This was back in 1982 and I was wandering around behind the U.S. Capitol when I bumped into a fellow grad school classmate whom I hadn’t seen since I finished my seminars in 1969. Turned out this guy decided he didn’t want an academic career, so after finishing his degree he got a job on the staff of one of the Senate committees as a full-time researcher which meant spending lots of time across the street from the Capitol in the Library of Congress, which wasn’t such a bad gig.
Why was he walking away from the Capitol that morning? Because, as he explained to me, his party had just lost the 1982 election and was no longer in the majority, which meant that until they returned to the majority in the Senate, he needed to find another job.
“It’s nothing to worry about,” he told me, “I’ll just roost in one of the federal agencies until I go back up to the Hill.”
In other words, this former graduate school classmate, was a bone fide member of the Deep State. Now hold that thought.
One of the things which emerges from reading the Select Committee’s January 6th Report is how Trump relied on information and advice from a group of advisers who Grandpa would dismiss as ‘shlemiels’ (read: fools.) I’m talking about guys like Giuliani, Eastman, Bannon, and others who not only promoted the ‘big lie,’ but put together the operation which ultimately did nothing for Trump except get him criminally referred to the DOJ.
And I don’t care what Trump or any of his current defenders has to say, Twitter account or no Twitter account, being the subject of a DOJ criminal investigation is no fun.
These putzes who are all identified in the Select Committee’s report and are shown to have made every wrong decision you can make, between them had absolutely no federal government agency experience of any kind, no background in planning or promoting the strategies they carried out for Trump, no duties or responsibilities which would have given them even the slightest degree of awareness or professional perspective about what they were telling Trump he had to do.
So, here’s the question which emerges from reading the report for the second time last night: How could Trump ever surround himself and depend on the advice of such a group of nincompoops and utter schmucks? I’ll tell you how.
Back in 1990 I actually spent several days hanging around the office of the Trump Organization in New York. At the time I was working for a conglomerate which owned a company that manufactured airplane hydraulics and Trump had just launched Trump Air. So, I went up to the Trump operation to try and make a sale.
I never saw Trump himself, but I spent some time and a couple of lunches with the Vice President who was in charge of the airline. Every time I went up to meet him, I noticed that there were always some guys sitting around, so I asked my Vice President who they were, and this is what he said:
“There’re always some guys who get to make a five-minute pitch to Donald about a deal. He never says ‘yes’ and he never says ‘no.’ But they can go out and make the pitch to someone else and say that Trump is interested in what they’re trying to sell.”
None of those jerkoffs like Giuliani or Eastman ever thought of themselves as engaging in a public service career. None of them ever moved between a Congressional committee and a federal agency and back to a Congressional committee depending on how the electoral winds blew.
Trump listened to this bunch of fools because they told him what he wanted to hear. And they told him what he wanted to hear because getting close to the President of the United States was the perfect way to feather their own nests.
These guys weren’t interested in public service. After all, a career in government makes you a card-carrying member of the Deep State and it doesn’t pay the big bucks. They came to D.C. with Trump for the same reason that Trump came to D.C., which was to make a buck in a market which generated almost $7 billion in revenues in 2016 alone!
Know what one percent of $7 billion is worth? Try $70 million. Not a bad return for sitting in the Oval Office and competing for who will bring Donald a Diet Coke, right?
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