Wolff, Bannon, Trump, and Useful Scandal

In yesterday's We Resist thread, I wrote about unethical fuckshit Michael Wolff's toxic project of documenting the Trump White House and selling questionable (at best) narratives about what's happened there in the past year, in service to his own notoriety and wealth.

In the intervening day, more scandalous and salacious details have poured forth into the public square; Donald Trump and Steve Bannon appear to be having a public feud (emphasis on appear to be); and the political press can't get enough of it, despite the fact that every new excerpt and anecdote from Wolff's upcoming book provides no new information and simply confirms what anyone paying the closest bit of attention already knows for a fact — that Donald Trump is a terrible person who surrounds himself with terrible people.


The Trump administration, and every single person who is a part of it, is vile. The policies emanating from the Trump White House are vile. The people who write and defend and enact those policies are vile. The Republican Party is vile. Congressional Republicans' refusal to do their fucking jobs and hold this president and his executive branch accountable is vile.

If any one of the things Wolff is reporting are true, it only confirms what we already know.

But public discussions about the president wanting to know what golden showers are (trust that he already knows that) and debates about whether he is even semi-literate and being held in thrall to elaborate stageplays he puts on with Steve Bannon, all the circuses with none of the bread, work to Trump's benefit.

If we have learned anything about this wreck of a human being since he forayed into politics, it's that he wants the political press and his detractors to be consumed by this horseshit while he maneuvers to grab more power.

So this is the last thing I'm going to be writing about Michael Wolff and his garbage book and its "explosive" revelations. Unless and until the recordings he claims to have made have legal relevance, or there is some other news worth knowing because it comes with attendant consequences for the hideous scoundrels who are the subjects of his work.

Otherwise, it's not worth my time and energy. And it is taking me away from the things that are.

My resistance, I realize more and more with each passing day, must include resisting giving my attention to the useful scandals, no matter how much the political press and social media, especially Twitter, contort everything and make it seem as though that's all there is.

But there is more.

More important news, and more important pieces of life that don't have anything to do with useful scandals, the discussion of which lessens us all.

We're going to find and engage with bigger things together, with more, here in this space.

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