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reince priebus
Donald Trump, Anthony Scaramucci, and Reince Priebus: Nasty, Brutish, and Short
“The simplest explanation is a there are a lot of drugs being used.”
Aug 01, 2017
Reince Priebus, Trump's former chief of staff, lasted only six months before he was fired. But the man who bragged about taking down Priebus got a mere ten days as the most profane White House spokesman in the history of the Republic. "The Mooch" only got about forty-eight hours to gloat about "cock-blocking" his rival, before he too bit the dust.
Washington politicos are pumping out high-minded analysis about the clash between "establishment" Republicans, represented by Priebus, and the visigoths who swept into office with Trump.
But the poisonous political atmosphere emanating from the Trump presidency won't clear up any time soon. Don't count on new chief of staff John Kelly--who made his name treating immigrant workers like criminals and deploying thugs in ICE uniforms to terrify Latina grandmothers--to fix the Trump mess.
The chaos goes all the way to the top. And it will undoubtedly continue.
Certainly, the arrival of "the Mooch" and his foul-mouthed rants was a fascinating chapter in the disastrous Trump regime. It caused Washington political analysts to express disbelief, as they have been doing since Trump won his party's nomination, became President, and then continued to be Trump. The Mooch caused them to wonder afresh: What is going on? How can this be happening?
"The simplest explanation is a there are a lot of drugs being used," says former Democratic Party of Wisconsin communication director Graeme Zielinski. "I think there is probably a pile of cocaine and big bottle of scotch back there. There is no coherent pattern."
"The simplest explanation is a there are a lot of drugs being used."
Zielinski, who was pushed out of his job after making impolitic comments comparing Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker to noted Wisconsin cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer, was always popular with reporters. He gave great quotes, he knew a lot, but his impolitic remarks seem positively quaint in the Trump era.
Zielinski also emphasizes the deliberate destruction of civility and civil society by Republicans--not just by the colorful characters, Trump and the Mooch--but also by low-key money man Reince Priebus.
Priebus played a key role in the rise of Wisconsin's "divide and conquer" politics, based on nurturing deep racial antagonisms and making explicit attacks on teachers and other public employees the norm.
"Wisconsin was Trump before Trump," Zielinski notes.
Back in the era of country-club Republican governors Tommy Thompson and Lee Dreyfus, the Wisconsin Republicans did not devote itself to targeting labor unions, slashing public school funding, stirring up racial resentment, or preventing poor people, black people, and students from voting, the way it did after Reince Priebus became state party chair.
Priebus nurtured that style of politics as practiced by divisive governor Scott Walker, and ushered Wisconsin into a new, mean Walker era. When he went on to become chairman of the Republican National Committee, Priebus and his close friend House Speaker Paul Ryan, took "Wisconsin mean" to the national level.
Priebus served as a conduit for the massive influx of cash from the Koch brothers, the rightwing Bradley Foundation, and various far-flung billionaires into statewide elections.
Priebus ushered Wisconsin into a new, mean Walker era. He was, as Zielinski puts it, "one of the early trustees of the post-Citizens United hellscape."
He was, as Zielinski puts it, "one of the early trustees of the post-Citizens United hellscape."
That experience served him well when he moved to the helm of the national Republican Party, where he deployed his wrecking ball in the service of President Trump.
Zielinski remembers when Priebus first bragged about dumping $300,000--a previously outlandish sum--into the race to defeat Wisconsin's Democratic senate majority leader Russ Decker. It was the beginning of the flood-of-cash approach to politics that helped remake the state and the country.
"He killed the whole Democratic bench," Zielinski recalls. "He surgically beheaded every viable Democrat. He is totally cynical and evil. And he is really good at it.
One of Priebus's key qualifications was the role he played in voter suppression in Wisconsin.
The group One Wisconsin Now put out a press release shortly after Trump was elected, pointing out that, while white nationalistTrump advisor Stephen Bannon caused an uproard when he moved into the White House, Trump's selection of Reince Priebus as his chief of staff was also a red flag.
"Throughout his tenure as a top Republican Party insider, Reince Priebus has been intimately involved in despicable efforts to silence the voices of legal voters," One Wisconsin Now research director Jenni Dye commented.
As Republican National Committee chair, Priebus worked to secretly fund the legal defense of Wisconsin's voter ID law. And back in 2010 he was linked to a "voter caging" plot that was used to suppress minority votes in Milwaukee precincts.
In 2008, Priebus headed up a scheme to intimidate minority voters using Republican poll-watchers.
It's not just the crudeness and bigotry of loudmouth-in-chief Donald Trump, or his late, unlamented spokesman Anthony Scaramucci, or scary racist Steve Bannon that is destabilizing the country. The current political moment is the result of a long-term effort by Republican strategists and money men, including Reince Priebus, to destroy the foundations of our democracy for their own short-term gain.
May their careers, like their vision for life in America, be nasty, brutish, and short.
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West Wing Chaos: Priebus Quits, General Kelly Takes Over as Chief of Staff
"Reince Priebus was the shortest-serving White House chief of staff in American history, edging out Ken Duberstein."
Jul 28, 2017
The White House announced Friday afternoon that Chief of Staff Reince Priebus had resigned amid mounting tensions. Some reports indicate that Priebus "privately resigned yesterday," and Reuters was told by an anonymous official that "Trump informed Priebus two weeks ago that he would be replacing him as White House chief of staff."
President Donald Trump announced on Twitter that Homeland Security Secretary Gen. John Kelly would take Priebus's place.
\u201cBy putting Gen John Kelly in charge, Pres Trump is militarizing the White House & putting our executive branch in the hands of an extremist.\u201d— Rep. Barbara Lee (@Rep. Barbara Lee) 1501276311
The resignation came just a day after a profanity-laced interview with new White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci was published in The New Yorker. Scaramucci launched insults at senior Trump advisors as well as Priebus, calling the then-chief of staff a "paranoid schizophrenic" and accusing him of leaking information to the press.
The New York Times summarized the events preceding Priebus's resignation:
In barely half a year on the job, Mr. Priebus never won the full confidence of the president nor was granted the authority to impose a working organizational structure on the West Wing. Always seeming to be on the edge of ouster, Mr. Priebus saw his fate finally sealed a week ago when Mr. Trump hired Mr. Scaramucci, an edgy Wall Street financier, over the chief of staff's objections. Mr. Priebus's ally, Sean Spicer, the press secretary, resigned in protest.
Reporters and commentators reacted to the news of Priebus's resignation Friday afternoon:
\u201cReince Priebus was the shortest-serving White House chief of staff in American history, edging out Ken Duberstein.\u201d— David Weigel (@David Weigel) 1501275736
\u201cReince Priebus' exit indicates the full decline in the White House of the RNC-led Washington wing. https://t.co/I4bB7JPxzz\u201d— NPR (@NPR) 1501276960
\u201cFirings/Resignations under Trump\n\u2014Yates\n\u2014Flynn\n\u2014Walsh\n\u2014Bharara\n\u2014Comey\n\u2014Dubke\n\u2014Shaub\n\u2014Corralo\n\u2014Spicer\n\u2014Short\n\u2014Priebus\nhttps://t.co/MvrUXwtyFt\u201d— Kyle Griffin (@Kyle Griffin) 1501277933
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This Is the Most Clueless, Incompetent, and Self-Defeating Administration in American History
The continual meltdown of the Trump administration has reached, unbelievably, an even higher pitch over the last few days, with the hiring of financier Anthony Scaramucci as the new White House communications director.
And yet, the endless juicy personal drama surrounding President Trump is in some ways covering up for far worse failures and incompetence -- particularly surrounding America's nuclear programs and arsenal. The hapless incompetence of this administration is virtually impossible to exaggerate.
Jul 28, 2017
The continual meltdown of the Trump administration has reached, unbelievably, an even higher pitch over the last few days, with the hiring of financier Anthony Scaramucci as the new White House communications director.
And yet, the endless juicy personal drama surrounding President Trump is in some ways covering up for far worse failures and incompetence -- particularly surrounding America's nuclear programs and arsenal. The hapless incompetence of this administration is virtually impossible to exaggerate.
But first, the drama. A mere five days after taking the job, Scaramucci was embroiled in a new seething controversy when Politico released a report detailing that, like practically every other top member of the Trump regime, he is stinking rich. He has up to $85 million in assets, plus a $5 million paycheck from his firm SkyBridge Capital and $4.9 million in capital gains from his ownership stake there in just this year alone.
Scaramucci immediately blamed White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, who had opposed his hiring, for the felonious "leak," and tweeted that he was going to report him to the FBI. But it turned out the form was public, a result of his previous post at the Export-Import Bank (as could be seen on the title of the form, which reads "Public Financial Disclosure Report"). Nevertheless, Scaramucci continued to insist that an investigation was needed, telling The New Yorker's Ryan Lizza that "Reince is a f--king paranoid schizophrenic, a paranoiac." (He also noted that "I'm not Steve Bannon, I'm not trying to suck my own cock.")
All this tomfoolery only slightly displaced the previous, still-ongoing personnel drama: Trump's campaign against Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The president told New York Times reporters he was upset that Sessions recused himself from the investigation into Trump's Russia ties, and is reportedly considering replacing Sessions with a loyal lickspittle who will squash the investigation. (Whether or not someone behaving this way has something to hide on Russia is left as an exercise for the reader.)
When trying to describe this endless parade of buffoonery, incompetence, and criminality, one problem is adequate description. One instinctively reaches for comparisons from fiction, but the problem is that the darkest black comedy satires of government incompetence do not remotely approach the reality we're living through. The scene in In the Loop where an American general is constructing a war plan with a child's toy calculator seems like a portrayal of earnest, responsible professionalism compared with our current cretin-ocracy.
But that isn't the half of it. A much more alarming aspect of the incompetence of the Trump regime can be found in a Vanity Fair story by Michael Lewis, who has been reporting at the Department of Energy for the past few months. The rather obscure agency is tasked with many things, but its primary one is safeguarding America's nuclear stockpile, securing and cleaning up nuclear waste, and securing loose nuclear material around the world. "In just the past eight years the DoE's National Nuclear Security Administration has collected enough material to make 160 nuclear bombs," Lewis writes.
The depth of the intellectual rot in the Republican Party is embodied in the selection of former Texas Gov. Rick Perry to run this department. This man's legendary stupidity first became a national punchline during a Republican presidential debate in 2011, when he was attempting to list three Cabinet-level agencies he would abolish, naming the Departments of Commerce and Education but forgetting Energy. After Trump appointed him to run the agency, it turned out that he still had no idea what the department did -- assuming, Texas-style, that it was all about oil and gas. Oops.
But as Lewis writes, Perry is running the department almost alone. In his increasingly terrifying article, Lewis describes the scores of Obama-era bureaucrats who waited patiently after the election for the Trump transition team to send their new people over, so they could describe the complicated but vital programs and finances of the department, as Bush-era people had done for them. (The department has a budget of about $30 billion and employs 110,000 people.) Almost nobody showed up -- and many of those who did were wet-behind-the-ears ideological hacks who demanded to know who was researching climate change. To this day only four out of 22 political appointee positions at Energy even have nominations -- and Perry is the only one that has been confirmed.
Extraordinarily sensitive nuclear, waste cleanup, and energy security programs are being neglected or simply left to rot. Meanwhile, Trump's proposed budget would cut spending on electrical grid security by half, as well as zero out an extraordinarily successful research division, a green loan program that underwrites things like Tesla's new cutting-edge factory, cancel all climate change research, and force layoffs of 6,000 scientists.
Any random schlub who was yanked off the street to become president would almost certainly be convinced of the vital nature of DoE programs by the world-class scientists working there. But Donald Trump has a virtually unique combination of total ignorance, total confidence, and endless trashy scandals to distract from his fundamental incapacity to govern.
This kind of thing could quite easily get thousands and thousands of people killed. There are worse things than national humiliation when being governed by the most corrupt, incompetent president in history.
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