Soulless capitalists or the Wolves of Willy Loman … Josh Marshall at TPM describes the capitalist codependency of Trumpery. A bureaucratic department of socio-pathology. Nixonian echos abound...
This is one way to destroy the administrative state but it’s pretty inefficient since it seems to require biting one neck at a time. Now that we’re seen several public admissions of the phenomenon, Tillerson has been candid about a wraith-like relation to Agent Orange. Spicer, Conaway, and Nunes seem also to have succumbed. McMaster may have drawn a line in the sand about how Trump is crazy/screwed in terms of “what did Trump know”.
James Comey retained his autonomy, despite his October Surprise in 2016, and seems to have resisted becoming a wraith either because of his constitutional oath, a self-survival instinct, or maybe he took a garlic bulb and a wooden stake to his Trump dinner. Rod Rosenstein had some purple Kool-Aid last week.
Trump Dignity Wraith, dumping almost literally everything he ever professes to believe in at the altar of Trump….
The main significance is that no more than 30 hours in, the White House’s absurd cover story about firing Comey over his misdeeds toward Hillary Clinton – a lie that virtually everyone at the White House has now publicly repeated and vouched for – is coming apart at the seams.
We can also see the staggering fact that after no more than two weeks on the job, Rod Rosenstein’s public reputation, which was formidable, has been destroyed.
He now joins a legion of Trump Dignity Wraiths, men and women (though mainly men) of once vaunted reputations or at least public prestige who have been reduced to mere husks of their former selves after crossing the Trump Dignity Loss Event Horizon…
“Rosenstein wrote ((it) Comey’s firing memo) but didn’t know the use it would be put to.”
I went back and read the memo with this in mind: that interpretation is unsustainable, even on the basis of the text of the memo alone. It is clearly written as a justification and argument for Comey’s dismissal.
Because of this and the secondary information we now have about the timeline and events leading to Comey’s ouster, it seems clear to me that Rosenstein’s disgrace is entirely merited and the destruction of his public reputation wholly his own doing.
I cannot figure why Rosenstein took part in this. I don’t know enough about him to attempt any analysis of his personality. All I know is that he did. And that, whatever his motivations and however it matches or mismatches with his career to this point, his public reputation is deservedly obliterated.
There’s something dark and sick at the center of the Trump World because I don’t think anyone can really deny the pattern I’m taking note of here, even though I describe it in fulsome and lavish language: everybody who gets close gets damaged, usually badly.
And the heart of that darkness is Trump himself, a lumbering vortex of need and rage, a black hole. The only question is why people keep going, mainly of their own free volition into his reach.