Yes, Trump Will Quit and No, The Mooch is Not an Upgrade

I’ve said since Trump got elected he would quit before he would be impeached, and certainly before he could run for re-election. I’ve said he’ll get tired of — for the first time in his life — running a company where you cannot run it like a business, or at least like the one man band he calls a business. He’ll get frustrated at being the CEO of something where the board of directors — something called Congress — has actual power, and where the customers who he has always sold overpriced — and often shoddy goods — turn on him, as they turned on his casino, his airline, his steaks, his made-anywhere-but-America clothing and even eventually his TV show, which after a few successful seasons only stayed on the air because it was cheap to produce. The students of his so-called university even sued him and he answered them by walking away from that, too. His first two marriages? Yeah, same thing. His made-in-China boots were made for walking, and that’s just what he’ll do.
He has been one of the luckiest guys on earth and the dumbest fixes he has gotten himself into have happened when he has forgotten that — like buying the Plaza Hotel for so much more than it was worth — it was almost the end of him. He lucked out there because the bankers, rather than take everything, let him license his name on even the buildings they took from him, because branding was the one thing he was really good at. His great talent was always puffing himself up to be bigger and better than he was.
He talks of going to Wharton knowing everyone takes for granted it’s the famous Wharton Graduate Business School and not realizing he went to the not-as-famous and scholastically-weaker undergrad school, and only got in there after dad made a multi-million-dollar contribution. He was born to a rich guy and thought that made him talented, not lucky. He was in New York City, the media capital of America, which made him famous in a way he never would have been if he had been in Chicago, or really anywhere else. Howard Stern never would have called him. He would not have made the cover of the New York Post for his affairs. No one as talented as Tony Schwartz would want to write his books for him.
He then had the luck to run for President against 16 absolute lunkheads, and one person, as capable as she may be, who can’t run a campaign. The one thing Trump learned when he was selling his brand was to give the people what you can make them think they want. Good advertising and the sweet smell of success are a powerful combination, and he sells it well. Everybody came to the casino in Atlantic City at first and they played at having a good time, because they must be having a good time because it’s the Trump Casino…until they realized they weren’t having a good time. Atlantic City wasn’t Vegas. Hell, go a block or two in and it wasn’t even Asbury Park, and Asbury Park isn’t even East Orange on its best day, and Asbury Park hasn’t had a best day since the 50’s.
And why do I bring this up now? Because I think the clock just started ticking on the…I did everything I set out to do speech, which is probably the same speech he used when his marriages failed. Most people do the pop psychology, “it’s not you, it’s me,” speech to get out of a relationship these days, but Trump wouldn’t be able to say if he were choking on it.
The tick-tock of the Trump-quits countdown clock got loud for the first time this week. He pissed off Boy Scout families. His aides, who realizing he will eventually fire them all anyway for his own failures, started talking back, telling him to stop his Jeff-Sessions-is-a-great-big-doodyhead campaign. Its only ticking off conservatives, and even Breitbart doesn’t have your back on this one.
The Sessions attacks have been bad for many reasons. I think I know why Trump is doing it, though spending time trying to think like Trump has my brain twisted like a mall-worthy Auntie Anne pretzel.
He hates Sessions because the only guy in Congress who thought Trump might actually be President one day seems to have been only 99 44/100th % loyal, which may be good for floating soap, but bad news for a cabinet member turned into a floater in Trump’s brain. By recusing himself from the Russian investigation, Jeff Sessions could not loyally bury the Russian investigation, and so the investigation into what Trump says is a hoax and witch hunt — so what does he have to be concerned about — seems to have Trump so concerned that he thinks Sessions, by believing there’s nothing there, may have undone Trump’s presidency.
[Session’s voice]: “I’m sorry Donald, but when you said there was nothing to it, I figured, you know, that there would be nothing to it, so an investigation would just prove how right and honest you were. Wouldn’t it? Donald? Why aren’t you talking to me? What have I done?” First rule of Trump Club, Jeffy: never think for a moment the man is telling you the truth. That’s why you’re in the mess you are today.
So what I think Trump is doing is he thinks — or was told — he can’t fire Sessions because that will make Sessions’ friends in Congress mad at Trump. Also, that sort of firing of people relating to an investigation of a President is the sort of thing that finally undid Nixon. Well, not that SORT of thing. Exactly that thing. That’s when, like a dying comic, Nixon lost the room, the room being Congress who liked former colleague Gerald Ford the way Republicans in Congress now like former colleague Mike Pence.
So thinking it might look bad to fire Sessions, he’s trying to bully him out of the job. Just call him ‘weak,’ ‘beleaguered,’ and send out a daily tweet about failing Jeff Sessions, ‘sad!,’ until he quits. The thing is Sessions is not the picked-on kid who hides under the blanket when it’s time to go to school with the bullies who taunt him. Sessions is a long time surviving politician who not only is thinking at this point he might outlast Trump, but believes he is on a mission from God to protect the United States from things like marijuana, even though Americans have voted in many states not to be protected from it…Sessions doesn’t want to be going anywhere, not unless he’s canned.
He won’t quit until he and Betsy DeVos make every kid in every third grade classroom watch Reefer Madness and recite lines from it from memory.
So now Trump’s aides are speaking back to him, weirdly like Reefer Madness warned your kids would do if they smoked marijuana. They’ve told him stop the stuff about Sessions. He’s the most loyal person you have in the cabinet. If you pry him out of the cabinet the noise as the suction from his lips is taken from your butt will be like a sonic boom and deafen everyone in the West Wing. If you destroy Sessions, everyone will think there’s no point in serving Trump, because in the end Trump will turn on you for every mistake he makes himself.
Trump has also not only fired Jim Comey, he’s now going after the number two man at the FBI, and if there is one thing you don’t want to do, it’s piss off the FBI. Oh, too late, but now he’s just asking for it. Trump may have forgotten that the FBI building is filled with lifers, and they keep dossiers on…well, everyone. Trump worries about leaks? If the FBI starts leaking, his ship of state will be shaking hands with the Titanic before the end of the year.
And then there’s the Republican Congress. Publicly supportive until now, they are looking at Trump’s polling numbers and fearing him about as much as Dorothy and friends feared the all powerful Oz after Toto pulled the curtain back and all the noisy and powerless flimflammery that disguised itself as knowledge and power was shown to be just so much noise.
We’ve seen the opening shots. Republicans have only themselves to blame for blabbering on for seven years about Obamacare and not planning on what to do for its encore, but they looked to Trump, as you would any incoming President, to give them a direction. They got none, and considering that just in the past few days Trump talked about how under the 17-year-old Obamacare you could get health insurance for $12 a year, it’s no wonder. Did you catch it yesterday when he claimed one of the health bills failed in the Senate by 51–50? And no he wasn’t talking about the successful use of Mike Pence to actually bring on these votes. He just can’t count. Or he just has no idea how many people are in the Senate. Or who knows what goes on in under that Sunkist navel head of his?
So Republicans feel they’ve been left out in the cold to take the rap for a President who was for national health..remember that? Then for repeal..then repeal and replace, then just repeal again, then repeal and replace again. No wonder Sessions is against drugs. I think he suspects someone mickeyed Trump’s magic 8 ball legislation advisor.
And then, came an issue that probably would not have been an issue for conservative Republicans just a few years ago. The far right in the House demanded there be a clause in budget legislation that the military would not pay for gender reassignment surgery. OK, this is a fraction of 1% of the military health care budget, as you would expect from the fact that much of that budget goes for things like IED injuries brought on by two wars courtesy of the Republican party under George W. Bush, who looks like the freaking humanitarian of the year now in the low-hurdle Olympics we now calls politics.
So what does Trump do? Though he said on the advice of his generals — though he can’t actually name any — he decided on his own to just up and ban transgender people from the military altogether. The House members never even asked for that. The Pentagon didn’t ask for it and was surprised by the announcement. Defense Secretary Mattis wasn’t asked. He’s on vacation, and the reaction? Conservatives in the Senate like Richard Shelby, Joni Ernst, Orrin Hatch and John McCain came out immediately against Trump’s move.
They had all probably read the Rand Study on this that said transgender people were not costing the Armed Forces money, were not hurting unit cohesion and were serving honorably, many doing multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. Trump just decided this on his own and tweeted it without even thinking, well, so we discharge 15,000 people all at once, no matter how valuable their service and particular talents may be? You may remember Bush did this with gays in the military and we lost most of our Arab translators which hindered our military intelligence on terrorism. The military and apparently many senators learned from that. Trump refuses to learn anything.
And so, now aides, and members of Congress are talking back. Trump is having a hard time filling important positions because people fear they will be embarrassed serving their country, which is something that should never ever happen no matter what the politics of that administration might be.
His poll numbers stink and it’s not a matter of rats leaving a sinking ship, it’s his most loyal people being tossed overboard.
This is not going to get better for him. He has shown, if nothing else, he has no learning curve and he would rather have sex with an appropriately-aged woman than stop tweeting for more than a weekend, which is a way of saying he will never stop tweeting his way into a deeper morass.
At some point, he will walk away. I brought you a more-conservative Supreme Court. I picked an ultra conservative vice-president. I declare victory and quit. I’m not having fun. I’m sad. I’m going. In fact, if there are some women in Moscow listening, I gotta go, gotta go, gotta go right now.
As for me, I don’t know when it will happen, but it won’t take four years. He will, in fact, make America great again. At some point between now and 2020, he will quit. PK, maybe with Pence as president America still won’t be great. But it will be slightly gooder again.
Final note from the craziest, most self-destructive White House ever: White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci, the man with no background at all in what he’s doing, has now publicly charged that White House chief of staff Reince Priebus is the leaker — as if there is really just one — or like he’s a Batman villain.. Having said that leakers are so treasonous that people would have been hung for this 150 years ago, he sent out a tweet accusing Priebus.
First, Scaramucci is an idiot. He jumped to the conclusion — which is what this White House does — that his financial information came from getting the job he has now. It did not. It came from when he got a job at the Export-Import bank, and that is totally public information. No one leaked anything.
Second, Scaramucci is an idiot. The leaks he’s been referring to aren’t classified information and we never hanged people for leaking stuff like this, or even stuff NOT like this unless you were directly working for and handing it over to an enemy nation. Hell, Aaron Burr killed one of the founders of this nation, Alexander Hamilton, and ended up dying more than 30 years later in bed in Staten Island, more afraid of his creditors than what many believed to be murder.
Thirdly, Scaramucci is an idiot. He’s been on the job a week and everyone already knows he wants Priebus’ job as chief of staff. All About Eve without the wit or subtlety. If you’ve never seen it, I’m sure its on Netflix.
Finally, Scaramucci is an idiot. He thinks he can guide a President who does things like tweet a change in policy on the military and transgender people without first asking the Pentagon, which apparently is going, yeah, guess what? We’re not cashiering 15,000 people because of a tweet. WE also don’t go to war over a tweet, or launch a missile over a tweet. In fact, even though you’re commander-in-chief, we don’t do anything because of a tweet. Grow up.
So in conclusion, two things:
At some point Trump will quit, AND Scaramucci is an idiot.
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