When my long, boring commute is no longer boring, it’s bad news. On good boring days, I usually listen to network broadcasts. That is where I learned about the Comey firing in May.
According to CBS News, Comey was speaking with staff at the FBI’s LA offices when he learned of his ouster. The New York Times reports he first saw breaking news of his demise flashing on the monitors in the room.
Tom Wait, CBS News, May 9, 2017
Not even the courtesy of a face-to-face meeting? That was cold.
The next morning, my friend at the office looked a little haggard. Sometimes the role of manager seems to bear down on him. We have a pretty good relationship, so I thought a little light levity might help.
“I just have one request,” I said. “If I get fired, please don’t let me know by flashing it on a news monitor.” He and I laughed. Mission accomplished.
One part of the broadcast carried meaning that did not become clear until much later.
Comey’s motorcade whisked him to LAX shortly after he received the news of his ouster. He was seen shaking hands and exchanging words with folks on the ground before taking off.
That flight from the airport apparently caused some friction. The once, but no longer, Director of the FBI was flown home on the same plane that took him to the conference. The fact that James Comey was not left stranded in Los Angeles infuriated Donald Trump.
The President called, fuming that Comey would be allowed to take this plane home after being fired.
Carol Lee, NBC News, January 29, 2018
“I just have one request,” I said to my friend. “If I get fired, please don’t leave me stranded in Los Angeles.”
He chuckled, then was serious. “Damn, that was petty.” He was right. Petty was the word for it.
There was more as I caught the rest of the broadcast that evening. Comey’s temporary replacement, Andrew McCabe, told the President that he had not approved the flight, but if he had needed to, he would have approved it. Reportedly, there was a second of silence. Then, unexpectedly the conversation went in another direction.
From NBC News:
He was talking about McCabe’s wife, Jill, who ran for the Virginia State Senate as a Democrat.
That had been years before. She lost the election.
Then he suggested to McCabe that he ask his wife how it feels to be a loser, and hung up.
Carol Lee, NBC News
When Rex Tillerson was fired, he found out about it on a tweet on the internet.
Mike Pompeo, Director of the CIA, will become our new Secretary of State. He will do a fantastic job! Thank you to Rex Tillerson for his service! Gina Haspel will become the new Director of the CIA, and the first woman so chosen. Congratulations to all!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 13, 2018
Congratulations to all?
Apparently, nobody outside the administration was supposed to know Tillerson had been fired by tweet. The White House denied the story. But a State Department official, Steve Goldstein, had already issued a statement saying Tillerson had found out he was fired via an internet announcement. So… Steve Goldstein was fired.
I bopped on into the office.
“I just have one request,” I said to my friend. “When I get fired, please don’t tell me about it on Twitter.”
My friend gave kind of a courtesy chuckle. “That was cowardly,” he said, and went back to work.
Andrew McCabe was fired over the weekend. CBS carried the story.
The firing comes less than 2 days before McCabe could retire with a full pension…
…Instead McCabe was fired with just 26 hours to go.
Paula Reid, CBS This Morning, March 17, 2018
My humor is unflagging. “Please don’t fire me a day before I qualify for my pension.” My friend flashed a polite smile and went back to work.
That’s the problem with our office. Co-workers sometimes forget I am hilarious.
We have talked, my friend and I, about this unique and troubling administration. Any patriot has to worry about our national standing. We who have any empathy must fear for the well being of the most vulnerable of our brethren.
Those who dwell within the administration must live in anxious desperation about their own professional standing. They depend on one man’s mood swings. And that one man’s emotional state depends on maintaining their anxiety.
A lucky few escape, if not with reputation, then at least with fame.
Two former inhabitants of Trump World have been condensed in the public mind to single names.
Omarosa Manigault needs no last name. Anthony Scaramucci needs no first. We know them as Omarosa and Scaramucci. Journalist Olivia Nuzzi of New York Magazine, in her account of the Hope Hicks saga, dispatches them quickly.
Both of them were eventually fired, along with a procession of others who failed to maneuver the chaotic status hierarchy President Trump seemed to cultivate out of boredom.
The entire piece is a fascination. I am especially taken by that sentence. It reminds me of Italian novelist Unberto Eco. It took me forever to read Name of the Rose. The words between each comma were carefully constructed, thought provoking. Each paragraph increased my sense of the universe for as long as I could remember it, which was usually a few seconds after I got to the next page.
Olivia Nuzzi’s chaos theory of Trump World is compelling in the same sense. Why does Donald Trump continue to stir the storms inside his own White House?
The chaos does seem spectacularly deliberate. She suggests a mundane motivation.
… the chaotic status hierarchy President Trump seemed to cultivate out of boredom.
Boredom. Well maybe.
The chaos is dazzling in its coarse lack of self-awareness. The grown up child in perpetual tantrum, smashing everything and everyone he can overtake and pummel. Out of boredom? Perhaps.
I think there is another reason for the restlessness. The anxiety of the junior staff, the worry of important figures. The petty resentments. They are not symptoms. They are causes. They are motivations.
There exists a collegiality of sorts in one side of the world of business. Business deals in that side of the game are about a search for a mutuality of interest. Win-win negotiations in developing markets are conducted by those with an eye to the future. Relationships are to be built by finding common ground.
More mature markets, which is to say areas that are played out, are often run by those who look to each sunset as a sort of final bell. Life is short-term. By all accounts, real estate maneuvering, Mr. Trump’s business motif, fits that category. Deals are competitive in the most cutthroat style. There are winners and there are losers in each deal, in each relationship, in and out of the office.
It translates from business to an emotional zero-sum world. There is winner and a loser in every emotional encounter. The only way to win is to make sure the person on the other side of the table, the other side of the contract, the other side of the bed sheet, is a loser.
“Loser” is Mr. Trump’s favorite pejorative.
Most of us, in some way, live out what is left of unmet childhood needs. As we watch our President, we can only wonder what searing patterns, what little boy traumas produced the inner emptiness that constantly needs to be filled at the expense of others.
The insatiable hunger for political theatre is fueled by the same inward vacuum that hungers for office chaos. He lives for those moments when he can look in any direction and see his subjects anxiously hanging on his every word. Those who do not meet that need are subject to his frustrated wrath.
The need for attention, for worship, is matched by a furious need for petty revenge on those who do not deliver that adulation.
I listened to reports of Mr. Trump’s Chief of Staff gleefully regaling his subordinates and members of the press with grim details of Tillerson’s humiliation.
Sources say that Friday, in an off-the-record meeting filled with White House officials and political reporters, Kelly said Tillerson had been suffering from a stomach bug during a diplomatic trip to Africa, and had been using the bathroom when he got the call from Kelly.
Ha ha. The Secretary of State was fired while sitting with his pants around his ankles.
For a brief shameful second, I thought about telling my friend. “Please don’t fire me, then tell my friends that you told me in the men’s room when I was…”
Then I thought better of it.
The joke had died from too much repetition. Too, too many encores.
The pathetic needs of my President are no longer funny. I suppose they never were.
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