“Trump spent every morning on the phone with me, with Page 6––he loved to get his name in the paper. As a result, he would drop dimes on other people in every industry he knew dirt on. You put the story in the paper, and then, three days later, you say, ‘Donald Trump was at a Knicks game with this supermodel.’ And he’s happy. That’s all it took.”
.. Calling Trump “shameless and shrewd at the same time,” Benza said “you might not like his style, but no one has played the American public and the U.S. government to this extent, and the media,” adding, “when he was with Marla Maples and we were going to write that they broke up, he cared more about ‘get my wealth in there, get the number right, how many billions I’m worth––that’s more important.’”
.. the gossip game was largely played on the barter system. To fill a blank page everyday for a city as high strung as New York, you can become somewhat dependent on publicists and managers and agents calling you and dropping a dime on someone so long as you were able to squeeze something in the column that helped them.
.. Having a PR flack sell out an A-List client’s extra-marital affair wasn’t odd at all, so long as I was able or willing to get one of their smaller, but vital, clients in the column. And God help them if I had a bit of dirt on one of their clients. Then the real negotiations began: “What are you gonna give me so that I bury this story and no one ever sees it?”
.. But the biggest difference in gossip, then vs. now, is we were more hung up on getting things right. Not so much getting things first.
.. I guess the aggravation he’s having now is see how much different it is trying to control ALL the columns, ink and electronic, rather than the wood, Page 2 or 3 and the more-pliable gossip columns.
.. I once said, he doesn’t check his pulse in the morning––he checks the papers to see if he’s alive. And that’s not a knock on him. Keeping your name in print in NYC has value.
..I’ve often said all columns should have a list of all the contributors who helped break, shape, and slant every story that began with a rumor or a tip. If that were the case, Trump would have a prominent position at the tippy top. But he wouldn’t be alone. More people than you think used to call me and just chat away over a cup of coffee.
.. What much of America hasn’t seen yet is the silly, compassionate, charming side to the guy.
.. The media ecosystem is ripe for takeover. The loudest, most popular voice usually wins. It’s no different than the atmosphere in a high-school cafeteria.
Give the crowd something to actualize their anger on and they’re off!
.. In general, people like getting angry––they’ll worry about the reason why later on.
..
Never before has the political world resembled a circus.
All Trump has done is put a face on The Strongman. And with everyone talking and gawking at The Strongman (or the anomaly), the circus gets a ton of attention, sells out every town, and rolls on without a hitch. I can’t see any other pol pulling this off or trying to adopt or whip up comparable anger. I don’t see anyone else with the same ego. And that’s saying a lot since everyone else who’s ever run for president have huge egos. But his is the size of Everest.
Who Are the Angriest Republicans?
These blue-collar white Republicans, a mainstay of the conservative coalition for decades, are now vilified by their former right-wing allies as a “non-Christian” force “in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture,” corrupted by the same “sense of entitlement” that Democratic minorities were formerly accused of.
.. Williamson portrays Trump’s struggling white supporters as relying on their imaginary victimhood when, in fact, he contends:
They failed themselves. If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy — which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog— you will come to an awful realization. It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be.
Less well-off white voters have only themselves to blame, Williamson continues..
.. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.
.. David French, also of National Review, writes:
I grew up in Kentucky, live in a rural county in Tennessee, and have seen the challenges of the white working-class first-hand. Simply put, Americans are killing themselves and destroying their families at an alarming rate. No one is making them do it. The economy isn’t putting a bottle in their hand. Immigrants aren’t making them cheat on their wives or snort OxyContin. Obama isn’t walking them into the lawyer’s office to force them to file a bogus disability claim.
..
Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank, wrote:
America’s self-appointed best and brightest uniformly view the passions unleashed by Trump as the modern-day equivalent of a medieval peasants’ revolt.
.. In 1992, 57 percent of white men without college degrees voted Democrat in congressional elections. In 1994, the percentage shrank by 20 points. Republicans captured the House that year and maintained control in 8 of the next 10 elections.
.. Between 1979 and 2005, the average real hourly wage for those with a college degree went up 22 percent and for those with advanced degrees, 28 percent. In contrast, average wages for those with only some college went up a mere 3 percent, actually fell 2 percent for those with a high school diploma, and for high school dropouts, declined a stunning 18 percent.
.. As a matter of practical politics, how can a party that is losing ground in virtually every growing constituency — Hispanics, Asians, single women and the young — even consider jettisoning a single voter, much less the struggling white working class?
.. The Republican Party has seen its core — married white Christians — decline from 62 percent of the population of the United States to 28 percent in 2015
.. Trump has won his biggest primary margins among less financially secure, less educated voters, turning the traditional winning coalition in Republican primaries upside down. Mitt Romney consistently did best among the most educated and most affluent Republican primary voters.
I’m Angry! So I’m Voting For Donald Trump.
Andrew Klavan is angry! So he’s voting for Donald Trump.
Politicians Seeing Evil, Hearing Evil, Speaking Evil
“My goal wasn’t to create a personality cult around Rabin,” Gitai told A.F.P. “My focus was on the incitement campaign that led to his murder.” Sure, the official investigating commission focused on the breakdowns in Rabin’s security detail, but, Gitai added, “They didn’t investigate what were the underlying forces that wanted to kill Rabin. His murder came at the end of a hate campaign led by hallucinating rabbis, settlers who were against the withdrawal from territories and the parliamentary right, led by the Likud (party), already then headed by Benjamin Netanyahu, who wanted to destabilize Rabin’s Labor government.”
.. And then Trump insulted John McCain, saying he was only a war hero because he got captured, adding, “I like people that weren’t captured, O.K.?” McCain spent five and a half years as a P.O.W. in Vietnam and was repeatedly tortured and had his bones broken. As CNN reported, “Trump, meanwhile, received four student deferments and one medical deferment to avoid serving in the Vietnam War.”
What does it mean to impugn a man who has sacrificed so much for his country? It means you can smear anyone.