So far in life, Donald Trump has survived and thrived on the same philosophy espoused by Littlefinger in “Game of Thrones”: “Chaos isn’t a pit. Chaos is a ladder.”
.. First we learned there were six, not four, people in the meeting, including a lobbyist who just happened to be a former member of the Soviet unit dealing in counterintelligence. Then we found out there were eight. Next, we’ll find out Putin was FaceTiming from Moscow.
.. Jared Kushner has had to amend his list of foreign contacts three times, adding more than 100 names that had somehow eluded him. “His lawyers have said this was inadvertent and that a member of his staff had prematurely hit the ‘send’ button for the form before it was completed,”
.. The Daily Beast recalled that back in the ’80s, when Goldstone represented John Denver and Michael Jackson, he went to Ethiopia for Band Aid, a rock concert to help famine victims, and managed to gain seven pounds.
As he explained to The Sydney Morning Herald, “I mean, what else is there to do in a country like Ethiopia but eat?”
.. According to ProPublica, after a man watching Rachel Maddow emailed Kasowitz Wednesday telling him to “Resign Now,” the lawyer shot back with a bunch of nasty messages, such as “Watch your back, bitch” and “I already know where you live, I’m on you. … You will see me. I promise. Bro.”
.. Kasowitz, ProPublica reports, has a drinking problem that could hamper him getting a security clearance. He has grown increasingly frustrated by Trump’s lack of discipline as the president sulks and rages in his tent
.. He bragged about his cunning when he brought up the hacks with Putin. After citing it once, Trump said, “I then said to him again, in a totally different way.”
Wow. That must have really outfoxed the lethal former K.G.B. agent. You know nothing, Donald Trump.
Donald Trump’s Double Standard on Weight
From the “400-pound” hacker to Alicia Machado, the candidate’s denigration of fat people has a long tradition—but may be a liability.
Spencer Kornhaber: I was struck by how much the topic of weight was part of the debate: There was the 400-pound hacker, Rosie O’Donnell, and Alicia Machado. Why do you think this keeps coming up this election?
Amy Farrell: Trump is definitely a bully, and we know that fat-shaming is the most typical reason a child will be bullied. So he’s picking up on a typical playground tactic. And it’s really connected to our ideas about sex and gender, race, and sexuality. His specialty is to insult, and fat shaming is a rhetorical move that’s far reaching, prevalent, and an easily understood way to degrade people.
.. But there’s much more of an allowance for a man to be fat than there is for a woman.
.. I think that there’s some level of the image of the “fat cat” that Trump is relying on. The fat cat wasn’t necessarily likable, but he was seen as powerful and able. So he gets a bye in that way.
.. [The implication is] that women need to live up to a certain kind of standard, and if one doesn’t they are deserving of insults, threats of violence, of sexual assault, whether symbolic or real. That has been a tactic used for the last 150 years. Cartoons against the suffragists showed them as turning into animals; white suffragists turning into black people, using the presumption that blackness was bad; and them turning into fat people. So he’s just drawing on a long tradition of mocking women if they don’t satisfy a particular kind of standard that is pleasing to him as a powerful white man.
.. Right, and also what was her great crime? It was disagreeing with him. And she’s an outspoken woman who also makes people laugh, which makes her particularly hated. The mockery of him he can’t stand, and so the only response back is to say she’s really like an animal, out of control, ugly, etc.
.. I was reading an interview with anApprentice producer who said that Trump always wanted to keep a fat man on the cast so people could laugh at him.
.. The fat man can be the everyman who everyone can identify with and isn’t threatening. Often he’s a humorous character: easy to mock but maybe quite likable, too.
But that also slides into a man who’s perceived as not being sufficiently masculine. Not being sufficiently strong. Not sufficiently male, really. So I think when he mocks other men for being fat, it’s like the alpha male kicking the other men who aren’t as great of a man as he is.