Maverick's World

Why Trump is losing it over the Omarosa book...

As no one worth their salt wants to associate closely with Trump - he relies on a network of "outsiders" (C list TV celebrities and other assorted losers) to staff positions close to his throne.

This would have been fine - though not ideal (as these people lack relevant experience) - but this is deeply complicated by the current situation in the Trump WH. I get the sense that he basically asks these guys to do stupid/illegal shit and then wants to the to keep quiet about the fact that he ordered it.

In order to enforce this kind of gag order he uses private NDAs and offers of highly paid sinecures in the Trump Organization.

I suspect he can't use the usual Nat Sec framework to silence these people because he is doing thing that could easily be interpreted as *treason*.

Early on last year - he tried to use Nat Sec rules to stamp out "leaks".  What happened when he pushed on this issue was that factions and tribes (ex Nazis, Russian plants, Kushnerites, Bannonites, Kelly/McMasterites, GOPers etc) relied on leaks to balance the power equations between them. Each tribe interpreted his order to "plug the leaks" as a license to target members of the peer competitor tribes. All it took was one tribe to push the agenda and that locked others into a retaliatory framework. The result was a logjam as the factions attempted to bring each other to their knees. The Kelly/McMaster faction which was most competent in using Nat Sec machinery emerged dominant and the Bannonites and the Kushnerites were decimated. Bannonites tried to throw Kushnerites under the bus and Kushnerites responded by appealing directly to Trump.

The end result was a bloodbath inside the WH that led to many people leaving. Only Trump would have been dumb enough to believe anything else was likely with such a poorly thought out initiative.

A lot of those who left ended up speaking Micheal Wolf. The result was a revealing look at the inner working of this WH and it is here that voters like us got the first glimpse of the insane levels of graft that were taking place inside the Trump setup. Whatever we were naive enough to believe about Trump behaving after he won the election was drowned in its infancy by reading the details in Micheal Wolf's book.

Micheal's book led Trump to revert back to his NDA + Trump org sinecure/hush money policy.

Now Omarosa represents the visible failure of that policy. Trump is now in a catch-22 situation. He can hit her with a private lawsuit but when it fails he will be shown to be completely incompetent. If he lets her slide, he will send out the message that it is okay to betray his NDAs and at the very least he will have to 3x as much to all those like Kurt Schiller that are already getting hefty sums of hush money.

The present approach of attacking her in public/on twitter is absurd. It will drive up her sales and exposure.

Hell awaits a mob boss who can't get his underlings to keep their mouths shut. 

This is looking like a major fail on Trump's part. If this keeps up he will have to ask Putin for some novichok to sort things out.

posted by maverick @ 7:58 AM