The emissary leaves behind a book in the Kanamit language. A team of analysts translates the title as “To Serve Man,”
‘To Serve Man,’ it’s… it’s a cookbook!”
.. For those who serve the president: The price of your diligence is his flippancy. The price of your efforts to protect him is his willingness to expose you. The price of your sacrifice — of time, profit, career and, in the long run, reputation — is his indifference. The price of your loyalty is his contempt.
.. For those who think the president’s character flaws can be softened, or overcome, by the caliber of his advisers: You can’t use water to put out a grease fire.
.. The president’s digital compulsions may be less obscene than Anthony Weiner’s, but they’re more consequential.
.. Twitter is the electric current that connects populist to populus, demagogue to mob
.. What’s a loss at the high court when he knows he can use it to capitalize politically from the next terrorist attack in the U.S.?
.. we may learn from James Comey’s Senate testimony whether Trump will have to pay a political price of his own for demanding personal loyalty oaths from nonpolitical appointees. If so, it would be fitting punishment for a man who so far has only known profit and advantage from his lack of loyalty toward those who serve him.
How Trump May Save the Republic
.. When he confesses the problem to mother, she responds with the most reproachful reassurance in movie history:
“We are protected by the enormity of your stupidity — for a time.”
Just so with our 45th president. His views are often malevolent, and his conduct might ultimately prove criminal. But we, too, are protected, for a time, by the enormity of his stupidity.
.. In corporate life, the usual practice when firing someone is either to say nothing or to say something nice, on the theory that the unlucky person is likelier to respond in kind. Trump has now given his former director the opportunity and incentive to do the opposite. Congressional hearings, should they happen, will be fun.
Clear, Clarify, Hold, Build
H.R. McMaster can put counterinsurgency tactics to good use in the White House.
Last week, Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly said during a visit to Mexico that there would be “no, repeat, no, use of military force in immigration operations. None.” This was a few hours after Mr. Trump had described his deportation policy as “a military operation.” A few days earlier, U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley insisted “we absolutely support a two-state solution” for Israelis and Palestinians, just a day after the president said he was agnostic on the subject.Before that, it was Mike Pence affirming the centrality of NATO, after his boss had called it obsolete. And Jim Mattis, promising Iraqis that the administration does not intend to take their oil, despite the countless times Mr. Trump has lamented our failure to do so. And Mike Pompeo reiterating that, yes, it was Russia that was behind the DNC leaks, and not, as Mr. Trump speculated last year, a 400-pound man in New Jersey.
Don’t Dismiss President Trump’s Attacks on the Media as Mere Stupidity
The President routinely describes reporting he dislikes as FAKE NEWS. The Administration calls the press “the opposition party,” ridicules news organizations it doesn’t like as business failures, and calls for journalists to be fired. Mr. Trump has called for rewriting libel laws in order to more easily sue the press.
.. Ideologically, the president is trying to depose so-called mainstream media in favor of the media he likes — Breitbart News and the rest. Another way of making this point is to say that he’s trying to substitute news for propaganda, information for boosterism.
His objection to, say, the New York Times, isn’t that there’s a liberal bias in the paper that gets in the way of its objectivity, which I think would be a fair criticism. His objection is to objectivity itself. He’s perfectly happy for the media to be disgusting and corrupt — so long as it’s on his side.
.. O’Reilly asks:
Is there any validity to the criticism of you that you say things that you can’t back up factually, and as the President you say there are three million illegal aliens who voted and you don’t have the data to back that up, some people are going to say that it’s irresponsible for the President to say that.
To which the president replies:
Many people have come out and said I’m right.
Now many people also say Jim Morrison faked his own death. Many people say Barack Obama was born in Kenya. “Many people say” is what’s known as an argumentum ad populum.
The president is responding to a claim of fact not by denying the fact, but by denying the claim that facts are supposed to have on an argument.
.. He isn’t telling O’Reilly that he’s got his facts wrong. He’s saying that, as far as he is concerned, facts, as most people understand the term, don’t matter: That they are indistinguishable from, and interchangeable with, opinion; and that statements of fact needn’t have any purchase against a man who is either sufficiently powerful to ignore them or sufficiently shameless to deny them
.. This is a version of Thrasymachus’s argument in Plato’s Republic that justice is the advantage of the stronger and that injustice “if it is on a large enough scale, is stronger, freer, and more masterly than justice.”
.. Truth is what you can get away with.
.. Today, just 17% of adults aged 18-24 read a newspaper daily, down from 42% at the turn of the century. Today there are fewer than 33,000 full-time newsroom employees, a drop from 55,000 just 20 years ago.
.. I personally think we crossed a rubicon in the Clinton years, when three things happened: we decided that some types of presidential lies didn’t matter; we concluded that “character” was an over-rated consideration when it came to judging a president; and we allowed the lines between political culture and celebrity culture to become hopelessly blurred.
.. If a public figure tells a whopping lie once in his life, it’ll haunt him into his grave. If he lies morning, noon and night, it will become almost impossible to remember any one particular lie. Outrage will fall victim to its own ubiquity. It’s the same truth contained in Stalin’s famous remark that the death of one man is a tragedy but the death of a million is a statistic.
.. Shameless rhetoric will always find a receptive audience with shameless people. Donald Trump’s was the greatest political strip-tease act in U.S. political history: the dirtier he got, the more skin he showed, the more his core supporters liked it.
.. Earlier today, at his press conference, the president claimed his administration is running like a “fine-tuned machine.” In actual fact, he just lost his Labor Secretary nominee, his National Security Adviser was forced out in disgrace, and the Intelligence Community is refusing to fully brief the president for fear he might compromise sources and methods.
.. The first is that we normalize it, simply by becoming inured to constant repetition of the same bad behavior.
The second is that at some level it excites and entertains us.
.. And the third is that we adopt new metrics of judgment, in which politics becomes more about perceptions than performance—of how a given action is perceived as being perceived. If a reporter for the New York Times says that Trump’s press conference probably plays well in Peoria, then that increases the chances that it will play well in Peoria.
Let me add a fourth point here: our tendency to rationalize.
.. And the third is that we adopt new metrics of judgment, in which politics becomes more about perceptions than performance—of how a given action is perceived as being perceived. If a reporter for the New York Times says that Trump’s press conference probably plays well in Peoria, then that increases the chances that it will play well in Peoria.
Let me add a fourth point here: our tendency to rationalize.
.. And the third is that we adopt new metrics of judgment, in which politics becomes more about perceptions than performance—of how a given action is perceived as being perceived. If a reporter for the New York Times says that Trump’s press conference probably plays well in Peoria, then that increases the chances that it will play well in Peoria.
Let me add a fourth point here: our tendency to rationalize.
.. They wanted to believe. They were willing to adapt. They thought they could do more good from the inside.
.. They convinced themselves that, brutal and capricious as Stalinism might be, it couldn’t possibly be worse than the exploitative capitalism of the West.
.. There’s the same desperate desire for political influence; the same belief that Trump represents a historical force to which they ought to belong; the same willingness to bend or discard principles they once considered sacred; the same fear of seeming out-of-touch with the mood of the public; the same tendency to look the other way at comments or actions that they cannot possibly justify; the same belief that you do more good by joining than by opposing; the same Manichean belief that, if Hillary Clinton had been elected, the United States would have all-but ended as a country.