Right?
But this weirdly addressed political campaign info dump on a Monday morning at the top of the news cycle makes no sense unless it was supposed to bigfoot some other, more awkward news--if I suspect that there is anyone kind of media-savvy in Team Trump, and based on the primary, could be. The sort of bad news--the Trump campaign is all kinds of broke--but this isn't new for them. The news that the Trump campaign only raised like $3.1 mill this month and has $1.3 mill on hand and owes something like $42 mill, and mostly uses Trump properties for its expenses meaning Trump is paying himself back--whoa! It's complicated, right? It's a lot like maybe the Trump campaign is just a giant funnel constructed to get GOP donations where Trump pretends to self-fund by "loaning" money to his campaign, but since the loans aren't forgiven--meh? The accounting stuff is probably boring to all y'all even if I think it's the most interesting thing I've seen in a forever. (Money nerd for life.)
But the cutesy thing where his web IT guys are "Draper Sterling"? Like from the tv series Mad Men? Are you shitting me?
What I love about this, personally, is how it segues into something Speaker Paul Ryan was just saying about the conscience of GOP voters. Which had me helplessly thinking about Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative. You know, Barry Goldwater's political memoir joint. Now, you all know I rankle when people talk about Hillary Clinton as a "Goldwater girl" because she evolved. But you know who was all about that hardcore GOP connection to the past--like Reagan, Goldwater, and all--Trump. Via Roy Cohn (who he dropped like a brick what with the AIDS thing) and Roger Stone, who is a Trump insider on the outside. So many echoes of 1964--which takes us back to Sterling Draper--is this some retro campaign? Because this money is definitely 1960's dollars, and not a 21st century campaign financing amount. And the southern strategy type race-baiting bullshit Trump has become a little bit infamous for? Maybe Paul Manafort, the sunovabitch Lewandowski's ouster leaves in the driver's seat--is just the guy with the history to continue in the expected vein. But this looks a lot more like a Ponzi scheme than an actual presidential campaign.
It's all current events--but it's also all "blasts from the past"--isn't it? Very fictional and meta. Very reminiscent of the themes from Mad Men, too. Not sure what to make of it, exactly. But the shared themes were too rich not to make note of.
2 comments:
I think Trump is doing a Guy Grand on us all and we don't get the joke because we're losers, okay? At the convention he'll demonstrate that he actually has vast knowledge of every issue that might affect his Presidency plus the IRS will say he's even wealthier than he admits to and pays more in taxes than if he took deductions he was entitled to and also he donates billions to charity all because of his innate decency and then everyone in America will vote for him except some losers and you know who you are and so does he.
There is something "too good to be true" that I don't trust about this campaign on some level--like his poor-mouthing disarray right this minute is only staging for him to seem like an underdog, the way a pool shark fakes being inept at the game to con people into placing bets, before going in for the kill with a surprise fundraising apparatus and newly-discovered message discipline showing up just post-convention "bump". Battling from a six or seven point deficit to a one or two point lead for even minute would get treated in the press like "momentum", since both sides and horserace for life, etc. Which would then become the plucky outsider Trump campaign ittle engine that could.
How paranoid am I that I can find a narrative where this tire-fire on the landfill of life turns out a Trump success-story?
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