Enough With the Fanfic From Trump's Shitty Generals and Enablers

[Nevilledog]

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The Daily Beast
@thedailybeast
"An announcement, six months after somebody is no longer the president, that there was a plan in place to take action that was never actually taken does not convince me that the person who supposedly made the plan is brave," writes @morninggloria

Enough With the Fanfic From Trump’s Shitty Generals and Enablers
We’ve been through so many rounds of rehabilitative Trump official fan fiction that it is its own genre at this point.
thedailybeast.com
10:00 AM · Jul 19, 2021

https://www.thedailybeast.com/enough-with-the-fanfic-from-trumps-shitty-generals-and-enablers

It takes a pine tree about 30 years to grow from seed to maturity. A single mature pine can be processed into up to 20,000 sheets of paper, which can be used to make books, newspapers, and magazines printed with all manner of literature. The tree has no control over what kind; one pine might be turned into, say, a marked-up keepsake copy of Middlemarch, and another tree just like it could be turned into the ghostwritten memoir of a girl power lifestyle influencer that will serve as a White Claw coaster until the dog chews it up.

But few paper tree fates are as undignified as that which awaits those that hit printing presses at the same time that a former Trump sycophant is launching a rehab tour. Imagine being a tree your whole life, and then having your afterlife devoted to insisting that some former government official’s tepid imaginary resistance to President Trump was actually a form of bravery that saved America. The indignity. Maybe that’s what happens to the bad trees.

The latest Trump contemporary on a mission to inform America that he is the real hero of the Trump era is Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, a regular Big Bad John down in the mine holding up the joists so all of the miners can run out, at least as people familiar with his thinking put it. You may remember General Milley from that photo taken the day that President Trump had law enforcement use tear gas to clear protesters from Lafayette Square, so that the president could pose next to a church and hold a Bible aloft like it was a fish he’d caught on vacation. Milley was with him that day, dressed like a GI Joe side character and wearing a face so self-serious it made him appear to be suffering from constipation.

Several days later, after the public had the opportunity to get good and mad about it, Milley acknowledged that the whole affair was indeed full of shit. He apologized for his involvement in the photo op.

*snip*

[lunatica]

1. The dollar short and day late syndrome

Sometimes it doesn’t work, but Trumpsters don’t mind.

[Ilsa]

2. I imagine Milley had to stay quiet

to keep from being sacked and replaced by someone who would follow trump's illegal orders. Blabbing would undermine everything since impeachment and investigations didn't get him removed.

So, I don't agree with morninggloria's assessment.

[sop]

3. Some on this site are calling Milley "an American hero."

[brush]

4. His response on critical race theory says a lot about the man.

IMO, in a positive way.

[Baked Potato]

5. The opinion writer is woefully ignorant of Command Authority and

she needs to stop and smell the freedom. I guess she doesn’t realize the power of the presidency and the fact T***p could fire anyone at anytime. She cherry picks situations in which in her mind T***p could have been felled with just the right protestation from someone with a uniform on.

TFG lost. It took the American people to stop him. Maybe America will be more careful who they send up as Commander in Chief.

[dweller]

6. At least no trees were harmed

for morninggloria



✌🏻

[gratuitous]

7. I agree

Ryan makes an excellent point about Gen. Milley:

This has led to a wave of embarrassing depictions of Milley as a “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” figure and an “American hero” instead of what he is, a “guy who now wants us to believe that he’s the reason that things weren’t worse.” But why should we believe him?

Why indeed, should we believe Milley months after the fact? Ryan's larger point is that we shouldn't lionize these folks for their self-aggrandizing tales months after the fact. There's a history here:

We’ve been through so many rounds of rehabilitative Trump official fan fiction that it is its own genre at this point. Do writers depicting those who were complicit as secret heroes think their spin is believable? It wasn’t believable when it was the Actually Don McGahn’s Secret Bravery Saved America news cycle, the Anonymous Miles Taylor The Quiet Hero cycle, several cycles of Ivanka and Jared Are Privately Urging The President To Be Less Bad, a round of John Kelly Always Hated The Guy, a hearty dose of Lt. General McMaster Pounds The Table And Yells “Sir!” Possibly Loudly Enough To Save the Republic, General James “Mad Dog” Mattis Has Some Tough Talk After The Fact, Bill Barr Was Actually Secretly Doing Smart Things, or the Mike Pompeo Was Tough And Presidential this Whole Time cycle. (Coming soon! Kellyanne Conway pretends that she didn’t spend the last six years blabbing to journalists from the Times on down as she promotes her “tell-all.”)