“When you give a crazed, crying lowlife a break, and give her a job at the White House, I guess it just didn’t work out. Good work by General [John] Kelly for quickly firing that dog!”
Well, OK then. Apparently it is the role of the President of the United States to give politically sensitive jobs paying nearly a quarter million a year to “crazed, crying lowlife(s).”
Usually mercy hires are for custodian, or mail clerk. Something with limited responsibility, even more limited visibility, and where if it doesn’t work out, the damage can be swiftly addressed. Press Liaison for the White House might be above the paygrade of your typical crazed, crying lowlife. It might be suitable for a dog, or even a cat: Bo, Millie and Socks are all very good press liaisons for their respective administrations, and they weren’t even asked to sign non-disclosure agreements. But it was generally assumed the White House would avoid crazed crying lowlifes since the Mary Lincoln incidents. Normally, crazed crying lowlifes are not well suited to be envoys and ambassadors for the President. Until now.
“When you give a crazed, crying lowlife a break, and give her a job at the White House, I guess it just didn’t work out. Good work by General [John] Kelly for quickly firing that dog!”Back when she was hired, days after the election, I knew little about her, but considered the choice to be a joke. A reality-TV show actor whose main claim to fame was she was the resident Samantha Bee word. A close match for the President elect, who fitted the same description, but at the time, I had no idea he was hiring her because she was a crazed crying lowlife. As a liberal, I like to see all segments of society represented in government, but this seemed a bit beyond the necessary courtesies of inclusionism.
In short, I regarded Omarosa, and her subsequent dismissal, as just one more minor sideshow Trump’s Big Top, appearing soon in a Stephen King novel near you. Her role in this chaotic administration could be equated to noticing a dog lifting his leg against a woman’s expensive boots during a nuclear attack. No catastrophe is complete without its moments of low farce, and Omarosa seemed perfect for the role of minor low farce.
Then I heard about the tapes. I didn’t expect them to amount to much. Trump has boasted he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it, and Republicans and Faux News are intent on proving him right. Even if the tapes had something damning, Republicans are far too lost and amoral to care. They smell power, and so fuck morality, fuck propriety, fuck the country, fuck everything.
My opinion of Omarosa went up minutely, though. She had enough common sense to tape her interactions with Trump.
Now it’s coming to light that taping Trump was de rigueur at the House of the Orange Pomposity, and damn the non-disclosure agreements. People simply felt a need to protect themselves.
This isn’t something about Trump we didn’t already know. During the campaign, it came out that his lawyers got in the habit of conferring with him in teams of two or more. The reason was simple: Trump was the ultimate nightmare client. He would not only lie to his lawyers, but if cornered, he would lie about them. In fact, he would lie for no particular reason at all.
We’ve seen this literally thousands of times during his presidency. Trump lies. He lies when it suits his interests. He lies just for the hell of it. He sometimes even lies when it does nothing but hurt his own interests. There’s an old political joke: “George Washington couldn’t lie, FDR couldn’t tell the truth, and [incumbent] can’t tell the difference.” I first heard it during the Nixon administration, and just about for every administration since.
Only now it isn’t a joke. I doubt Trump usually knows if he’s lying or not, and wouldn’t care either way.
His lawyers figured that out fairly quickly, and double-teamed him because he would, inevitably, betray them and throw them under the bus. He wouldn’t even need a reason.
Getting elected president didn’t make him better, any more than feeding a rabid dog will make him a good playmate for the kids. (Yeah, I just compared the President of the United States to a dog. What goes around comes around!).
So we have a White House where the leader is so chaotically temperamental and destructive that the people putatively working for him are recording him to cover their asses. Despite the non-disclosure agreements.
Speaking of which, campaigns often have their volunteers sign NDAs. I came across a copy of the one required by the Obama campaign in 2008 ( https://obama.3cdn.net/d33f3886bfb70a0cca_zrs9mvxyt.pdf ). Its scope is significantly more limited than the one Trump used ( http://slnews.us/sf081418a ), both in terms and range of items not to be discussed. One limit was that it forbade disclosures that might hurt the campaign, giving it a term of the day after the election. Trump’s is indefinite, and thus may not hold up in court. The Trump campaign supposedly is suing Omarosa “for millions of dollars”, so it will be interesting to see if a court considers it enforceable or not.
It’s being reported that Trump had administration hires sign and NDA, as well, and that’s far more problematic. Security clearances (which Trump tried to grandly ignore) are one thing: it’s reasonable to set limits on access to national security elements. But NDAs, something no other administration has ever required, is another. Is it reasonable, or even legal to require government employees to keep non-national-security items secret from the public? I suspect that’s going to get tested in court in fairly short order.
In the meantime, if you’re an employer, owner of a large firm, and you want to show how big-hearted you are and hire a crazed, crying lowlife, that’s probably a nice thing to do, but one word of advice: don’t put that hire in charge of your public relations. Get a dog instead.
