#but also he kept calling Fredo 'liar'

[arlingtonpark]

Top 5 News Stories of 2017 pt. I

(This list is probably being posted past its “best if posted by” date, but you know what? Posting year-in-review lists before the year is over is ridiculous, so I’m not apologizing. :P) 

So how’s the new year been so far? 

2017 was quite a year, wasn’t it? Never in my short time on this Earth have I ever seen a year that was simultaneously hopeful, despairful, and baneful and all in equal measure.

I pay close attention to the news and most people don’t, so I thought I would share what are, in my opinion, the top 5 most important stories of 2017.

5. Survivor White House

I don’t know how many people are aware of this, but Donald Trump is not actually a great businessman. His business was a glorified mom-and-pop shop, and the mismanagement of his presidential campaign was all you need to look at to see that he was an incompetent manager. He’s also not actually a billionaire.

No, the reason people thought he was a billionaire businessman extraordinaire was because he said he was and he played that role on a reality tv show. Unfortunately, the extent to which reality tv is fake eludes most people.

A big part of the reason Trump is such a bad businessman is because instead of setting up a clear hierarchy and chain of command, Trump likes to have a power structure with competing power centers. When he entered the White House, Trump gave the position of Chief of Staff to Reince Priebus. The COS is supposed to set the President’s schedule and control not just the WH staff, but also who gets face time with the POTUS. But Priebus was a very neutered COS, with Chief Strategist Steve Bannon most notably getting walk in privileges in the Oval Office. He could just go in whenever he wanted and talk to POTUS without having to go through the COS. But not just Bannon, but many, many other people, from Trump’s family to Hope Hicks, and even f!@#ing Omarosa got walk in privileges.

This is very important because Donald Trump is notoriously feeble-minded. His stance on an issue at any given time is the stance of whomever spoke to him last. Thus, getting unlimited face time privileges with him gave you incredible influence on Federal Government Policy.

This meant there was grueling competition between the high ranking individuals in the Trump WH. When everyone has unlimited face time privileges with the Boss, a nebulously undefined role, and no one person has authority to control everyone else, the end result is throat slitting competition. Trump encouraged this, of course, because he thinks the competition breeds strength among his flunkies. Adolf Hitler had a similar management style, actually. Guess what: it sucked too.

Another important factor was that it didn’t necessarily have to be a person talking to Trump in order for Trump to be influenced. Trump watches a lot of tv and his stance on the issues can also be influenced by that.

This plus the interpersonal competition among staff led to a truly ridiculous situation: whenever a WH staffer felt they were being shut out, they would go on Fox and Friends, or some other tv show Trump loves to watch, break from the party line, and advocate for their own personal beliefs in the hopes that Trump will see them and be influenced through the tv screen!

And the leaks! Another common strategy employed by staffers is to leak information to the public that they disagree with and hope the media’s reporting on it will influence Trump to not go ahead with the planned policy. Leaks were also weaponized by staffers against each other. If a staffer thought another was getting to far ahead, they would leak embarrassing information to the public in an attempt to diminish them in Trump’s eyes.

To make matters worse, these staffers were not strategic geniuses. By any means. These people are *stupid*. Very *stupid*. I’m sorry, but if you’re one of those people who believe that no one is truly stupid, you’re simply ignorant. Ever seen The Godfather? If so, then you probably remember Fredo Corleone.

The failson of Vito Corleone, Fredo is simply an idiot. On political Twitter, it became a running gag to refer to Trump as the Fredo of the WH. “The Trump WH is like the Godfather if Fredo was in charge.” This is completely accurate and it bodes poorly for the country, but it’s actually worse. Having a Fredo in charge is bad but can be mitigated if there are competent people underneath working to counteract their incompetence.

But with Trump? It’s f!@#ing Fredos all the way down! Everyone who works under him is a Fredo in their own right. It’s incredible!

Steve Bannon

First off, there’s Steve Bannon. Bannon is a former financial executive turned Hollywood producer turned professional right-wing fear monger. (He gets between $50-100K from Seinfeld royalties yearly.) From the start Bannon was billed as a mastermind. The puppet master who would control Trump from behind the throne and plunge America in to a neo-fascist dystopia. Even I was sweating bullets! Two months of this and people were starting to give this nonsense the mockery it deserved. Bannon is like an edgelord teenager you find on Reddit. He thinks he’s a learned individual and for the shallowest of reasons. For example, he thinks he’s a cut above the rest simply because he can quote Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. As if reading the Art of War makes you an intellectual! Did I forget to mention that Bannon is over 60 years old? The Bannon-as-puppet-master meme got so much buy in from the media that one commentator wrote that Bannon could run out of the West Wing with his pants around his ankles and the media would still say was somehow more powerful than before. Also, he dresses ridiculously. Steve Bannon was fired as Chief Strategist August 2017.

Kellyanne Conway

Conway is probably the most shameless Trump sycophant. She goes on cable tv and will say almost anything to either build Trump up or deflect blame. A consummate liar, she’s more annoying than stupid, honestly.

Hope Hicks

Ah, Hope Hicks, the potted plant of the Trump entourage. The best way to think of Hicks’ place in the Trump orbit is to think of a piece of furniture or appliance that’s just always been there. Hicks has been working for Trump since before the campaign started in June 2015. She was previously his assistant, but since then has become mainly involved in handling his comms work. Depending on the type of person you are, you might doc or add points to her score for this, but she’s a true believer. She legit believes that Trump has the country’s best interest at heart and is just misunderstood by most people. So not a flunky, just delusional.

Sebastian Gorka

Oh my God, where do I start? Sebastian Gorka is a total clown in an entire White House of clowns. Just listen to him speak. Everything about him is ridiculous, from the unflinching smugness with which he spouts his obviously wrong bullshit to his absurd accent. Like many people who work in the Trump WH, no one actually knows what Gorka’s actual job was other than to go on tv and praise the President. That said, Gorka’s area of expertise, and I say that charitably, is counterterrorism. Specifically, he took a hard line against Islamic extremism, to the point that he was outright bigoted against Muslims. Gorka’s PhD dissertation provides a window into his knowledge, or lack thereof. Indeed, Gorka’s dissertation is so shoddy that it couldn’t pass muster as an undergraduate thesis, much less as a PhD thesis.

Omarosa

Omarosa was a contestant on Trump’s tv show back in the day. They kept in touch and now she works in the WH doing...something. She was such a delusional person, she actually claimed that she “delivered the black vote for Mr. Trump.” Nine out of every ten black people voted for Clinton. In December of 2017 she was fired (she claims she resigned; don’t listen to her), but, refusing to have any of it, she tried to break in to the White House to appeal her firing to Trump himself. She had to be literally dragged off the premises kicking and screaming. Hilarious.

Stephen Miller

Miller is basically a younger version of Bannon. A far right xenophobe and a total buffoon who thinks highly of himself.

Sean Spicer

Sean Spicer, in fairness, had to pull double duty as the press secretary and as comms director. Both jobs are challenging on their own, and together they are virtually impossible to do. That said, Spicer is a total doofus. There are many different gaffes to point towards, from the inaugural crowd size imbroglio to him favorably comparing Adolf Hitler to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Anthony Scaramucci

The Mooch! Scaramucci was brought on board the Trump team in the Summer of 2017. When he was first brought on he was the best evidence yet that we live in a badly written tv show. That whole episode was like the shake up in the status quo you sometimes see during the season finale. Press Secretary Spicer was fired and Scaramucci was his replacement. Chief of Staff Priebus vehemently opposed this and he was shown the door shortly thereafter. And then Scaramucci totally imploded and was tossed out not long after. He called Ryan Lizza, a New Yorker reporter, and, not understanding the rules that govern journalistic sourcing (you’d think a comms director would), gave what seemed in print to be a totally wild rant. “I’m not like Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own cock.” They released the audio of the call and it turns out he wasn’t angry at all, he’s just casually vulgar.

Brown M&Ms

The final thing to cover is what I like to call the Brown M&Ms factor.

I borrow this idea from political scientist Brendan Nyhan. Whenever the Trump administration makes an embarrassingly unprofessional mistake, like misspelling the name of a world leader on official government documents, he references the brown M&Ms story: supposedly the band Van Halen would stipulate in their contracts that there be a bowl of brown M&Ms in their dressing room at concerts. This minor yet exacting demand was used by them to gauge the attentiveness and professionalism of the staffers organizing the event. If there was a bowl of brown M&Ms in their room, then they could rest assured that the staff actually read the fine print.

The point is to highlight a very ominous fact: if the Trump administration can’t do even basic things right, then how can they handle something like North Korea or a natural disaster.

The reason why this incompetence matters is because it’s the job of these people to formulate policy and govern the country. Yeah, that’s right, the administrative state of the most powerful country on Earth is in the hands of these morons.

Part 2 | Part 3

#politics #2017 #top five