That’s like someone enthusiastically volunteering to wallow in pig shit, and then feeling sorry for them because they’re covered in pig shit. I mean…
That would be a contradiction, I think, right now. Someone competent would have to be willing to acknowledge reality, which is what causes Trump to fire people. Although it really doesn’t matter what they do, as Trump is unhappy with reality and expects his campaign manager to magically alter it. In theory someone could survive if they devote themselves to successfully feeding Trump fake information (about e.g. the poll numbers), made sure all venues were full of people (e.g. by hiring actors), etc. but that wouldn’t make them a competent campaign manager.
Yeah, this worries me about American’s future. Trump has shown the vulnerabilities in the system, so someone even marginally smarter can follow in his footsteps and avoid the mistakes he made. Although the path Trump took to the White House would be difficult to replicate (it involved a lifetime of fraudulently presenting himself as a unspecified “success”), eventually someone will stumble onto a similar road into the Oval Office. They damn well better have fixed some of the weaknesses in American democracy by then, or we’re all totally hosed.
It’s not that they’re stupid, necessarily. It’s more that Trump’s ego is such a destructive black hole that any one with any sort of competency that can put his campaign on the right track would be overridden the moment it clashed with his wants or needs. Campaigns aren’t just driven by the wants of the candidate, but by making compromise and doing other things he is clearly not capable of doing. Anytime anyone around him has made decisions that clashed with his ego, when it’s for the good of the country, has been shit canned. That’s why he won’t get anyone competent.
Lots of smart people out there who will debase themselves for personal gain, but it’s getting harder and harder to find any angles for a would-be grifter to work.
Professional campaign strategists, like professional filmmakers, often find their employment and income prospects tied to how well their last project did. Nobody wants their name attached to a project destined to go down as one of the most epic failures of their generation. If the smart folks don’t see a feasible path to victory for Trump then they aren’t likely to be excited about the job unless it pays so well that they will be able to weather the career hit. Plus, even when Trump has smart people on his team he usually undercuts them anyway.
None of which is to say it’s going to be impossible for Trump to win. But if he does, it’s going to be through some factor that goes beyond the competence of his campaign staff.
I don’t have any empathy for people who actually choose to work for Trump. If they choose to jump into the sewage in the hopes of finding a gold ring, then they have no reason to complain about only finding feces.
I feel more empathy to the misguided and ignorant people still supporting Trump. Those duped by whatever means to believe all of this is actually ok. They deserve better- but are culpable to a great extent for not looking at the facts.
Perhaps because the linked story does not work well as a “rats leaving the sinking ship” metaphor, but (contextually) equating a group of persons and/or their actions with rats is straight out of Dr Goebbels’s little brown book of propaganda?
(Just my $0.02 off the top of my head, not an informed analysis, mind. If I was good at figuring out people I’d be a psychologist.)
Notice that he’s only being demoted, apparently this is because his consulting company has hired Don Jr.'s girlfriend and Eric’s wife at $180K+ salaries to avoid campaign finance laws. If he were truly cast away from the campaign, they’d have to ‘find something else.’
Heinlein describes that feature of politics as though it’s a mistake, but the idea that a ruler is also a sacrifice is a common archetype, often set up in explicit terms – several cultures appointed kings who were automatically killed at the end of a year, or at the next bad harvest or whatever. It makes perfect sense that if someone becomes an avatar of some magical narrative, their human life ends; so killing them isn’t murder, it’s just a cultural punctuation mark. It’s the same thing with celebrities. The only thing our modern culture has added to this ancient pattern is the insistence on acting surprised every time it plays out.
I mean, this doesn’t apply to Parscale, he’s just an ordinary disposable lickspittle. It does apply to Turmp, though. There’s a lot you could say about that.
i know I’m the 11th response to this, and I’m not just piling on. i think Parscale is a grifter who say that, despite also being a grifter, Trump is an easy mark. Parscale made money off of this, maybe more than we’ll ever know depending on how campaign funds were directed, and is going to get some follow-up gig or book deal or who knows what.
I have no reason to think Parscale got any less than Parscale expected from this deal, and no reason to sympathy. I’ve got no sympathy for people who successfully profit off of fascist politicians. But this also isn’t a schadenfreude moment for me. I think this went fine for Parscale.
