Cringe deep in thought train professional#

Somehow this justification persisted even after they no longer worked for him and were using their access to make it rain in the private sector. The committee members felt that taking on this oh-so-altruistic act on behalf of America meant that they didn’t have to publicly reckon with the moral compromise of working for someone like Trump. These self-appointed supermen and wonder women saw themselves mostly in terms of “bad decisions prevented” rather than successes, according to Axios. McMaster, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, economic advisers Gary Cohn and Dina Powell and John Kelly, the man who oversaw the implementation of the Muslim Ban from his perch running the Department of Homeland Security before being promoted to White House chief of staff. Among them were National Security Adviser H. In August of Trump’s first year, Axios’s Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen announced the “Committee to Save America,” a “loose alliance” of generals, cabinet officials and high-level staff who took it upon themselves to protect the country from disaster. The messiahs’ self-regard was such that somehow the most grandiloquent leak during the presidency of the world’s most bombastic individual did not actually flatter the narcissist-in-chief himself, but rather the self-appointed messiahs who went to work for a man whose manifest unfitness made them afraid and whose grotesque personality they detested. The Jesuses walking among us in their crowns of Apprentice thorns. Here’s a field guide, my taxonomy of enablers, so you can identify them in the wild.įirst among equals were those with the Messiah Complex. They all turned out to be much more powerful than I had anticipated. Others are unique to the creatures of Washington or the contaminated right-wing political ecosystem that sustained the Mango Monstrosity. They fit into different categories, some of which reflect universal, human failings replicated across industries and societies and ideologies. When I dug deeper beneath this cozy conventional wisdom, what I found were real choices made by individuals who all fell back on a few phyla of rationalization that reveal why they did what they did. And the Truth mustn’t be reflected upon without the whole game being jeopardized. A groupthink emerged whereby this “reality” came to be treated as if it were delivered from on high. The “political reality” meant that the base of voters in the Breitbart comment section must be appeased and managed. They all had internalized what they thought were the lessons of the previous decade. POLITICO Weekend delivers gripping reads, smart analysis and a bit of high-minded fun.

Their hopes and fears and loathings and animal desires.

Cringe deep in thought train professional#

Throughout these informal and professional exchanges, over time, I began to build a reservoir of understanding as to what was going on in the interior lives of the men and women who succumbed to the MAGA wiles. Except the tribesmen were my former colleagues, and the readers shouldn’t have required a middleman’s lingua franca to understand their perspective, because they were unknowingly standing next to them in the Whole Foods checkout line the entire time. My task was somewhat akin to a National Geographic adventure journalist who embedded themselves in a remote Amazonian rain forest to report back to the mainland about the culture of previously uncontacted tribes. These conversations became formalized late in the Trump term, once I began writing for Rolling Stone as a sort-of anthropologist to the Trumpists for the Boomer Piketty set. However, in these instances there was one important difference: the realization that they brought it upon themselves. People dealing with their internalized shame. They weren’t all that dissimilar from the coming-out-of-the-closet convos I’d had over the years. When you are a prominent Never Trumper and not a total prick, you attract these types of conversations.