Poor Paul Manafort. Donald Trump demoted him (or, in the language of bullshit, gave him a new special role in the campaign). Manafort's efforts to make Trump a more conventional candidate failed. If Manafort ever believed he could succeed at making Trump, convinced of his own superiority, into a candidate cooperative with the Republican Party and willing to "play by the rules," (not seem demented to rational-thinking people) he, Manafort, must be tragicomically confident in his abilities to promote degenerates to high office. He is, after all, the one who helped Viktor Yanukovych gain power in Ukraine, and who lobbied on behalf of despots. Trump is just Manafort's latest raise-high-the-scoundrel project. Alas, Manafort's Ukrainian-connected past, with its unaccounted-for 12.7 million dollars, came to light; although I doubt that's why Trump pushed him to the background.
The candidate has added two players to his hellbound theater of the absurd: Kellyanne Conway as campaign manager (she has no experience doing this) and Stephen Bannon in the never-before used role of "campaign CEO." Sounds impressive, if this were a board game. Bannon is high up in the Breitbart organization, a news media outlet along the lines of TMZ (trashy entertainment news) mixed with a right wing political perspective. Bannon is "anti-establishment," a friend of Trump's, and according to one former employee of Bannon's, "a jerk [who] yells a lot." Pictures of the man show a cross between David Lynch and Robert Redford, not that that means anything.
Trump, reportedly, has been "very unhappy" in recent weeks, a news item that made me happy. He's felt closed in by his handlers, unable to break out and be himself. Now, according to insiders, under the new management, we'll get to see and hear "Trump being Trump."
Have we not experienced this already?
I suspect that Trump's call for building a wall that Mexico will pay for in order to keep out criminals and rapists was a taste, early on, of the real Donald Trump. With his first press conference, announcing his candidacy in June 2015, he revealed himself as a racist, a demagogue, a braggart, an utter clown, and a master manipulator of the news media.
Some in the news have wondered, "Why Bannon?"
Bannon's merger with Trump's grotesque dickishness makes sense if Trump's ambition includes further forays into news media and reality television. Rumors of a future Trump TV network suggest a key role for someone like Bannon. Trump TV, if it comes to being, will wed the lies of Fox News Channel with the gutter slander of right wing talk radio, plus Trump's special entertainment-based bravado, in which utterly ridiculous scenarios, like Trump and Ivanka sitting at a table with minor celebrities, trying to impress "the Donald" with their business sense.
Today, a still photograph was released by the Trump Campaign showing a "high-level" meeting in Trump Tower. The big table, with all four sides occupied (Manafort far away from the boss, indicating his shrinking importance), was a mockery of a White House Cabinet meeting. This meeting took place a few hours before Trump's first national security briefing, a courtesy given to candidates of both parties since it was initiated by President Truman in 1952. Truman, remembering bitterly how twelve days went by during the first weeks of his presidency before he was informed of the nuclear bomb-related Manhattan Project, wanted Eisenhower and Stevenson to get a sense of what they were heading towards, without getting sideswiped by vital information upon assuming office.
No candidate has ever said what Trump said today about the candidates' intelligence briefing. Interviewed by a young blonde woman from Fox News before the briefing, Trump, wearing his serious grump face, lips pouting, piggy eyes alert and indicating instant readiness to eject verbal shit from his mouth, said he doesn't trust U.S. intelligence, based on their past record--Iraq, the Middle East, "a total powder keg." Trump would have us believe he knows more than the intelligence community.
We don't know what Trump was told at his briefing, but he did bring Chris Christie with him. I hope the information conveyed dwelt heavily on Russian cyber threats, given Trump's encouragement of that kind of thing. I hope they told him a lot about Ukraine, too.
What we can infer from "Let Trump be Trump" is a candidate who will proceed to behave more abominably than ever before. The low points of this election cycle, I predict, are ahead of us, not behind. If I'm right, Republican dignitaries like Paul Ryan will be faced repeatedly, relentlessly, with having to speak on camera, condemning Trump's words but not his candidacy (nothing new there). What will be different is Ryan and others' loathsome descent into the pull of their party's death spiral, the monster causing it skipping away freely at the end to form his own media empire, bringing in fresh money to make him at least somewhat as rich as he claims to be.
Vic Neptune
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