President Donald Trump: Master of Demolition

News keeps happening at such a furious pace that it leaves you breathless.

One of President Donald Trump’s key skill sets is manufacturing swirling, transgressive dramas, yet his capricious war against Iran still manages to stun. The administration has now proffered so many different reasons for initiating the attack — including an argument (which Trump first suggested and now denies) that Israel’s intent on striking Iran forced Washington’s hand. The ultimate tail wagging the dog story — as opposed to a Wag the Dog story. (We’ll get to Jeffrey Epstein later.)

Amid a slew of pieces now written about this, Politico’s Alex Burns delivers a humdinger: “Trump Buries the 20th Century.” Burns displays a tough-minded realpolitik as he lays out facets of our current situation with a gimlet eye:

He is burying the 20th Century: Its villains, its alliances, its political norms and ceasefires. And he is unleashing a future of uncertainty and disruption with no new equilibrium in sight.

Across both his terms as president, and in so many different areas of policy and governance and culture, his signal achievements have been acts of demolition.

Burns ticks down the list – and each point is a jaw-dropper. Here are a few: Trump’s tariffs and trade threats have shattered 50 years of global commercial agreements and diplomatic relations; his America First policies are shoving NATO, the most powerful military alliance in history, toward the ash heap; his focusing the Justice Department on retribution against his enemies combined with zeal in pursuing personal enrichment and corporate favoritism have wiped out post-Watergate legal and ethical presidential norms.

In each case, too, Trump is tearing down old structures and systems without a vision for replacing them. …

It is not likely that before he leaves office we will see a stable global trade order … or a post-NATO order of international security that reflects America’s overdue destiny as a Pacific nation.

Burns aims to close on a positive note — saying this offers both a challenge and an opportunity to the president who follows Trump. But the demolition he describes looks devastating to our nation.

Reading this, sadly, brings to mind W.B. Yeats masterwork “The Second Coming.” For it too often seems that Trump has again unleashed chaos upon the world — much as Yeats experienced in the brutal wake of World War I, which had immolated so much of the old order:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

It could be that Trump has proved so effective at this because he simply has no regard for what came before. As a sui generis leader, history appears to have no lessons and no meaning for him. Burns writes:

Trump’s opponents have often criticized him for his vacant sense of history …. This philistinism and historical ignorance was at the heart of Joe Biden’s case against Trump. Biden deplored Trump as an insult to the American political tradition and promised to make Washington work, repair broken norms and turn over power to the next generation. His slow-moving, self-admiring, politically dysfunctional administration achieved none of these things.

I sure don’t agree with Burns’s description of Biden’s presidency. His infrastructure bill remains a long-awaited and powerful achievement, as were the lower drug prices and the first new gun regulation laws in decades — to name only a few big successes. But the shadow of Trumpism loomed over his presidency. The fact that Trump never stood trial for his Jan. 6 insurrection is a clear case of justice delayed being justice denied.

David Sanger, a stalwart and long-experienced New York Times reporter, has an informative news analysis about how Trump’s decision to attack Iran was made, “Trump Follows His Gut. His National Security Advisers Try to Keep Up.”

… Trump’s determination to cut out the bureaucracy, to reduce his advisers to a tiny, leakproof few and to trust instinct over intelligence briefings applied as he made the gravest decision any commander in chief can make. …

when debates take place, the number of players often shrinks to a tiny group. In the Iran case, Mr. Rubio, Vice President JD Vance, C.I.A. director John Ratcliffe, the four-star head of Central Command, Brad Cooper, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Dan Caine. …

Not much leaks from those sessions…

As I read this, I thought of a story President Ronald Reagan’s former Director of Communications, David Gergen, told me in the last century. I was at The Los Angeles Times Sunday “Opinion” section, when I heard Gergen was leaving the White House. So, I quickly called and asked him to write for me. He was soon contributing a piece every month, and we had many conversations in the process.

One tale about the Reagan White House that I vividly remember was they were growing ever more concerned, almost paranoid, about myriad leaks revealing their decision-making process. The administration kept tightening and tightening the circle of officials allowed to attend critical meetings — from nine to four, for example. Finally, when three people together seemed unreliable, he said, they got down to a group of two — this felt safest. At that point, I had never even heard of a group of two!

Meanwhile, Trump’s war of choice in Iran regularly invites chattering class speculation as to just why the president decided to start it now. Josh Marshall, the founder and Grand Pooh-Bah of Talking Points Memo, offers an intriguing explanation in his piece, “Let’s Face Facts: This Isn’t Going Well (Iran War Edition)”:

I think we’re in this war because the Venezuela operation went pretty well for Trump, certainly in the short-run. That was fun. So why not do it again in Iran? And he’s escalating abroad in general because escalation, vast expression of power and violence, amount to a kind of psychological compensation for loss of power and popularity at home. It’s a kind of presidential self-care making use of the prerogative powers of the American presidency.

This sort of thing is not uncommon, since the attack on Iran as well as Trump’s Venezuela adventure and the brutal ICE and Border Agent attacks in Minnesota are all regularly cited as efforts to shift public attention from the Epstein files.

Jeffrey Epstein: Insidious Connector

But the Epstein news seems unstoppable. The newest horror story involves a woman who talks in her 2019 FBI interview about being raped repeatedly by Epstein back in the early 1980s, when she was age 13. Then, she ties her abuse to Trump — a first for the Justice Department’s entire files release.

She told the FBI that Epstein introduced her to the future president, “who subsequently forced her head down to his exposed penis which she subsequently bit. In response, Trump punched her in the head and kicked her out.”

That the FBI ultimately conducted four interviews with this woman implies they took her seriously. Why else keep going back? The conversation ultimately stopped because she cut it off — not because the bureau did.

Yet this very specific Trump story, as well as roughly 50 pages of notes from three of the FBI’s four interviews, did not originally appear in the masses of released files. On Thursday night, however, the documents were suddenly posted online. A note said they had been mistakenly classified as duplicates. Hmmmm.

In fact, we only knew about her story before this because an intrepid journalist, Roger Sollenberger, who formerly worked at The Daily Beast (where he did crackerjack reporting), and now writes a Substack, “The Memo,” figured out it was missing by working back from one index.

It was also reported that, though the Justice Department didn’t at first let the public see this, Ghislaine Maxwell already had. It was included in material released to her before her trial.

The reams of released documents also reveal far more details about how Epstein managed to sidle into so many people’s lives.

He functioned as an almost insidious connector. I have long felt many people are bored in their daily lives, circumscribed within their social silos. (That’s one of the psychic rewards of journalism — you can reach out to anyone you want and ask them virtually anything you want.) In Epstein’s emails, he continually entices people by offering something far beyond their usual sphere. His proposals present an intriguing frisson, essentially “coolness” by association. Big Business people are offered dinner with celebrities, intellectuals are offered dinner with the outrageously wealthy (and possible donors), moviemakers sit down with esteemed scholars, financial savants meet famed models and all bask in the beauty of many young women — we now know how very young. Everyone is getting something out of it — except, of course, the girls who are being abused.

This facility to connect people — to cross-pollinate between social groups — can be an amazing asset. Decades ago, the erudite New Yorker writer Malcom Gladwell wrote a remarkable piece, “Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg.” It has stayed with me over the years. (And not just because I know her son, Jacob.) Weisberg, as profiled by Gladwell, genuinely likes and befriends many, many different sorts of people — as opposed to collecting them, the way Epstein did.

Gladwell describes this Chicago woman as an extraordinary example of an essential component of our society:

in a very down-to-earth, day-to-day way, they make the world work. They spread ideas and information. They connect varied and isolated parts of society. … Lois is far from being the most important or the most powerful person in Chicago. But if you connect all the dots that constitute the vast apparatus of government and influence and interest groups in the city of Chicago you’ll end up coming back to Lois again and again. Lois is a connector.

Epstein functions along these same lines — if in a calculating and manipulative fashion.

Even after Epstein was convicted in Florida and served a jail sentence, his allure drew people in. That is why one story in particular stands out. In 2016, Epstein proposed funding a documentary about the much-lauded talk-show host, Dick Cavett. But when PBS documentary producers looked into this, they turned Epstein down. After doing a background check, the public television producers decided they didn’t want him involved.

Why could they see this when so many accomplished and storied people couldn’t? Is it because they have a public responsibility and other people only have self-interest?

We’ll see how it all works out…