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A Quote from Michael Wolff

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House

It came out, and made its splash, months ago now, but I'm just getting around to reading FIRE AND FURY, a take on the early months of the Trump presidency written largely from the point of view of Steve Bannon.

"It's worse than you can imagine. An idiot surrounded by clowns. Trump won't read anything -- not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers, nothing. He gets up half-way through meetings with world leaders because he is bored. And his staff is no better. Kushner is an entitled baby who knows nothing. Bannon is an arrogant prick who thinks he's smarter than he is. Trump is less a person than  collection of terrible traits. No one will survive the first year but his family. I hate the work, but feel I need to stay because I'm the only person there with a clue what he's doing. The reason so few jobs have been filled is that they only accept  people who pass ridiculous purity tests, even  for midlevel policy-making jobs where the people will never see the light of day."

This is apparently from a memo written by Gary Cohn. To whom? It isn't clear?  For those with short memories, Cohn was for years the president and COO of Wall Street pillar Goldman Sachs, He was the Trump administration's chief economic adviser throughout the period covered by Wolff's book, though in March 2018 he was sacked, (having thus survived the first year by only a couple of months)  apparently due to his disagreement with POTUS' view that tariffs are good and trade wars are easy to win.

The above quoted passage is intriguing for a number of reasons. One of them is that Wolff's book is in large part written from Bannon's perspective: Bannon was clearly a central source for it.  Yet Wolff, in introducing this tidbit, seems to want to separate himself from his own Bannonite sourcing, and tease us with the possibility that we may have been reading the second hand account of someone who only think's he is smart.

That phrase reminds me, too, of The Princess Bride.  [SPOILER ALERT.] One of the bad guys there, bragging at one point about how great a genius he is, asks one of the protagonists: "You've heard of Socrates? Plato? Aristotle? [pauses for effect] Idiots!" That character's hubris proves fatal within minutes of that bit of braggadocio.

Anyway: Cohn clearly believes that Bannon is the type represented by that character and (this may help make his point) Cohn's own tenure in the Trump administration did outlast Bannon's.

"Have fun storming the castle!"
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