You might have heard that Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin is being urged by his Yale classmates to “speak out” and resign from Trump’s cabinet following the President’s bungled press conference which was chock-full of egregious ramblings about everything from the Founders’ slaves and race relations to how dishonest the media is.
This is the letter (from 300 members of the Yale College Class of 1985):
Dear Secretary Mnuchin:
We, some of your fellow members of the Yale College Class of 1985, write to you today in response to President Trump’s comments on the recent events in Charlottesville. We believe it is your moral obligation to resign your post as Secretary of the Treasury, effective immediately. We understand that graduates of Yale College have served the United States proudly as presidents, members of the cabinet, and in many other capacities since its founding, and that rarely, if ever, have any of us made such a request of a classmate, whatever our differences in political opinion have been.
We do so today because President Trump has declared himself a sympathizer with groups whose values are antithetical to those values we consider fundamental to our sacred honor as Americans, as men and women of Yale, and as decent human beings. President Trump made those declarations loudly, clearly, and unequivocally, and he said them as you stood next to him. We can be Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, Greens, and a number of other things and still be friends, classmates, and patriots, but we cannot be Nazis and white supremacists. We can disagree on the means of promoting the general welfare of the country, on the size and role of government, on the nature of freedom and security, but we cannot take the side of what we know to be evil.
We call upon you, as our friend, our classmate, and as a fellow American, to resign in protest of President Trump’s support of Nazism and white supremacy. We know you are better than this, and we are counting on you to do the right thing.
Mnuchin has responded and you can find his letter in full below.
Suffice to say it’s almost as chock-full of bullshit as Trump’s presser, and I’m sure Mnuchin knows it.
Indeed, as I pointed out on Twitter earlier today, the fact that “Mnuchin Pushes Back Against Classmates Call to Quit Trump Admin” is even a headline certainly seems to suggest that he will eventually resign from the administration.
"Mnuchin Pushes Back Against Classmates Call to Quit Trump Admin"
the fact that this is even a headline suggests he will eventually exit
— Heisenberg Report (@heisenbergrpt) August 19, 2017
Meanwhile, Axios has published a kind of compendium of anecdotes sourced from “a half dozen senior administration officials, who range from dismayed but certain to stay, to disgusted and likely soon to leave.”
Here they are:
- “You have no idea how much crazy stuff we kill”: The most common response centers on the urgent importance of having smart, sane people around Trump to fight his worst impulses. If they weren’t there, they say, we would have a trade war with China, massive deportations, and a government shutdown to force construction of a Southern wall.
- “General Mattis needs us”: Many talk about their reluctance to bolt on their friends and colleagues who are fighting the good fight to force better Trump behavior/decisions. They rightly point out that together, they have learned how to ignore Trump’s rhetoric and, at times, collectively steer him to more conventional policy responses.
- “Trump’s not as evil as portrayed”: All of them talk up the president as more reasonable off Twitter and TV than on it. This gives them hope (though almost all increasingly say it’s fleeting hope) he will listen to his better angels, or at least the pleas of Ivanka.
- “We like the power”: Well, no one comes out and say it this blatantly. But working in the White House, even this one, is intoxicating and ego-stroking. They have enormous say over regulations and rules, invites and implementation, government jobs and access to the Oval. They also know they are one step away from an even bigger job in government, so it’s hard to just walk away.
Needless to say, none of that is particularly encouraging and some of it is downright frightening.
You can draw your own conclusions here, but what you should note is that at this point, this is a lost cause. Everyone is just trying to figure out what their own optimal strategy is in terms of abandoning ship. Or, as one of the best bloggers around (Notes From Disgracedland’s Bjarne Knausgaard ) put it earlier:
Absolutely. He can deny it as much as he wants, but he is out. His reaction only proves that he had taken a course in game theory.
— Bjarne Knausgard (@BjarneKnausgard) August 20, 2017
Here’s the letter:
Yeah, we get it. You hate Trump.
How does this not get redundant and boring for you?
Pretty pathetic, actually.
What’s pathetic is that some people DON’T hate Trump.
yes, how the hell does someone see the news and watch him and hear what he says and does and still support him? The bad thing is that they still get to vote! omg.
– Murphy
“What’s pathetic is that some people DON’T hate Trump.”
Oh, wow. Good one. You got me.
That wasn’t the point of this or almost any other blog post by Heisenberg.
I would say I’m surprised you missed the point, but since you sound like a Trump apologist, I suppose I am unsurprised by your reading comprehension deficits.
Buddha said, as recorded in one of many translations of the Dhammaphada,
“All experience is preceded by mind,
Led by mind,
Made by mind.
Speak or act with a corrupted mind,
And suffering follows
As the wagon wheel follows the hoof of the ox.”
Today, we experience Trump, not by his own making alone, but by the making of the Republican party. Trump is the suffering that follows from the manner by Republicans acted and legislated with corrupted hearts and minds. Trump is their echo, in the most bold, clear and unfiltered way. Republicans broke our democracy. Now they must fix it.
Excerpted from the New Yorker:
“Donald Trump’s ascent was hardly the first sign that Americans had not uniformly regarded Obama’s election as an inspiring chapter in the country’s fitful progress toward equality. Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House, had branded him the “food-stamp President.” In the right-wing and white-nationalist media, Obama was, variously, a socialist, a Muslim, the Antichrist, a “liberal fascist,” who was assembling his own Hitler Youth. A high-speed train from Las Vegas to Anaheim that was part of the economic-stimulus package was a secret effort to connect the brothels of Nevada to the innocents at Disneyland. He was, by nature, suspect. “You just look at the body language, and there’s something going on,” Trump said, last summer. In the meantime, beginning on the day of Obama’s first inaugural, the Secret Service fielded an unprecedented number of threats against the President’s person.
And so, speeding toward yet another airport last November, Obama seemed like a weary man who harbored a burning seed of apprehension. “We’ve seen this coming,” he said. “Donald Trump is not an outlier; he is a culmination, a logical conclusion of the rhetoric and tactics of the Republican Party for the past ten, fifteen, twenty years. What surprised me was the degree to which those tactics and rhetoric completely jumped the rails.”
For half a century, in fact, the leaders of the G.O.P. have fanned the lingering embers of racial resentment in the United States. Through shrewd political calculation and rhetoric, from Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy” to the latest charges of voter fraud in majority-African-American districts, doing so has paid off at the ballot box. “There were no governing principles,” Obama said. “There was no one to say, ‘No, this is going too far, this isn’t what we stand for.’ ”
Last week, the world witnessed Obama’s successor in the White House, unbound and unhinged, acting more or less as Obama had predicted.”
Worth a read:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/28/donald-trumps-true-allegiances
Marty, read it and loved it! Saw this one next to it — really good too! Here is a great quote from this article: “This is the inescapable fact: on November 9th, the United States elected a dishonest, inept, unbalanced, and immoral human being as its President and Commander-in-Chief. Trump has daily proven unyielding to appeals of decency, unity, moderation, or fact. He is willing to imperil the civil peace and the social fabric of his country simply to satisfy his narcissism and to excite the worst inclinations of his core followers.”
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/28/donald-trumps-true-allegiances
nailed it!
– Murphy
“The bad thing is that they still get to vote! omg.”
Yeah, wow. OMG. Well said, you fucking loser.
Not exactly a fan of the democratic process, are ya?
Liberals. Unbelievable how stupid you are.
One can very easily be a democrat and believe that many of your fellow citizens are too ignorant to exercise their franchise either intelligently or responsibly.
“yes, how the hell does someone see the news and watch him and hear what he says and does and still support him?”
Yeah, how about you say “and” a few more times in one sentence you fucking loser.
You are not Jack Kerouac. You are a…. fucking….. loser…..
hahahaha! touch a nerve? AND if you had a brain you would see what a fucking loser you support! But based on your juvenile response, I see you AND your idol are a good match. AND fuck you too. 🙂
– Murphy
No. Your dumbass attempt to sound like a writer did not “hit a nerve” you douche. Pointing out you lame you are does not mean you “hit a nerve.”
But guess what. It does mean you’ve wasted enough of my time. Goodbye shithead.
You need to take a chill pill and proofread your bullshit before you submit it. You sound pretty ignorant.
– Murphy
You know what it says you fucking loser.
“This is the inescapable fact: on November 9th, the United States elected a dishonest, inept, unbalanced, and immoral human being as its President and Commander-in-Chief. Trump has daily proven unyielding to appeals of decency, unity, moderation, or fact. He is willing to imperil the civil peace and the social fabric of his country simply to satisfy his narcissism and to excite the worst inclinations of his core followers.”
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/28/donald-trumps-true-allegiances
Be sure and read that.
– Murphy 🙂
No, a frayed knot.
Hey idiot. Nobody is interested in your bullshit. Do you not know what GOODBYE means
Most children outgrow the name calling stage.
🙂 Murphy
Could you go ahead and send the email to the h-man? The hate mail bag has been dead lately.