The digital guru who helped Donald Trump to the presidency BBC News Many of the "Tech Gods" were dismayed when Donald Trump - who holds a very different worldview - won the American presidency. But did they actually help him to win? A key insider from the Trump campaign's digital operation - Theresa Wong - unravels for ... |
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The digital guru who helped Donald Trump to the presidency - BBC News
Hole 3, Par 4
A dogleg left, not Trumps favorite hole: He shanks off the tee into the Sessions Woods, pretends that didnt happen, takes a floating mulligan, and drives down the right side of the fairway. He pulls his six-iron approach into the Manafort bunker. Blasts out into the Kushner trap on the other side of the green. His sand wedge to nine feet is good and he sinks the putt for a triple bogey 7. He marks a 5 What do you think I pay Spicer for?
Hole 4, Par 3
On this downhill short hole over the Russian Collusion Pond, Trump skies his seven-iron and plops it right in the water. Never happened, this is a witch hunt, he says, takes another floating mulligan, and fires a defiant shot to 20 feet from the pin. Holes the putt and records his bogey 4 as a birdie 2. Damn right it was a birdie, just ask Kellyanne about alternative facts.
Hole 5, Par 4
Its prudent to play short here but Trump takes a driver and arrows the ball into the Syrian Tomahawks trap. He cant think what his next shot should be. Opts for an eight-iron and pulls it into the Xi Woods, notorious for their deceptive difficulty. Cannons the ball into a Comey Pine and orders it chopped down immediately. Chips up close and holes for a bogey 5 marked as a par 4. Hillary can delete 33,000 e-mails and I cant delete a shot?
Hole 6, Par 4
Trump drives into the Foggy Bottom bunker, then throws a fit because sand is hard and theres water in it, due to budget cuts. Drops ball out. Calls Jared Kushner for advice. Goes for the green over Merkel Lake but ball disappears into the water and she wont even pay up. Drops out, hits a doozy of a chip (simple as Israel-Palestine) to four feet, but misses putt and hurls putter into the water. Marks his 7 as a par 4. Call it a Kompromat.
Hole 7, Par 3
Takes a six-iron, lands it four feet beyond pin, ball rolls back into hole. Hole in one! I am the most brilliant guy in the history of the universe. Just ask the Saudis. The hole is renamed Al Saud. Saudis underwrite Bedminster to the tune of $500 million over a decade; all Americans of Iranian descent banned.
Hole 8, Par 5
Trump hooks into the Kim Jong-un Wood and vows to burn every tree. Hacks the ball out but, furious at all the foliage, orders United States out of Paris climate accord. His approach is short and lands in the China bunker; takes him three shots to get out. Sinks a long putt for a double bogey 7, which he scores as a 6. Donald Jr. can verify that with advice from Russia.
Hole 9, Par 4
Pulls his drive into the effing Scaramucci rough. Shanks into the Priebus bunker; orders it abolished. Blasts out, calls the Marines to eliminate Scaramucci rough. Sends his approach into the McCain bunker, and decides nuking Pyongyang would be simpler than health care. Blasts out, two putts, for what Trump records as a 4 (in fact a 7). It was really a 3, says the Scaramouch. Werent you watching?
Trump score: 36. Actual score: 53. Audit to follow by Robert Mueller.
In the spring of 2016, Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, were both backstage at a National Rifle Association conference in Louisville, Kentucky. The two men are political opposites. McConnell is a poor orator but a gifted Senate tactician. He plays the long game. Trump is a great showman but barely knows the basics of the constitutional system. He improvises. In Louisville, McConnell noticed that Trump, who was by then the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee, was holding pages of prepared remarks in his hand. I see you have a script, McConnell said, according to a former adviser who heard the story from the Majority Leader. Put me in the category of supporting that.
I hate it, Trump said.
But this is what you should be doing, McConnell told him.
Until this week, the relationship between Trump and McConnell was one of the less fraught ones among senior Republicans in Washington. Unlike Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, who held out from endorsing Trump for months last year and who has occasionally spoken outgingerlyagainst Trumps worst excesses, McConnell has always viewed Trump with a calculating eye. He had two priorities in 2016: to hold the Republican majority in the Senate, and to help elect a Republican President who would get to name a Supreme Court justice for the seat that he had refused to allow President Obama to fill. No matter how deep Trumps flaws, McConnell believed that antagonizing him would hurt those twin goals. He supported Trump when he won the Republican nomination, and he has rarely criticized him in public since.
McConnell was extremely pragmatic about the relationship, the former McConnell adviser told me. He never said anything if it wasnt in the interest of him, or his partys interest, to say it. He didnt want to create any intra-party feud that could hurt his members.
Last year, McConnell cared less about anti-Trump conservatives than he did about Republicans such as Roy Blunt, the Missouri senator who was facing a tough relection fight in a state where Trump was extremely popular. It wouldnt have helped Blunt if McConnell was out there trashing Trump, the former adviser saidMcConnell saved any rebukes for personal conversations with Trump. Thats the way the relationship looked up until this week.
What happened this week is that when Trump wasnt busy threatening North Korea , he was busy threatening McConnell. The attacks were provoked by a speech McConnell delivered on Monday in Kentucky, in which he said, Our new President, of course, has not been in this line of work before. I think he had excessive expectations about how quickly things happen in the democratic process. On Wednesday, Trump responded. Senator Mitch McConnell said I had excessive expectations, but I dont think so, he tweeted. After 7 years of hearing Repeal & Replace, why not done?
Trump woke up on Thursday with McConnell still on his mind. Can you believe that Mitch McConnell, who has screamed Repeal & Replace for 7 years, couldn't get it done, Trump tweeted, a few minutes before 7 A.M. Must Repeal & Replace ObamaCare! Later in the day, he tweeted a slightly more encouraging note: Mitch, get back to work and put Repeal & Replace, Tax Reform & Cuts and a great Infrastructure Bill on my desk for signing. You can do it!
Also on Thursday, reporters asked Trump if he wanted McConnell to step down as Majority Leader. His answer was coy. If he doesnt get repeal and replace done, and if he doesnt get taxes donemeaning cuts and reformand if he doesnt get a very easy one to get doneinfrastructureif he doesnt get them done, then you can ask me that question, Trump said.
Disagreements between a Senate Majority Leader and a President of the same party are not a Trump-era innovation. They have a long history. They used to say that the best situation was to be the Majority Leader with a President from the other party, Donald Ritchie, a former historian of the United States Senate, told me. Majority Leaders are expected to go to bat for the President even when its not in the best interest of their party.
Ritchie pointed to the relationship between John F. Kennedy and Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, a fellow-Democrat. He was criticized as not being strong enough at getting Kennedys program through, Ritchie said. Nixon, too, had trouble with a member of his own party: High Scott. Scott eventually supported impeachment and conviction of Nixon, Ritchie said. More recently, George W. Bush pushed for Trent Lott to resign as Majority Leader after Lott said that the country would have been better off if Strom Thurmond, who ran for President as a segregationist, had won the election of 1948.
Still, Republicans in Washington were distraught at Trumps attacks on McConnell this week. When political heavyweights get into a public fight, their aides generally try to play down the rift when talking to reporters. But people close to McConnell whom I talked to didnt play anything down. I think this is a different moment, the former McConnell adviser said. Im not saying its going to define the relationship or persist, but it is different and it should be acknowledged as such. McConnell is not a shrinking violet. He very jealously guards the prerogatives of the Senate.
Scott Jennings, a former senior adviser to McConnell, noted that Trump this week wasnt talking about the three Republicans senatorsLisa Murkowski, John McCain , and Susan Collinswhose votes doomed the Partys latest effort to repeal Obamacare . Two of them were personally insulted by the President, Jennings said, referring to McCain and Murkowski, whom Trump has attacked in the past. And the other one is far more liberal than the rest of the conference. Jennings added, Is Mitch McConnell to blame for the personal relationships of Donald Trump and Murkowski and McCain? I dont think so.
Jennings, like many of McConnells supporters, was mystified by Trumps lack of gratitude toward the senator, for his support during the campaign and for the Supreme Court seat that he delivered. Their relationship is rooted in one thing, he said. McConnell kept open the Scalia seat, which likely delivered the Presidency to Donald Trump. Putting Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court, Jennings said, is Trumps only legislative achievement. He added, While a lot of Republicans were having mood swings about Trump during the campaign, McConnell stayed the course.
Some Republican senators have also come to McConnells defense. McConnell has been the best leader weve had in my time in the Senate, through very tough challenges, Orrin Hatch, of Utah, tweeted on Thursday. I fully support him.
Could Trumps attacks on McConnell mark some kind of a turning point? Sometimes, a dispute between a President and a Majority Leader can rock a Presidency. In 1944, President Roosevelt, a New Yorker with a sense of showmanship, and Majority Leader Alben Barkley, a Kentuckian who was often criticized for not standing up to F.D.R., clashed over a tax bill passed by Congress and vetoed by the President. In his veto messageTwitter had not yet come alongRoosevelt said that the bill was not for the needy, but for the greedy. Barkley considered this such a personal affront that he immediately resigned as Majority Leader. The Senate rose up against F.D.R., overriding his veto and reinstalling Barkley. One senator, Elbert Thomas, of Utah, remarked that before the incident, Barkley spoke to us for the President, but since then, he speaks for us, to the President.
In 2007, McConnell himself told this history in a speech on the Senate floor . The Majority Leader and the President mended the breach soon after, and continued to work together, McConnell, who has long had a picture of Barkley hanging above his desk in his Capitol office, said. But you could say their relationship was never again the same.
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Will the Rift Between Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell Last? - The New Yorker
A few years ago Mr. Kim poured millions of dollars into a museum in the farming town of Sinchon that serves as a mecca of anti-Americanism, a house of horrors with room after room cataloging in full, bloody, life-size detail the (largely unsubstantiated) war crimes pinned on the Americans. All spring and summer, students are taken by bus to the museum for field trips intended to scare them into hating and fearing the United States.
There is method to the madness. Mr. Kim is using the threat of attack from the United States to enforce a sense of unity among North Koreans. He knows that few things work better to inspire nationalism and patriotism than the threat of invasion. (Mr. Trumps xenophobic presidential campaign suggests that he recognizes that, too.)
This propaganda is especially effective with Koreans, whose cultural identity has been shaped by thousands of years of aggression from outside forces: the Chinese, the Mongols, the Japanese, the Americans. Thats why Korea became known as the Hermit Kingdom. For centuries, long before the Korean Peninsula was divided, guarding against foreign infiltration was a national creed.
Now in his mid-30s, Mr. Kim inherited in 2011 the leadership of a people who didnt know anything about him until three years before he took power, and perhaps were disgruntled by another hereditary succession. To maintain power and promote stability, Mr. Kim and his strategists have worked to obtain the modern equivalent of a hedgehogs quills nuclear weapons and the simple narrative that with this treasured sword, and the clever wits of his atomic scientists, Mr. Kim will protect his country from imminent destruction by the marauding United States.
The regime has used this narrative to justify pouring more than a fifth of its meager national budget into defense at a time when millions of North Koreans go hungry every day, according to the World Food Program. The leadership also uses this David vs. Goliath narrative to explain to North Koreans why they must suffer ever-tightening sanctions that, if enforced, will make their already difficult lives even more onerous.
Mr. Trumps fiery rhetoric mainly serves to advance Kim Jong-uns agenda by giving him more reason and justification to build nuclear weapons under the guise of protecting his people.
This is not to say the North Koreans werent thrown off by Mr. Trumps comments. No previous American president since Harry Truman has returned rhetorical fire with fire quite so enthusiastically, not even George W. Bush when he grouped North Korea in with the axis of evil in his 2002 State of the Union speech. And the North Koreans know they would quickly be overwhelmed in a conflict with the United States, which has stationed powerful weaponry in the Pacific and conducted sporadic flyovers of B-52s and B-1 bombers to remind and warn them.
But with nuclear weapons, they feel somewhat invincible. North Korea responded to Mr. Trumps recent threats with a warning that it was devising a plan to fire missiles into waters near Guam, a United States territory with two military bases and 160,000 residents. Whether or not it follows through on that threat, the North will keep test-firing missiles, improving the technology with every launching.
The savvy move by Washington would be to find a face-saving way to back down from the escalating rhetoric and to stop giving Kim Jong-un what he wants: propaganda victories and a justification to keep building bombs and missiles.
But perhaps Mr. Trump is taking a page out of Mr. Kims playbook: Hes drumming up fear and provoking Americas enemies in order to distract from his own problems and establish his reputation as a leader who can defend his people, even if it comes at a cost to global peace and security.
Jean H. Lee, a former correspondent for The Associated Press, is a global fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on August 13, 2017, on Page SR1 of the New York edition with the headline: What Kim Jong-un Wants.
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Donald Trump Is Giving North Korea Exactly What It Wants - New York Times
Ever since Donald Trump appeared on the horizon of presidential politics, he has mirrored the pop culture of the past. Thats because Trump, in one way or another, has always been an actor a man whose image precedes his reality. For 35 years, he has been a genius at one thing: stroking and manipulating the image machine of modern media. Trump went on the campaign trail as an insult-comedian/talk-radio-host/pompadoured-Elvis/reality-TV-mogul/badass-in-chief, and whenever I read now about how Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush blew it, I always think: None of those mere mortals ever stood a chance. They were fighting a superhero of populist sleaze who didnt need facts and figures he just needed the best lines. Trump remains one of the only people you could name who is not primarily in theentertainment business yet created himself as a character, a figment of larger-than-life fantasy. Thats what autocrats do: They dont sell reality, they sell mythology.
Pop culture is the metaphysical realm in which Trump operates. To most Washington insiders, his signature phrase of Youre fired! on The Apprentice was just a catchy piece of kitsch. What they missed is how Trumps use of that phrase, for all its comic braggadocio, was profoundly nostalgic, because it returned you to an earlier America, one in which you could be fired. (Yes, you can still be fired, but now, for the most part, youre downsized phased out of the workforce, replaced by a robot or a worker in Guangdong Province.) Trump was never an old-fashioned patriarch-executive who had the backs of his employees, but he played one brilliantly on TV.
Now, he plays the president on TV. But, of course, he isnt just playing.
With Trump, the reason the pop metaphors keep coming is that theyre often the only things that explain whats going on. The rise of a monomaniacal entertainer-in-chief like Trump was prophesied by A Face in the Crowd, the still-startling 1957 Hollywood drama in which Andy Griffith played a folksy demagogue with a sixth sense for how to harness the power of television. It was prophesied, as well, by Network, where Peter Finchs Howard Beale becomes a cult of personality riding the waves of his viewers rage (Im mad as hell, and Im not going to take this anymore!), though how telling and Trumpian it is that Beale turned out to be a tool of corporate forces. When Ned Beatty makes his big speech near the end of Network about how the whole world is one giant corporation, he might be the representative of Big Oil or the Russian government, explaining to Trump what will be required if he wants their continued support.
Early on in Trumps presidency, when he was making his bumbling phone calls to Taiwan or the leader of Australia, he became, briefly, a Sacha Baron Cohen character: the tyrant-buffoon of The Dictator. And now, just this week, he has become a figure out of Dr. Strangelove: a version of Gen. Jack. D. Ripper, lashing out at North Korea with the threat of nuclear attack. At the end of last year, I said that Rogue One: A Star Wars Story had become a powerful (if inadvertent) metaphor for the coming Trump presidency, because of its dramatization of the force of the Death Star through the imagery of nuclear detonation. Many readers responded by saying that no, the Rebel Forces were the Trump insurgents those who would now drain the swamp and deconstruct the administrative state. (One wants to ask Steve Bannon: Hows that working out for you?)
Yet for some of us who greeted Trumps presidency, from day one, with fear and loathing, the issue of nuclear weapons has always been at the center of our trepidation. Now, here he is, threatening to rain fire and fury down on North Korea in a way that echoes Harry S. Trumans ominous warning to the Japanese, and then when challenged doubling down on the threat. Anyone who thinks that this is just a way of diverting attention from the Mueller investigation is guilty of diverting their own attention. Earth to people with heads in the sand: This is terrifying! And its real.
To say, however, that the Trump presidency has entered its countdown-to-zero Hollywood thriller phase is not to trivialize whats going on. Its to understand that Trump is suddenly acting like an unhinged president out of a movie because he has unleashed this egregiously reckless threat through the lens of his pop-culture-fed imagination. Hes a leader who has begun tofeel cornered: not just by the provocations of North Korea, but by a presidency that isnt going his way and by a Russia investigation thats heading directly his way. And so hes lashing out, asserting his nuclear manhood. Its policy by toxic tantrum. Hes tweeting his way to Armageddon.
What the Trump presidency could now be turning into, for the first time, is a nightmare-suspense drama in which the people around the president regardless of their political affiliation come to realize that the man in the Oval Office has decided to play a game of nuclear chicken in which he threatens the survival of the planet, and that something has to be done. Kind of like Air Force One, only with the president asthe man who must be stopped.We could all sit around and cast that movie. But the point is that we dont have to, because its already a movie (at least, in parts of Donald Trumps brain). Its key dramatic question may come down to this: Who will be the hero? Who will step in to save the day?
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Donald Trump's Pop-Culture Presidency Enters Its Thriller Phase (Opinion) - Variety