblematic of a country that seems to have truly bought into the idea that elites are bad and should be mistrusted and that wisdom and competence lies in folk wisdom and the populist temperament and then acted accordingly.

OTOH I do think our collective elites are failing too so I see Trump as the manifestation of a pretty deep collapse of order rather than the rise of an exceptional madman. That is: he's a feckless late stage Roman emperor after Theodosius, not Caligula.

Edit: Meant to post a different, newer article than this one actually. This one is about two weeks old.


https://twitter.com/XHollinger/statu...83259861676033

Trump seems to be rolling with an exceptionally small "skeleton crew" to run the federal government as is his personal business style. This is not due to Democratic obstruction or filibustering (he has the 50+ R votes needed to confirm almost any nominee) but because he simply refuses to fill the positions. Is this just Trump being lazy or Bannon trying to "dismantle the administrative state" in yet another way?

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/0...g-clash-235250

Yeah. If you go back (Pod Save America talked about this this week) Sarah Palin was really Trump 1.0 in many ways.

Should have posted this:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/o...?smid=tw-share

Yeah, I mean that's a way that the two differ because Hitler, as you probably know, stayed in his bunker in Berlin and shot himself when the Allies overran the place. His advisors wanted him to abandon Berlin and withdraw to Bavaria, but he refused. Hitler was a narcissist, but he had grand ideas and a vision, which was that he would be the leader of a Thousand Year Reich, beloved for providing lebensraum for the volk. In the end, trying to preserve that grand idea was more important than just saving his skin. Trump wants to be loved for doing nothing at all, and is perfectly willing to jettison grand ideas to preserve what really matters: himself. It's truly an American version of fascism, in that it is petty, myopic, lazy and superficial.

Now we're talking. Hitler had ambition and ideology. Trump just wants to turn on TV and see himself. Yet again I would note that Trump's conceit is almost childlike; he wants to be President when he grows up because he knows it's powerful position but doesn't really have any meaningful goals or coherent desires beyond rallies, and just wants it to be 9-5 and then go back to Mar-a-Lago for golf and dinner on the weekend. He's a pretty typical self-absorbed narcissist who wants to lounge around at retirement. That's bad for a President but it's not Hitler-esque. It's the CEO in his golden years hanging onto the company too long; keep everything 3 bullets or less so I can get back to practicing my putting.

Risk: Bannon/Miller and that group and lots of others that buoy Trump are true-believer *******s of the first order who have goals beyond cheers from Fox and Friends.

Trump in Washington: The Banality of Self-Absorbed Incompetence

Bring it on

speaking of mediocrity/incompetence, who goes on twitter in an attempt to say "no more comments" and in the process admits that they're trying to interfere with/misdirect the investigation that's being done on them?

a complete ****ing idiot, that's who

Obama ate human babies on the reg. No further comment, pending investigation.

It seems like this whole Obama thing has a potential to backfire. Any investigation into Obama wiretapping will almost definitely have to investigate leads into the whole Russia business.

It really comes down to who does the investigating, Trump is obviously going to look for a loyal Trumpkin and the blue team is going to scream bias. So there may be some sort of minor compromise. As long as whoever is charged with doing this is not in the tank for Trump, then I don't think Trump is going to like the outcome.

This obama wiretapping will be the next Benghazi. A million hearings about nothing, never proving any guilt, while failing to address the real problems.