The Soul Food Menu for Mr. Trump.

 

It’s not known whether Jeff Sessions loved soul food or not but I’m pretty darn sure he never expected to become it. It’s one of the great ironies of the Trump era that the very racist elements of his administration have been reduced to a culinary choice named for that which they deplore, namely “the other,” those unlike themselves, Soul Brothers.

 

The source for this observation is a New York Times editorial by James Comey where he states that “Mr. Trump eats your soul in small bites.”

 

Sessions is not the only course on Trump’s Soul Food menu. Others include, Reince Priebus, Corey Lewandoski, Kelly Anne Conway, Rob Porter, Hope Hicks, Rod Rosenstein, Michael Cohen, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Mike Pence, Michael Flynn, Mick Mulvaney, George Papadopoulis, Roger Stone, Carter Page, Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon, Anthony Scaramucci, Sean Spicer, Omarosa Manacault, Tom Price, Sebastian Gorka, Rex Tillerson, John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, Steve Mnuchin, Patrick Shanahan, William Barr, Matt Whitaker, David Bernhardt, Sonny Perdue, Wilbur Ross, Alex Acosta, Alex Azar, Ben Carson, Elain Chao, Rock Perry, Betsy Devos, Robert Wilke, Kirstjen Nielsen, Robert Lighthizer, Dan Coats, Jonathan Cohen, Gina Haspel, Andrew Wheeler, Linda McMahon, Lindsey Graham, Chuck Grassley, Tom Cotton, Rand Paul, Devin Nunes, Chris Collins, Kevin McCarthy, Mark Meadows, Paul Ryan, Jeff Flake, John Kennedy, Mitt Romney, Bob Corker, Marsha Blackburn, Ben Sasse, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, Orin Hatch, Rob Portman, Martha McSally, Jim Jordan and notably Mitch McConnell to name but a few. Too many to mention are the Republican members of Congress many of whom have succumbed to Trumpism as a way of political survival.

 

Trump team members notably absent from this list are Paul Manafort and Steven Miller. Lacking a soul, neither has anything to lose and therefore cannot be reduced to grist for Mr. Trump’s mill.

 

Below is the relevant portion of that NYT editorial:

 

“Amoral leaders have a way of revealing the character of those around them. Sometimes what they reveal is inspiring. For example, James Mattis, the former secretary of defense, resigned over principle, a concept so alien to Mr. Trump that it took days for the president to realize what had happened, before he could start lying about the man.

But more often, proximity to an amoral leader reveals something depressing. I think that’s at least part of what we’ve seen with Bill Barr and Rod Rosenstein. Accomplished people lacking inner strength can’t resist the compromises necessary to survive Mr. Trump and that adds up to something they will never recover from. It takes character like Mr. Mattis’s to avoid the damage, because Mr. Trump eats your soul in small bites.

 

It starts with your sitting silent while he lies, both in public and private, making you complicit by your silence. In meetings with him, his assertions about what “everyone thinks” and what is “obviously true” wash over you, unchallenged, as they did at our private dinner on Jan. 27, 2017, because he’s the president and he rarely stops talking. As a result, Mr. Trump pulls all of those present into a silent circle of assent.

Speaking rapid-fire with no spot for others to jump into the conversation, Mr. Trump makes everyone a co-conspirator to his preferred set of facts, or delusions. I have felt it — this president building with his words a web of alternative reality and busily wrapping it around all of us in the room.

I must have agreed that he had the largest inauguration crowd in history because I didn’t challenge that. Everyone must agree that he has been treated very unfairly. The web building never stops.

 

From the private circle of assent, it moves to public displays of personal fealty at places like cabinet meetings. While the entire world is watching, you do what everyone else around the table does — you talk about how amazing the leader is and what an honor it is to be associated with him.

Sure, you notice that Mr. Mattis never actually praises the president, always speaking instead of the honor of representing the men and women of our military. But he’s a special case, right? Former Marine general and all. No way the rest of us could get away with that. So you praise, while the world watches, and the web gets tighter.

Next comes Mr. Trump attacking institutions and values you hold dear — things you have always said must be protected and which you criticized past leaders for not supporting strongly enough. Yet you are silent. Because, after all, what are you supposed to say? He’s the president of the United States.

 

You feel this happening. It bothers you, at least to some extent. But his outrageous conduct convinces you that you simply must stay, to preserve and protect the people and institutions and values you hold dear. Along with Republican members of Congress, you tell yourself you are too important for this nation to lose, especially now.

You can’t say this out loud — maybe not even to your family — but in a time of emergency, with the nation led by a deeply unethical person, this will be your contribution, your personal sacrifice for America. You are smarter than Donald Trump, and you are playing a long game for your country, so you can pull it off where lesser leaders have failed and gotten fired by tweet.”

Speaking to CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Comey explains why he believes Trump eats peoples’ souls.

“It doesn’t make me happy to write that, but it’s what I believe. “

 

“This President, because he’s an amoral leader, shapes those around him. And that shaping sometimes pushes out someone that is a strong person of integrity that stands up and says ‘not going to have it,’ but far more often it shapes and bends and pulls in weaker souls and he does it.”

“It has happened to me. The man lies constantly. In public you’ve seen it and in private it happened.”

 

“I think people like that, like Rod Rosenstein, who are people of accomplishment, find themselves trapped. They justify their being trapped, which is, ‘yeah he’s awful but the country needs me.’ Republicans are doing this in Congress. ‘Yeah it’s awful but if I speak I’ll get defeated and this nation needs me here right now,’ so they start to make little compromises to stay on the team, echo his words, use the term ‘spying,’ talk about collusion or just be silent, saying, ‘that’s what I need to do to survive,’ and in the process he has eaten their soul. So that’s what happens to so many people, and they end up making compromises.”

 

Bennies and a Rabies Shot

Last night as part of my Sunday routine, I tuned in to Homeland on Showtime.  Homeland makes every effort to create engaging drama sourced from current events and in the process, can both educate and entertain.  In this recent episode, I learned a lot about the 25^th amendment as a means to depose a sitting president.  In it, the fictional president fires four of her cabinet in order to stop a potential vote to remove her from office, thereby eliminating the possibility that the cabinet could get the eight required votes necessary to accomplish their goal.  Hmmmm.

But what if the President fired just the cabinet who had expressed a dissenting opinion over time and replaced them with lesser qualified loyalists who had long ago drank his Koolaid?  That would do it, no?  Hmmmm.

You’re not going to hear anyone talk about that, for sure, but in the age of Trump is that so far out?

To be sure, Trump is always calculating, measuring, conspiring, misdirecting but consistently on a singular path to fulfill his own greedy ends, the satiation of his personal appetites.  After destroying all opposition with overwhelming verbal abuse, a sole survivor, Jim Comey, decides to drop his Boy Scout pocket knife and bring a gun to the gunfight, only to face criticism as the Boy Scout who has learned the middle finger salute and is using it for the first time.

The Trump response is to trot out the big gun–not many left in the Trump circle. Steven Miller has been forever banned for his last failed and embarrassing performance leaving only Kellyanne Conway as the one person who can string two words together cohesively.  Considering Trump’s Twitters and his pitiful prompter speeches, a President that can’t spell and has trouble reading is no equal to the rapid-fire, machine-gun mouth of a crazed surrogate who speaks as if she has just downed a bottle of Bennies and missed her Rabies shot update at the kennel.

Have we already submitted to this endlessly-repeated, lopsided narrative or is there room for dissent, even from a wayward boy scout incapable of lying?

Bizarro World

Looking back over the past year, I find myself wishing for things I never thought I would wish for, like please Dear Lord, keep Jeff Sessions in office.  Don’t let anything happen to that nasty little racist, or hey, I think I could have been OK with Jeb Bush, maybe even Mitt Romney. After all, they were millionaires too. So was Hilary. In fact, they all were, every last one of them. But Mr. Counterpunch decimated them all, all 16 primary contenders, nutty Republicans for the most part, but not as nutty as Trump, and then even Hilary, tough old broad as she was.  She survived her husband, Bill Clinton but could not survive Trump.  Why is that?  What’s so special about Trump?

Trump defined a new political game, far advanced from old-school mudslinging.  No, he added insults and humiliation, lying and bullying his way through every old-school candidate with his juvenile, schoolyard tactics until he created Trump nation, a body of simple-minded supporters who bought into the notion that Trump was not the anti-Christ, but the true savior.  Marco Rubio may have been the only candidate that tried to take Trump on at his own level and the voters eviscerated him for it.  Why was Little Marco treated so badly and Trump hailed so boldly? After all, this was a big dick contest from the start. Marco knew that and called him out but he was no match for Mr. Counterpunch.

And so, after the election the many stunned GOP losers circled the wagons to lick their wounds and all too readily, happily donned their “I’m with Stupid” T-shirts and went off in search of the promised land of their new savior, the Great America they once knew, the dream of a false prophet, while the Democrats were left reeling, trying to craft a new antidote for the ever-mutating virus.  But no one thought to attack Trump on his home turf, to use Trump tactics to de-fang the beast, meet him head on and counterpunch his counterpunch ten times harder.  No, they were all playing the game by the old rules, ever respectful, trying to maintain the high ground.  Unlike Obama, who was alone in the ability to do so because he never wandered from the high ground, they had already been tainted long before stepping up to the plate to take a few practice swings. Too late, they had already relinquished the moral high ground.  They were not pure.  They were vulnerable. Even Obama did not realize how truly unique he was. Bernie or Elizabeth might have been able to don his mantle, but they were not allowed to.  It was not their time.  It was not their turn.  The battle was to be fought on a different playing field, one the Democrats thought would be an easy win with a middle of the road corporatist candidate, everything that Trump railed against but secretly embraced.

Now with the release of his new book, James Comey steps in as a pinch-hitter and swings for the fences.  He embraces Trump’s tactics and agrees to take him on with 10x counterpunches.  Finally, someone who understands Trump faces him head-on.  But already, the media swarms around Comey like flies around dead meat, emphasizing his style as untoward that of the formerly pristine reputation garnered by a career straight-shooter who had made a single mistake but had always known how to tow the line and had now crossed it. So what, if it’s revenge served cold?  So what, if it’s the absolute truth? The media attacked the messenger as if he had departed his earthly body to inhabit Bizarro world without a license.