In a conference call on Monday with Barrett, Blair, D’Antonio and O’Brien, the biographers were unanimous in their assessment of what we are seeing: They are not surprised. Trump is who they thought he was. This, they said, is not a show. It is not an act. This is the man they wrote about.
.. He is, the biographers said, “profoundly narcissistic,” “willing to go to lengths we’ve never seen before in order to satisfy his ego”—and “a very dangerous man for the next three or four weeks.” And after that? “This time, it’s going to be a straight‑out loss on the biggest stage he’s ever been on,” one biographer predicted. And yet: “As long as he’s remembered, maybe it won’t matter to him.”
.. I think he’s always been a skirt chaser. I guess, you know, in that context, it didn’t surprise me. I think he’s always boasted about the things that he’s the most insecure about, which is his wealth, his intellect and his sex appeal.
.. They talk about this as if this is locker room bragging, and really, I was in a lot of locker rooms and I never heard anything like this. Men don’t brag about forcing themselves on women. They want to paint themselves as desirable, and, you know, he doesn’t look like a stud here. He looks like a predator.
.. This is boasting of something that shows your own weakness. It shows, you know, that a woman doesn’t want you; whereas, most boasts in these kind of scenarios are about women who do want you.
.. I did interview women who confirmed some pretty aggressive, if not violent—actually, I considered it violent sexual behavior—but no one will go on the record with this.
.. But it’s a very parallel circumstance with the tape because Melania is pregnant at the time of this tape, and Trump is talking about this kind of activity. And Marla Maples was pregnant when this incident, the first incident happened between Ms. Harth and Donald. And so it’s regardless of what his own home circumstances are, regardless of what’s going on in his personal life. In both instances, his wife‑to‑be in one case and actual wife in the other, was pregnant with his child, and he’s walking around either talking this way or actually behaving this way.
.. Erin Burnett went on CNN and told a very similar story, at least about the kissing part of it and the Tic Tacs, about a friend of hers.
.. But the problem with reporting all of these things is that the women involved often are afraid to go on the record. I know that his ex‑wives, when I was reporting, were very wary of being interviewed and running afoul of him by doing so, at least when they spoke with me.
.. Kruse: Do you all think he is driven more by lust or by fame?
Barrett: I think this is almost nothing to do with lust. This is subjugation.
O’Brien: Right. It’s acquisition.
Barrett: This has almost nothing to do with sex. This is a total power move if you’re talking about “I can plunge my tongue down any mouth I see. I just make my move quickly.”
.. he is popping Tic Tacs all the time, but it’s just the analog behavior to how he is with men in any room—looking to dominate, being competitive, looking for a way to be in charge. And for women, I think for him, there’s really only one way to be in charge, and that is to dominate, and if possible, you know, some physical aggression isn’t off the table.
O’Brien: I think he is just going to wage a scorch‑the‑earth campaign for the next three weeks. And if he loses, which I think he’s going to—I think he’s going to lose badly—he’s then going to come up with a scenario in which it was stolen from him, that the election was rigged, because he’s survived by creating alternate realities. And he’ll never say to himself he lost because he had a skeletal campaign operation, which he did; that he lost because he’s unappealing to a large swath of the voters; that he lost because he’s willfully ignorant about public policy; that he lost because he’s a nasty and unappealing bigot. He’ll never, ever acknowledge any of that. He’ll just come up with an alternate reality that said, “It was rigged against me.”
.. who would proceed knowing that he has all of these problems in his background, knowing how much audio and video exists, having been on “Howard Stern” and said horrible things? He just doesn’t seem to recognize his own issues and problems and how he’s perceived.
.. for the next three weeks, he’s going to be trying out, you know, Breitbart TV and proving to the masses that follow him that he’s as red in tooth and claw as he seems to be.
.. I was always kind of uncertain that he would really go for it, running for president, because he would have to do financial disclosures. What I didn’t realize was that he wouldn’t do the financial disclosures and would barrel ahead, and at least up until very recently, that he would seem to be getting away with it. So that all those tapes that are out there, he knew that, but he would just barrel over them—I think that has been his M.O. that we’ve seen in every other realm, so why wouldn’t it work in this one?
.. I think he didn’t enter into guaranteeing $900 million in personal loans in order to engineer a write‑off six or seven years later. I think he ended up getting a boost from the tax code, but that $916 million write‑off is an emblem of how abysmal his judgment is and what a bad deal‑maker he is.
.. And from the moment he got out there, he played the role of a victim. He now considers himself a victim of the national media, primarily, and a bit of the Republican establishment that abandoned him overnight
.. So I think that what is really dangerous is, over the course of the next few weeks, he’s going to push every button he can, and the primary button that he can push is racism.
.. he said he’s be quite happy to use the Department of Justice to settle scores with Hillary Clinton and, you know, by inference, anyone else who he would regard as a political opponent, and that gets back to an old kind of way of politicking
.. D’Antonio: Well, don’t you think this is a kind of thuggery, that this is a guy who is playing to a mob when he talks about how he can say these things, because he goes before crowds and they’re out for blood, and their anger and rage is the justification he has for saying these thuggish things? And now he’s going to plunge the whole country into an authoritarian dynamic because the mob is telling him to do so?
.. imagine if this was an African-American leader who is saying these kinds of things. I think that the Republican Party would be screaming for the man or woman’s arrest, but he gets cheered for saying these things.
.. the kind of rage he’s stoking is regional rage. And I think we’re going to live with that well beyond this election. He’s really served to solidify the divisions regionally and ideologically in the country, and I think he’s blown up the GOP.
.. he thought of himself as a victim in the downfall of 1990 and playing the victim card and being as angry at others as he was in the ’90s in the way in which he dealt with the bankers. It was very strikingly similar to that period of time.
.. He managed to survive in almost an unbelievable way when his empire collapsed, but managed to survive with the aid of the bankers.
.. during the primaries, with so many different people on the stage, that same M.O. worked. But only one other person on the stage for 90 minutes, it’s a totally different thing.
.. But because of his myriad flaws—you know, he’s financially undisciplined, he’s emotionally and intellectually undisciplined, and he’s incapable of building teams and leading other people, profoundly incapable of those things
.. I feel like I’ve learned more about the country by virtue of this exposure to the Trump virus than I’ve learned about Trump himself.
.. he’s truly the offspring of Roy Cohn and Joe McCarthy. He’s more violent in his way of thinking than I understood him to be. He’s less attached to reality than I thought he was.
.. But the real thing that I’m taking away is that he’s actually been telling us the truth about himself all along, and that this is not a character he’s been playing. It’s the real Trump. And I think a lot of times, people have wasted lots of effort trying to figure out: Is he serious, does he really mean this, is this all just one big joke? And I don’t think it’s a big joke. I think that he really is this horrible creature, and he has no regard for anything but himself, and he’s willing to go to lengths we’ve never seen before in order to satisfy his ego.
.. we’ve learned about the country are that racism is still a deeply troubling and embedded feature of American life, and he’s exploited that. I think we’ve learned that American voters don’t really care if they have a leader who is wildly ignorant about foreign affairs and spins tales about foreign policy that don’t correlate with facts or reality. I think we’ve learned that sexism and chauvinism are alive and well
.. we’ve learned that the leadership of the GOP lacks courage
.. It’s not Stephen Colbert. This is not a persona that’s adopted for a performance. That’s really him. He thinks that’s still a winning possibility for him, that he is a success. I think he deeply believes that.
.. After the birther controversy, after he went after Mexico and Mexicans in his announcement speech and he didn’t get called on it, he only heard cheers—I think that was the, you know, that was the liftoff.
.. I don’t think he thinks. I don’t think that he is a guy who reflects on a long‑term goal. As Tim was saying, he doesn’t lead groups of people. He doesn’t know how to organize something complex.
.. If you look at some things that he says, a lot of them are the same things he said in the 1980s, and there’s this crazy language about race and “they’re laughing at us.” He’s used these terms since 1987,
.. He openly contradicted his own running mate about Putin. It’s the only issue on which he would do that, and it has everything to do with the WikiLeaks revelations, which is still, in my judgment, his hope for the remaining several weeks, that there is more power in that.
.. Alex Jones, Roger Stone’s sidekick. Roger had predicted that the WikiLeaks stuff would come out last Wednesday, and when it didn’t, Alex Jones went on his show and absolutely denounced WikiLeaks and Assange in the vilest terms. And then the next day, he went out—and you can see the video—and apologized profoundly to Assange and said Assange was a hero to all of the world.
.. I’ve been wondering who Trump’s brain is, whether it’s Roger Stone or Alex Jones, but it’s a pretty dark personality that’s driving all of this.
Barrett: It’s Roger.
.. when you saw him do the number with the four Clinton‑associated women last night, that is Roy Cohn orchestrated through Roger. Roger has been talking about this forever. What is so interesting about what happened in the debate last night with these women is that Roger is back running the show in the person of those four women, and this is exactly what Roger has wanted him to do.
.. I don’t think you can discount Ann Coulter’s role as an influence on his thinking in this either. You know, his language when he rolled down the escalator at Trump Tower, when he first announced, and his descriptions of the evils of immigration closely paralleled things Ann Coulter had written in the past. I think she had a big influence on themes and images that he used.
.. he never had a real relationship with him. And the people in the Kremlin are laughing at this guy because all of them are far more sophisticated and shrewd than he is, and they would love for him to become president, not because they have deep lending relationships with him and not because he’s got a deep relationship with Putin, but because they know that he could be their sock puppet because he’s ignorant and overconfident.
.. he hit millions of themes in that thing last night that appealed to the Breitbart coalition, and I think it’s a measure of what you’re going to see in months and years to come from him and that part of the Republican populous faction, that he’s channeling their anger and their imagery.
.. Well, don’t you kind of think that the media promoted this for ratings, especially—I mean, I’m talking almost exclusively about broadcasts and almost exclusively about CNN, that Jeff Zucker made a ton of money putting this guy on the air. And I actually think that people scared themselves, that at some point, they said, “Oh, wait a minute. We’re journalists. We better start reporting on this guy.”
.. I think broadcast media was, for the most part, an enabler for most of his run, and I think early on, both broadcast and print didn’t know how to handle him. I think they mistakenly took him for a zoo curiosity when the campaign began last year. I think by the time—it took almost him getting nominated for most of the media to take him seriously.
.. once big institutions like the Times and the Washington Post got their engines going, they really brought a lot of force to bear on him.
.. there were people like Brian Stelter and Jake Tapper and Chris Cuomo and Anderson Cooper who took strong shots and strong looks at him, even if CNN was an enabler, you know, and that went along with, I think, a really egregious mistake on CNN’s part to bring Corey Lewandowski in
.. I think his ability to harness attention through Twitter is a big piece.
And not just harness attention but demolish his opponents. He really used Twitter much more effectively during the primary season
.. he’s certainly used it during the primary season to label, diminish and then expel political opponents like Jeb Bush and then Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio with labeling and name‑calling.
.. I’m a big sports nut, and they basically have covered the campaign the same way they cover the NFL season, you know, promoting the game at all times to encourage ratings and advertisers.
.. Michael Kruse just wrote one about how Trump on 9/11, 15 years ago, started talking about how he now had the biggest building in downtown Manhattan, the very day that the bodies were still lying in the streets, and no one on television even mentioned the story. And so these great pieces of print journalism got no airtime and died
.. I think he’s going to start a media company, despite the fact that he said he won’t. I think he and Sean Hannity and the Breitbart crew and Roger Ailes will figure in that in some way, although Ailes has a non‑compete with Fox.
.. I think it’s going to be impossible for him to get advertising for it, except for maybe Viagra ads
.. But business people do not want to stay in a hotel and have someone call and hear the word “Trump” when they answer the phone. It’s really poisonous right now.
.. if he hadn’t run, he would have had a legacy of master promoter and a guy who pioneered publicity and converting publicity into cash. But now he may go down as the thing that he doesn’t want to be remembered for at all, and that is as a loser in a landslide election.
.. somebody who is likely to go down in history as having unleashed some very hateful forces in American life, and I think that’s what’s going to end up defining him.
.. I don’t think he realizes probably how badly it taints him and his family—I mean legacy. I think if he did realize it, he still wouldn’t feel ashamed of it because I think he’s incapable of feeling shame.
.. he’ll go on to have influence through his kids. You know, Don Jr. is an aggressive extremist, I think, who sees political aspirations of his own, and Ivanka is a budding entrepreneur and has her own businesses.
.. Jared Kushner. I think Kushner has launched on what is going to be a life worth tracking. News accounts from yesterday indicate that he helped put together the Clinton women thing last night, so he’s way out there.
.. He’s polished. He’s driven, and, you know, I think he’s a serious player.
.. Department of Justice action against the Trump organization in 1973 about not renting to African Americans, Roy Cohn filing the $100 million lawsuit the next day? I mean that aggressive counterpunch—all about racism.
.. he reaffirmed, as we all know, the guilt of the Central Park Five.
.. in the Apprentice tapes is that, supposedly, he uses the N-word. You know, that’s been hinted at in stories.
.. If Trump loses badly, it will be a repudiation by maybe even the majority of white Americans of that strategy. It could be a good day in America.
The Least Surprising ‘Surprise’ of the Campaign
What’s changed since the John F. Kennedy and Johnson’s time is that we can’t, officially or unofficially, look the other way indefinitely. Although we have more liberal ideas about marriage and fidelity than we once did—Ronald Reagan was our first and, so far, our only divorced president—there are new and legitimate demands in the political marketplace that disparagement of women comes at a price, and that price is defeat. The transitional figure in this shift from lechers like Kennedy and Johnson to straighter shooters like Jimmy Carter, the Bushes, and Barack Obama is, of course, Bill Clinton, somebody who projects as a modern man but is really a lech throwback. In entering the presidential race, Trump probably thought he could pull off a Bill Clinton-type fusion of the modern and the lech just long enough to get elected.
.. But our reactions tell us more about us than they do about him. We knew all along that he was this way. He told us he was this way. In 1999, he explained to Chris Matthews on Hardball that he had a woman problem. “Can you imagine how controversial I’d be?” Trump said. “You think about him [Clinton] and the women. How about me with the women? Can you imagine?”
The Cathedral and the Bazaar, by Eric Raymond
Linus Torvalds’s style of development – release early and often, delegate everything you can, be open to the point of promiscuity – came as a surprise. No quiet, reverent cathedral-building here – rather, the Linux community seemed to resemble a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches (aptly symbolized by the Linux archive sites, who’d take submissions from anyone) out of which a coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles.
The fact that this bazaar style seemed to work, and work well, came as a distinct shock. As I learned my way around, I worked hard not just at individual projects, but also at trying to understand why the Linux world not only didn’t fly apart in confusion but seemed to go from strength to strength at a speed barely imaginable to cathedral-builders.
.. 1. Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.
.. 2. Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).
.. Linus Torvalds, for example, didn’t actually try to write Linux from scratch. Instead, he started by reusing code and ideas from Minix, a tiny Unix-like OS for 386 machines. Eventually all the Minix code went away or was completely rewritten – but while it was there, it provided scaffolding for the infant that would eventually become Linux.
.. you often don’t really understand the problem until after the first time you implement a solution. The second time, maybe you know enough to do it right. So if you want to get it right, be ready to start over at least once.
.. 5. When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.
.. 6. Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.
.. Linus’ cleverest and most consequential hack was not the construction of the Linux kernel itself, but rather his invention of the Linux development model.
.. One unexpected side-effect of FSF’s policy of trying to legally bind code into the GPL is that it becomes procedurally harder for FSF to use the bazaar mode, since they believe they must get a copyright assignment for every individual contribution of more than twenty lines in order to immunize GPLed code from challenge under copyright law. People who copyright using the BSD and MIT X Consortium licenses don’t have this problem; they’re not trying to reserve rights that anyone might have an incentive to challenge.
.. 7. Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.
.. Most developers (including me) used to believe this was bad policy for larger than trivial projects, because early versions are almost by definition buggy versions and you don’t want to wear out the patience of your users.
This belief reinforced the general commitment to a cathedral-building style of development. If the overriding objective was for users to see as few bugs as possible, why then you’d only release one every six months (or less often), and work like a dog on debugging between releases.
.. In those early times (around 1991) it wasn’t unknown for him to release a new kernel more than once a day! Because he cultivated his base of co-developers and leveraged the Internet for collaboration harder than anyone else, this worked.
.. Linus is a damn fine hacker (how many of us could engineer an entire production-quality operating system kernel?). But Linux didn’t represent any awesome conceptual leap forward. Linus is not (or at least, not yet) an innovative genius of design in the way that, say, Richard Stallman or James Gosling (of NeWS and Java) are. Rather, Linus seems to me to be a genius of engineering, with a sixth sense for avoiding bugs and development dead-ends and a true knack for finding the minimum-effort path from point A to point B.
.. what was he maximizing? What was he cranking out of the machinery?
Put that way, the question answers itself. Linus was keeping his hacker/users constantly stimulated and rewarded – stimulated by the prospect of having an ego-satisfying piece of the action, rewarded by the sight of constant (even daily) improvement in their work.
.. Here, I think, is the core difference underlying the cathedral-builder and bazaar styles. In the cathedral-builder view of programming, bugs and development problems are tricky, insidious, deep phenomena. It takes months of scrutiny by a dedicated few to develop confidence that you’ve winkled them all out. Thus the long release intervals, and the inevitable disappointment when long-awaited releases are not perfect.
In the bazaar view, on the other hand, you assume that bugs are generally shallow phenomena – or, at least, that they turn shallow pretty quick when exposed to a thousand eager co-developers pounding on every single new release. Accordingly you release often in order to get more corrections, and as a beneficial side effect you have less to lose if an occasional botch gets out the door.
.. “Debugging is parallelizable”
.. “The total cost of maintaining a widely used program is typically 40 percent or more of the cost of developing it. Surprisingly this cost is strongly affected by the number of users. More users find more bugs“.
.. Linux kernel version are numbered in such a way that potential users can make a choice either to run the last version designated “stable” or to ride the cutting edge and risk bugs in order to get new features
.. Brooks, Chapter 9: “Show me your [code] and conceal your [data structures], and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your [data structures], and I won’t usually need your [code]; it’ll be obvious.”
.. 10. If you treat your beta-testers as if they’re your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.
.. 11. The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.
.. if you are completely and self-deprecatingly truthful about how much you owe other people, the world at large will treat you like you did every bit of the invention yourself and are just being becomingly modest about your innate genius. if you are completely and self-deprecatingly truthful about how much you owe other people, the world at large will treat you like you did every bit of the invention yourself and are just being becomingly modest about your innate genius.
.. 13. “Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.”
.. With the SMTP forwarding feature, it pulled far enough in front of the competition to potentially become a “category killer”, one of those classic programs that fills its niche so competently that the alternatives are not just discarded but almost forgotten.
I think you can’t really aim or plan for a result like this. You have to get pulled into it by design ideas so powerful that afterward the results just seem inevitable, natural, even foreordained. The only way to try for ideas like that is by having lots of ideas – or by having the engineering judgment to take other peoples’ good ideas beyond where the originators thought they could go.
.. most science and engineering and software development isn’t done by original genius, hacker mythology to the contrary.
.. 14. Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.
.. I believe the fetchmail project succeeded partly because I restrained my tendency to be clever;
.. A bazaar project coordinator or leader must have good people and communications skills.
This should be obvious. In order to build a development community, you need to attract people, interest them in what you’re doing, and keep them happy about the amount of work they’re doing.
..It is not a coincidence that Linus is a nice guy who makes people like him and want to help him. It’s not a coincidence that I’m an energetic extrovert who enjoys working a crowd and has some of the delivery and instincts of a stand-up comic. To make the bazaar model work, it helps enormously if you have at least a little skill at charming people.
.. He argued that the complexity and communication costs of a project rise with the square of the number of developers, while work done only rises linearly. This claim has since become known as “Brooks’s Law” and is widely regarded as a truism. But if Brooks’s Law were the whole picture, Linux would be impossible.
.. In his discussion of “egoless programming”, Weinberg observed that in shops where developers are not territorial about their code, and encourage other people to look for bugs and potential improvements in it, improvement happens dramatically faster than elsewhere.
.. the traditional Unix world was prevented from pushing this approach to the ultimate by several factors. One was the legal contraints of various licenses, trade secrets, and commercial interests. Another (in hindsight) was that the Internet wasn’t yet good enough.
.. Linux was the first project to make a conscious and successful effort to use the entire world as its talent pool. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the gestation period of Linux coincided with the birth of the World Wide Web, and that Linux left its infancy during the same period in 1993-1994 that saw the takeoff of the ISP industry and the explosion of mainstream interest in the Internet. Linus was the first person who learned how to play by the new rules that pervasive Internet made possible.
.. While cheap Internet was a necessary condition for the Linux model to evolve, I think it was not by itself a sufficient condition. Another vital factor was the development of a leadership style and set of cooperative customs that could allow developers to attract co-developers and get maximum leverage out of the medium.
“Having been brought up in a serf-owner’s family, I entered active life, like all young men of my time, with a great deal of confidence in the necessity of commanding, ordering, scolding, punishing and the like. But when, at an early stage, I had to manage serious enterprises and to deal with [free] men, and when each mistake would lead at once to heavy consequences, I began to appreciate the difference between acting on the principle of command and discipline and acting on the principle of common understanding. The former works admirably in a military parade, but it is worth nothing where real life is concerned, and the aim can be achieved only through the severe effort of many converging wills.”
.. The “utility function” Linux hackers are maximizing is not classically economic, but is the intangible of their own ego satisfaction and reputation among other hackers. (One may call their motivation “altruistic”, but this ignores the fact that altruism is itself a form of ego satisfaction for the altruist). Voluntary cultures that work this way are not actually uncommon; one other in which I have long participated is science fiction fandom ..
.. Perhaps in the end the open-source culture will triumph not because cooperation is morally right or software “hoarding” is morally wrong (assuming you believe the latter, which neither Linus nor I do), but simply because the commercial world cannot win an evolutionary arms race with open-source communities that can put orders of magnitude more skilled time into a problem
Choosing Leaders: Clueless or Crazy
These days, if you want to elect a leader, you generally have two choices: a sensible, establishment figure who is completely out of touch, or a populist outsider who is incompetent, crazy or both.
.. It’s not clear Johnson was really in favor of Britain leaving the European Union, but leading a campaign for it seemed to be the quickest way to make himself prime minister. When his side of the referendum surprisingly won, he emerged ashen-faced, like a boy who’d had fun playing with matches but accidentally blew up his own house.
.. The big historical context is this: Something fundamental is shifting in our politics. The insiders can’t see it. Outsiders get thrown up amid the tumult, but they are too marginal, eccentric and inexperienced to lead effectively.
Without much enthusiasm, many voters seem to be flocking to tough, no-nonsense women who at least seem sensible: Angela Merkel, Hillary Clinton and, now, the Conservative Party front-runner, Theresa May.
.. We probably need a political Pope Francis-type figure, who comes up from the bottom and understands life there, but who can still make the case for an open dynamic world, with free-flowing goods, ideas, capital and people. Until that figure emerges, we could be in for a set of serial leadership crises.