Nothing Gate

Nothing Gate The Wiles Files, Crash Test Dummies Today, I’m going to break with tradition and lead NextDraft with something that is not news. Vanity Fair has a two-part story that covers eleven interviews with Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles. The NYT (Gift Article) shares some of the lowlights . Wiles acknowledged that, while she has tried to stop the tendency, Trump is using Justice Department prosecutions to settle scores. “When there’s an opportunity, he will go for it.” (No way! Trump?) Wiles said that Trump “was not telling the truth when he accused former President Bill Clinton of visiting the private island of the sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.” (A falsehood? From Trump? Say it isn’t so!) Wiles explained that “Vice President JD Vance has ‘been a conspiracy theorist for a decade’ and his conversion from Trump critic to ally was based not on principle but was ‘sort of political,’” (Vance? Less than authentic and even political ?), that Elon Musk is an odd duck and an avowed Ketamine user (Weird, Elon seems like a sober, rational thinker who comes off as just a regular guy), and Russell T. Vought, the budget director, is ‘a right-wing absolute zealot.’” (Funny, he’s always struck me as being sort of middle of the road). There were insider accounts that could still surprise us during the first Trump term, but that bar has been raised. The badness is not being concealed. It’s being celebrated. So are the mental issues. If Freud watched a Trump press conference, I’m guessing he’d make it through about five minutes before putting down his notebook and saying, “I really have nothing more to add.” What we’re seeing in front of our eyes is worse than what we once imagined to be taking place behind the scenes. None of the Wiles revelations are as bad or disturbing as what we’ve seen in the past 24 hours of livestreamed news coverage of Trump and his enablers, and we’ve learned from experience that the next 24 hours won’t be any different. + Yesterday, I got a lot of reactions to my take on the confluence of three stories that made the launch of the holiday season feel like the Hanukkah from hell. Candles in the Wind . 2 Striking the Wrong Note “If the ideas within it are really used to shape policy, then U.S. influence in the world will rapidly disappear, and America’s ability to defend itself and its allies will diminish. The consequences will be economic as well as political, and they will be felt by all Americans.” Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic (Gift Article) on the new National Security Strategy. The Longest Suicide Note in American History . “The security strategy also talks, bizarrely, about Europe being on the verge of ‘civilizational erasure,’ which is not language used by many European politicians, even those in far-right parties ... In multiple indices, after all-health, happiness, standard of living-European countries regularly rank higher than the United States. Compared with Americans,...

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