GIANNOULIAS TRANSITION TEAM

 SPRINGFIELD. Ill. — Alexi Giannoulias, the Democratic secretary of state elect, has pulled together a huge transition team in an effort to transform the office that’s been led for more than 20 years by retiring Secretary of State Jesse White.

And get this: A key player on the team is Dan Brady, the Republican who lost to Giannoulias earlier this month.

Brady said he’s “honored” that Giannoulias is “rising above party politics” to take advantage of his experience working on issues related to the office.

A lot of voices: Giannoulias has pulled together nine transition committees, which comprise a total of 125 members from across the state and from various industries. See the full list here.

Giannoulias, who takes office Jan. 9, says the team is charged with producing “action-oriented solutions and deliverables starting on Day One,” according to a statement.

Along with coming up with their own ideas, the transition committees will consider the nearly 1,000 proposals and suggestions that were submitted from the public on the RevUpIllinois website, according to a statement.

Who’s in charge: State Rep. Bob Morgan is leading the Driver Facilities and Road Safety Committee, a key component of the SOS office. And Brady heads up the Organ and Tissue Donations Committee and serves on the Road Safety panel.

Former state Rep. Carol Ronen is leading Voter Rights and Registration. Tech entrepreneur Howard Tullman heads up Technology Enhancements. Illinois Environmental Council’s Jennifer Walling leads Environmental Initiatives. Highland Park Library’s Heidi Smith heads up Library Enhancements. Broadhaven Capital’s John Simpson leads Securities Division Policies. And Velez Global Enterprises’ Letty Velez heads up Business Services.

HOWARD TULLMAN ON LISA DENT SHOW - WGN RADIO

 LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE

LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE

 

BRET STEPHENS

The Table for Trump’s Antisemitic Banquet Was Set Long Ago

Nov. 29, 2022

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

 

By Bret Stephens

Opinion Columnist

The former president, who is running for his former office, invites to his home one of the most notorious antisemites in the United States, who brings along a well-known Holocaust denier. So far, to my knowledge, the only member of Donald Trump’s cabinet to publicly condemn his former boss by name is Mike Pence. Nor, with a handful of exceptions, have top Republicans or the major organs of right-wing media, and even for them the indictment is mainly that Trump was sloppy about vetting his guest list.

If he were to win again, all this would be swept under the rug, just as it was the last time. This is the new normal. We shouldn’t be surprised. The ground for it was laid long ago.

It was laid when Republicans normalized Trump’s various ethnic bigotries. Remember when, during the 2016 campaign, he said he couldn’t expect to get a fair trial in a fraud case from a judge with Mexican heritage and Paul Ryan, who was then the speaker of the House, called it a “textbook definition of a racist comment”? Ryan endorsed him anyway.

It was laid when Republicans normalized Trump’s conspiracy theories. His birtherism should have been disqualification enough. But the problem with conspiracy thinking is that one theory always leads to another — and the ultimate conspiracy theory, the secret to the secret to the secret, is that the Jews did it. People who can be led to believe anything about anything will eventually believe anything about Jews.

It was laid when Trump and much of conservative media made Republicans the party of immigrant bashers, something they emphatically were not when their standard bearers were Ronald Reagan, the Bushes and John McCain. “You too must befriend the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt,” says the Book of Deuteronomy, which helps explain why the words on the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal were composed by a Jewish poet. It’s also why a fanatic murdered 11 Jewish congregants in a Pittsburgh synagogue in a plot to attack immigration.

It was laid when Trump called the news media the “enemy of the American people.” It should not be controversial to say the mainstream news media is frequently blinkered by groupthink, liberal bias and self-flattering assumptions about its own goodness. But Trump forwent critique for the demonization of an industry that, along with banks and entertainment, is all but synonymous with “Jewish” among hardened antisemites.

It was laid when the conservative movement came to despise intellectualism of any sort, including conservative intellectuals. Though the moment was long in coming, it arrived when Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly publicly ripped into the Washington Post columnist George Will for the latter’s unflattering review of the TV host’s idiotic “Killing Reagan” book, after which Will lost his Fox News contract but retained his honor. (O’Reilly ended up losing both.) The Trumpian right’s hatred of anything that conveys a sense of erudition or culture is not in itself antisemitic. But it has a way of leaning in that direction.

It was laid when “globalist,” another dog-whistle word for “Jew,” became a slur used by the right. The notion that a shadowy group of financiers who share an allegiance to no country, are in it only for themselves and will gladly make the working classes suffer for their profits is the theory behind the “Jews will not replace us” chant adopted by the neo-Nazi marchers at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017.

It was laid when management at Fox News repeatedly stood by its star bigot even as he championed replacement theory, went after the “vulture capitalism” of a prominent Jewish hedge funder and showered praise on Kanye West as a “bold” truth-teller while reportedly editing out Ye’s antisemitic comments.

It was laid when the right repeatedly looked the other way at Trump’s persistent overtures to the radical wing of the party, whether it was tweeting antisemitic images, lying about David Duke or refusing to repudiate white supremacists in Trump’s first debate with Joe Biden — telling the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.” This foul courtship has always been part of Trump’s playbook, which is why his most recent dinner should come as a surprise to nobody.

It was laid when pundits on the right justly decried antisemitism on the left — the noxiousness of an Ilhan Omar or a Jeremy Corbyn or the anti-Zionists whose unhinged criticisms of Israel so often mimic ancient antisemitic tropes and behaviors — while remaining practically mute to the antisemitism of a Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Viktor Orban and the QAnon right. “First cast out the beam out of thine own eye” may be a Christian phrase, but it behooves a conservative movement to clean up its own house when it comes to antisemitism before it considers the mote in the eye of its opponents.

A final note: I was reluctant to write this column, because I think the former president is a spent political force and because, as Patti Davis observed on Monday, often the best way to defeat a bully is to ignore him. But the bigotries Trump has unleashed are not spent and cannot be ignored. And they won’t be defeated until they are unequivocally denounced by whatever is left of honorable conservatism.

NEW INC. Magazine column by Howard Tullman

 

Beware of Investors Who Will Undermine Your Company

VCs come bearing capital and, supposedly, sage advice. But at critical times like these, they're more concerned about their interests than yours. 

 

BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS@TULLMAN

As a serial entrepreneur, I've been accused of regarding most venture capitalists much like a dog looks upon a fire hydrant. Nothing that has taken place in the last few years has changed that opinion. There may be a few good souls among these VC vipers but, if anything, it's become increasingly clear that I may have been too kind. Then again, I'm an equal opportunity offender.

Watching shameless VCs circulate to their portfolio companies the business plans submitted in good faith by hopeful startups (and potential competitors of those portfolio companies) without the slightest regard for confidentiality is just one of my many grievances. At the same time, I've also cautioned startup entrepreneurs to be a little less greedy and aggressive in their own valuation demands when dealing with VCs. And I've suggested to board members some basic ground rules for effective and supportive participation.

But as we enter a new season of triage, salvage, and self-interest, where the VCs serving on hundreds of boards find themselves grossly conflicted, I fear further challenges. There are so many who have divided duties, and they can't serve two masters at once. Every entrepreneur trying to sustain and save his or her own business needs to keep a very watchful eye on the worst of these folks. Because, when push comes to shove, there's only so much room in the lifeboats and so much cash, resources, and time to devote to individual situations. Be attentive and proactive, because you don't want to be the one without a seat when the music stops and the VCs decide which firms to back, which ones to bury, and which ones to bail on.

Right now, in the most viable businesses, we're seeing serious conflicts at the board level between the concerns and objectives of the management teams trying to stabilize and prudently rebuild their businesses and the venture investors concerned mainly with their own timetables and exit strategies. But whenever the company's financial condition, current performance, and long-term prospects are uncertain and challenging, the board level conversations quickly turn to triage, and the VCs are the last people an entrepreneur can count on and the quickest to jump ship and forget their fiduciary obligations to the business. It's possible that it's actually impossible for a venture capitalist running an investment portfolio to not be conflicted, and to honor their duties as directors and act completely objectively, independently, and faithfully in the best interests of each portfolio company.

Over the last few decades, we've regarded the ability of the VCs to cross-pollinate, coordinate, and share opportunities and technologies among their companies as a clearly positive competitive advantage for all concerned. Whether it's Y Combinator, the PayPal mafia, or any of the many other variations of the Japanese keiretsu model that gained as much currency and popularity in the last decade as the kaizen manufacturing doctrines did in past times, spreading and sharing the wealth throughout one's portfolio is increasingly SOP for the VCs. But when hard choices have to be made, this approach can far too easily shift to robbing Peter to pay Paul. What worked well in the best of times can be a double-edged sword.

As the CEO of a challenged portfolio company, you don't want to wake up one morning and find yourself sitting on the sidelines as your business is sold out from under you for scrap, folded into someone else's shop that is also in need of salvation, or - worse yet - cannibalized by your own self-interested venture investors looking to poach your key employees, customers, or technologies and move them to their other, more viable, portfolio companies.

And don't think for a moment that it can't happen to you because this is happening all over the country. The post-pandemic portfolios of many VC firms are in shambles and, in their frenzy to protect theirs, venture capital partners who are serving on the boards of several of their portfolio companies are finding themselves torn between competing interests. There are multiple potential conflicts: the needs of each business they've invested in; their own anxieties about their firm's scorecard; their competing fiduciary obligations as directors; and their own arrogant belief that they uniquely know what's best for all concerned. These are people who simply believe that they make their own morality and that the traditional rules and legal obligations don't apply to them.

This awful combination of personal concerns, questionable judgments, and complete callousness leads to borderline or worse behaviors by conflicted directors. Their book of breaches of fiduciary duties includes interfering with management's responsibilities, directly approaching company employees with criticisms of senior management, using budgets as instruments of torture rather than planning documents, and soliciting or offering senior managers positions at their other portfolio companies. Beyond being unethical and unprofessional, these acts - especially in stressful and uncertain times - can do serious damage to a company's morale, common purpose, direction, and progress.

Unfortunately, there's an overwhelming tendency among board members to be aggressive conflict avoiders. They value their venture industry contacts and relationships far more than any of their portfolio companies.  That means it's very difficult for entrepreneurs to rally and induce board members to take action when "one of their own" is misbehaving, even in clear cases of breach and other inappropriate behaviors.

In many instances, the other board members may be conflicted -- especially where they have co-invested with the offender. And frankly, no one's interest is served by initiating formal legal actions or board motions and sanctions. Apart from direct confidential conversations with the problem directors, which may result in a change or replacement of the investing entity's board representative, there's not much to be done other than to hope that the discovery and warning of the inappropriate actions will prevent a repeat of the same kind of behavior.

The bottom line is simple -- forewarned is forearmed. Even if the available remedies are modest at best, it's still your job as CEO to be attentive and observant and to take whatever steps you can to protect the company in every possible way from directors who insist on placing their own selfish interests ahead of those of the business.

NOV 29, 2022

The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.

 

TWO COMPLETE ASSHOLES

 

INSULIN - SCUMBAG REPUBLICANS WHO VOTED NO

 

GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER

 

 

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN BY HOWARD TULLMAN

  

Be Thankful You're Still in Business. Be Ready to Get Through Some Tougher Times Ahead.

Enjoy the holiday, but for entrepreneurs there's rarely a day off and there are big decisions ahead. These five tips can help you make them. 

BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS@TULLMAN

As the holiday celebrations approach after another year of mixed blessings, we're all more likely to be relieved about what we avoided rather than thankful for what modest blessings we've received. But there's at least one group I know of who wouldn't trade places or positions with anyone, notwithstanding all the grief they've been through for the last several years. Entrepreneurs. They're people who know that they've hung in, that they've hung tough, and that, while the battle's far from over, they're proud and grateful that their businesses are still standing. And they're especially thankful for the people and plans that helped get them through the hardest of times.

Thanksgiving is a fitting holiday to acknowledge and appreciate the courage, grit, and perseverance of the millions of founders still plugging away every day, nose-to-the-grindstone, and working to build the future, brick by brick and bit by bit. The top job can feel solitary and under-appreciated at times, but while it can be lonely at the top, at least it's not crowded. There's still a lot to be said for knowing that you have some direct say in your own destiny, especially when the going gets really rough and the world at large seems to be conspiring against you. Honestly, as they'll be quick to tell you, there's no other place these folks would want to be.

Besides, it's not like the grass is much greener elsewhere. The previous allure and reassuring comfort of a 9-to-5 job at a big business doesn't look all that appealing, especially when the entire tech sector is shedding employees at an alarming rate. Those big businesses (other than Twitter) may be incrementally more stable at the macro level, but the individual prospects of job security right now at these places actually feels far less certain. Micro matters most when it's your personal paycheck. Whatever the company, the people who think that their jobs aren't somewhat at risk are beyond naïve. We'll all be somewhere on the employment bubble spectrum for at least the next year.

There's certainly no good time to let people go, but there are undoubtedly more sensitive, appropriate, and considerate ways to do it than the midnight unsigned emails and other methods adopted by some of the a-holes running the big tech companies. Nothing excuses or explains the crass, callous, and clumsy ways that the Captain Queegs of the tech industry have handled their downsizing efforts. These guys are masters at taking all of the credit but none of the blame or responsibility (except in the grandest and emptiest sense) when things go sideways. Whether you're Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or one of the Jeffs doesn't really matter - the only thing that's certain is that the pain of parting will be felt everywhere but where it actually belongs.

Serious entrepreneurs never got into the startup game in the first place because they were looking for safety, security, or stability. If those kinds of objectives are high on your list, you made a seriously wrong turn somewhere along the way and you were probably destined to come up short from the beginning. The best entrepreneurs run toward the mess and love the challenges, uncertainties, and risks that come with blowing up the old and building the new.  In many ways, unlike the fat cat corporate heads and old school managers, it was the reactive, adaptive, and flexible entrepreneurs who helped us all through the chaos of COVID-19 and who also thrived in the process.

Hopefully, the pandemic won't re-emerge (and it's somewhat reassuring to have sane leaders in charge now), but it's still useful to take a moment to see what steps and strategies worked best for the survivors, in case there's a next time.

(1)   Keep Your Own Head Up

Leaders can cast light or shadows. Everyone's watching you for signs and signals and it's critically important that you keep moving forward, tell your people the unvarnished truth, and explain what's going to be required of them. The fact that they believe that you'll be right beside them in the trenches makes all the difference. Hope sells -- and it's contagious.

(2)   Communicate Constantly

While most people at Twitter and elsewhere would just as soon see Elon shut his mouth, any smart CEO has spent a huge amount of time during the pandemic messaging the team, talking to customers, clients, and investors, and detailing the path forward as well as the firm's future. Especially in the new remote and hybrid world, assuming that the "word" gets out efficiently and effectively is foolish. And remember that nobody likes surprises - get the right story out there and stay ahead of the noise.

(3)   Re-Recruit Your Key Players

Everyone is worried. Don't think for a minute that even the folks who have been with you for many years aren't just as concerned as the newbies about the company, and the commitment of the key players to stick around and stick it out. You need to have direct, one-on-one conversations with all your key players (some of whom aren't senior managers) to be certain that everyone you need is on board and ready to re-up for the long haul. Options that are way underwater and will be for a while aren't gonna convince anyone to stay. The best people commit to other people-- that's the bond and the glue you're looking for.

(4)   Take Care of the "Me" Issues ASAP

Your people may love their work and even the company, but they have serious financial concerns and families to worry about, which always come first. While it's hard to make concrete commitments, the sooner you can address these selfish and serious concerns, the sooner your people will get back to paying attention to the business. And don't waste time taking any of this personally; you'd feel exactly the same way if you were in their shoes.

(5)   Make the Hardest Decisions First

It's easy to convince yourself that small, initial, reactive steps are smart, and that preserving projects or retaining underperforming lines of business makes sense. But the salami approach -- multiple small cuts over time in the workforce and elsewhere -- almost never works and usually raises everyone's uncertainty and stress levels. While Elon is a great example of overdoing the cuts and undermining surviving employees, it's far more prudent in most cases to make the deepest cuts necessary to assure the business's long-term viability and then build back as circumstances permit.  

And one final note: don't try to be Superman and do it all yourself.  That's not smart, it's not possible, and it's destructive of the critical team attitude and approach that is essential to holding things together.

ADA's THANK YOU CARD

 

 

The Elizabeth Holmes Sentence

 The Elizabeth Holmes Sentence   By Bob Lefsetz



Am I the only one thrilled that she got eleven and a quarter years (135 months)?

I feel defeated. I was brought up in a world where you were told to jump through the hoops, work hard and you'll end up with a modicum of accoutrements, more than satisfied. As for the rich, they were people who did something extraordinary, like entertainers. And rich was relative. It's one thing to be a millionaire, quite another to be a BILLIONAIRE! How is the average person supposed to earn a billion dollars? Rob a bank?

Well, that's one way, you can work on Wall Street, employing financial shenanigans that the average person cannot comprehend, that paid-off elected officials keep trying to remove the guardrails from. Yes, we've been told to let the market be free, that it will police itself. HUH? It colludes with itself!

Kind of like CEO salaries. I mean if you started the company, if you own the company, you're entitled to untold riches. But Michael Eisner didn't even start at Disney, and by time he retired he was the company's largest shareholder. How does that happen?

In a way that that the average person going to Disneyland has no understanding of.

So right now we're seeing Elon Musk self-immolate, light a match to $44 billion. I'm loving it. As for the loss of Twitter... It won't happen, and even if it did, if people really need to communicate in short bursts of words another platform will arise. Then again, never underestimate the power of the individual. Donald Trump single-handedly put a dent in democracy. Everybody believed in the sanctity of elections, now nearly half of the population does not. And yes, Musk did a good job at Tesla, then...

For a top-notch automobile he could never improve the interior, the appointments, Teslas are upscale vehicles, and upscale customers expect more. And Musk kept telling us his self-driving technology worked, when it turns out he put the kibosh on lidar and went solely with cameras. All evidence says Tesla's system doesn't work, that it's not roadworthy. So, Musk is leaving the door open for the usual suspect car manufacturers to catch up and supersede him.

And yes, SpaceX appears to be a phenomenon.

But why are we all convinced that if you succeed in one vertical, you're an expert in another?

You want to work for yourself, you want to put in 120 hours burning the midnight oil... Fine, but just don't expect others to. They don't care that much, there's not enough of an upside. And one thing about the market crash of the past year... All these techies, a bunch who are now getting laid off, have stock options that are underwater, i.e. WORTHLESS! Yes, that's the dream. You get paid in stock and you too become rich. Well, they'll adjust the strike point for the CEO, but not the rank and file.

Once again, there are two different worlds.

There's a club, and you ain't in it.

Not only do you have to be rich, you have to know people.

Cory Booker and the Stanfordites filing letters of recommendation to the court? God, these same people would write letters in support of Jeffrey Epstein! You defend your friends, irrelevant of what they do. And most people just don't have friends like that. They've got nothing to trade, so they're left out. Get arrested and you're going to JAIL!

Then again, there's a good chance there's footage. If you watch streaming TV crime shows you know there's a camera almost everywhere these days, your crime has been recorded. But if a CEO tells his CFO to do something, or if the CFO acts based on prior instructions, there's plausible deniability. Yes, it's damn hard to convict people. Even if you've got a ton of evidence.

And these criminals hire David Boies, who was doing Harvey Weinstein's dirty work, to intimidate truth-tellers. That's the key element in John Carreyrou's Theranos book. Boies and team, yes there's intimidation in numbers, came into the "Wall Street Journal" offices to try and get the story told their way, if at all, which was totally false. I'm going to let you in on something, most people can't handle the pressure. That old axiom "You'll never work in this town again."? That's much more true than untrue. Sure, we hear about the people who bucked the system, but most people were silenced and squeezed out, or now owe fealty to bad actors.

Yes, I spent four years in college. I've got a diploma. When did it become a badge of honor to drop out? And when did the arts and humanities get such a bad rap? When I went to college it was never about getting a job, never ever, it was about LEARNING! But now college is seen as a glorified trade school. As for the cost... Word is finally getting out, it's NEGOTIABLE! Almost nobody pays list price. Yes, college is run like a business, whereas it used to be seen as separate, with its ivy-covered walls.

Everything is a business, everybody wants to get rich. Check out how much a firefighter makes. It's the overtime that bumps their salary. And I'm not saying we don't need firefighters, but I will say teachers don't get overtime. And as a matter of fact, the private schools that keep being promoted as part of school choice usually pay their teachers even LESS!

I could go on and on, but I won't. I'm just saying it's every person for themselves in America today. You feel like nobody is on your side, everybody's expendable. And if you play by the rules, you're a chump. It's one thing to break through archaic rules as you disrupt an industry into the future, but that's not what I'm talking about here. What I'm talking about is people who take shortcuts, who think the rules don't apply to them.

That "Wall Street Journal" article about Elizabeth Holmes was printed back in 2015, over seven years ago. And what has happened since then? Holmes has been living the life of Riley. Yes, click on this link, it's free: https://on.wsj.com/3gnm6xx Scroll down to see the pictures Holmes's significant other sent to the court to show what a good person she is, that she deserves leniency. You see Holmes in Park City... It looks like nobody in these pictures works, they're gallivanting all over the country, willy-nilly, as if Holmes was a perfect specimen of society, bedrock. I mean only a rich prick like Billy Evans could be so tone-deaf as to not realize these pictures make Holmes look anything but remorseful.

And Holmes never expressed a speck of remorse until sentencing. She doesn't care about those she ripped-off, she just wants a lighter sentence, she and her lawyers will say anything to try and achieve this.

But this time it didn't work.

Oh, she's going to appeal and the wheels of justice move so slowly that her kids may be out of college before she goes behind bars, laughing all the while. Holmes is making a mockery of the system. If only she were like Jimmy McGill, aka Saul Goodman, who ultimately owned up to his bad behavior and paid the price. Holmes could have pled guilty, she could stop all these high-priced appeals, she could ask to be put in prison right now!

And I don't care if she only serves a year. As long as she thinks she's going to serve eleven plus. Holmes has got to pay the price.

As for it being sexist... Come on, look at the top of the same "Wall Street Journal" article posted above, can you say ENRON? Men have gone to jail for fraud for over a decade!

And fraud it was. What kind of person acts like this, FOR YEARS! You wouldn't, I wouldn't, but Holmes believed she was above it all, as she famously said, "I'm too pretty to go to jail."

No one is too pretty to go to jail.

And it's not only Holmes, Trump has to be convicted too. And spend some time in jail, if even only a day. Because you can't poke our eyes with your illegal b.s. and get away with it. If Holmes doesn't go to jail, and if Trump isn't convicted, why should anybody do the right thing?

I'm here to tell you, they're not. Let's start with phishing schemes, it's not all Russians. Unless people pay consequences behavior is legitimized. Which is why we're still feeling the aftereffects of Wall Street skating after destroying the economy back in 2008.

And whenever we catch someone, shine the light upon them, they always blow back, tell us we don't know, when in truth we do, because we were brought up right, we know the difference between right and wrong.

But if you can't put food on the table, or if you keep being exposed to the lifestyles of the rich and bogus, you too are going to get frustrated, you too are going to want your piece of the pie.

I want to see Elizabeth Holmes wipe that s..t-eating grin off her face. I want to see her scared to the bone. I want to see her begging for mercy. I want her to see that she did a bad bad thing, which she most certainly did. Come on, incorrect medical test results, knowingly? I can barely think of anything worse than that, it's truly life and death.

And we live and we die and nothing seems to change. Money talks, and the rest of us walk. And just because you have money that does not make you a good person, oftentimes just the opposite. But in our world, money is everything. The goal isn't to become an artist, but someone with a musical profile who can turn themselves into a brand.

Let's even talk about the Kardashians... I don't care how much money they have, if I was washed up on a desert island with them I'd kill myself. Because what would there be to say? That's why you go to college, to hear other opinions in the dorm, to learn not only facts, but how to analyze. There is very little black and white in this world, almost everything merits discussion, but if you're uneducated and ignorant this cannot be done. Even worse, those in charge want their constituents ignorant, they're more easily molded.

No, Elizabeth Holmes, you're not better than the rest of us, YOU'RE WORSE! In the interim you could have volunteered, given back, but NO! as John Belushi famously said, that's below you.

I hope to see you cleaning toilets soon.

Even better, I hope to stop reading about you in the press.

But I don't want you to be forgotten, I want you to be a lesson to both the citizens of today and those of tomorrow, teaching us that there are rules in society, and you break them at your peril. Furthermore, life is not solely about lifestyle, it's what's inside that truly counts. And Elizabeth Holmes, you're rotten to the core. Call me Crabby Appleton, I don't mind being the voice of reason in this era of groupthink, where no one ever blows the whistle on anybody else. That's right Holmes, the judge blew the whistle on you, get off the court, go straight to the locker room, jail, YOUR ROOM and don't come out until you've thought long and hard about what you've done and how you're going to repay society. Theoretically you can rehabilitate yourself, even Chuck Colson did. Best to start NOW!

The Chaos Inside Donald Trump’s Mind

 The Chaos Inside Donald Trump’s Mind 

Nov. 15, 2022 

 

 

By Michael Wolff 

Mr. Wolff is the author of three books about Donald Trump. 

In August 2020, the Trump campaign found itself with a staggering $200 million budget shortfall. In September 2020, Brad Parscale, a senior adviser who had until recently served as campaign manager, had a public breakdown on the street in front of his house in Florida, and the police were called to restrain him. In the crucial last months of the race, campaign staff members kept Donald Trump away from their data guru, Matt Oczkowski, whom Mr. Trump found weird and boring. And by the final weeks of the campaign, the incumbent president was being outspent by as much as three to one — an unprecedented mismatch in the history of modern presidential races. 

In the opinion of the many Trump insiders with whom I have spoken, including nearly all the top members of his campaign and West Wing staff, those few months laid bare the chaos at the heart of Trumpian politics, exposing Mr. Trump for what he is: not a model chief executive but an inattentive, lazy, incompetent manager whose defiance of convention and hot mess of a personality were saddling his campaign with a heavy disadvantage. The government can continue to function if a president isn’t on top of the details, but a presidential campaign is in trouble when a candidate can’t be bothered with the game plan and is dismissive of the people trying to stick to it. And while Mr. Trump won his first campaign and lost the second by only a relatively slim margin in just a few key states, that was in spite of the calamity that surrounded him. 

The path to his 2024 declaration has been a characteristic prelude to the burden he imposes on a campaign. His close circle first believed he had signed off on plans for an announcement in early summer, which was seen as the best opportunity to frame the investigations proceeding against him as inherently political, stop the advancing prospects of Gov. Ron DeSantis and seek an early consolidation of the Republican Party behind Mr. Trump. But that time passed without any action or explanation from the prospective candidate. New dates were rumored to be set, and missed, throughout the summer and early fall, first, according to one aide, to distract from the Mar-a-Lago documents search and then to position him to claim as his own the red wave he believed was coming. 

At the same time, though, there was never any doubt that he would run. “He would put his head down and die if another Republican became the king,” the aide told me. In long rambling calls and meetings with aides and friends, Mr. Trump never considered a different avenue for himself. At the same time, he made little effort to assemble a team and organization. His most reliable political handlers — among them Jared Kushner, Stephen Miller, Jason Miller and Kayleigh McEnany — were pursuing their own interests. Even Donald Trump Jr. was staying mostly on the sidelines. No new team had clearly emerged. Boris Epshteyn, a persistent Trump hanger-on who never quite made it into the White House and who became involved in Rudy Giuliani’s ludicrous legal efforts to overturn the 2020 election, is one of the few people now front and center in the incipient campaign — a portent of the kind of talent that might fill the West Wing in a Trump restoration. 

While few other politicians might contemplate a presidential run without a ready and serious brain trust, staffing for Mr. Trump is only ever a remote concern: He has always run things out of his own chaotic head. 

Having written three books in less than four years about Mr. Trump, with near constant input from his closest aides and friends, as well as hours of rambling from him, I have come to two primary conclusions: that there is almost never any true plan, strategy or forethought in Trump world and that everyone around him lives in the prison of his monologues, which allow for no interruptions or reality checks and overrule any plans others have tried to make. His fixations, misunderstandings and contempt for better minds that might correct him reign. 

The aide recently described the constant churning within Trump world, as grievances and resentments are rehashed and blame assigned, as the workings of Mr. Trump’s “blender brain.” 

Chaos suits him, allowing him again and again to turn what ought to be humiliating and defeating disorder into potent conflict: If he can’t find a solution to a problem, he can almost always identify an enemy to blame it on. Trouble is, the problem remains. 

The federal grand juries investigating him, plus the investigations in New York and Atlanta, are to him, and apparently to many of his followers, political prosecutions. Running for president becomes his main defense. But it doesn’t solve the problem that he has monthly multimillion-dollar legal bills, with lawyers on retainer, now being paid by the Republican National Committee and by his super PACs, which he seems to view as his $100 million personal piggy bank. Both sources of funds will dry up with his declaration — the R.N.C.’s support because it can’t show favoritism for one Republican candidate over another and the super PACs’ because they can’t coordinate with Mr. Trump now that he has officially entered the race. Without their support, Mr. Trump’s campaign could soon be in a serious, even mortal, financial hole. 

Yes, he survived Impeachment 1 and Impeachment 2 and the Russia “hoax” and Trump University and Trump steaks and Trump women … but no one has ever run for president under criminal indictment, and many if not most Trump aides believe that at least one is coming. An indictment would surely help provide more of the Sturm und Drang that motivate him and his legions, but it would also impose, over the coming two years of the campaign, an almost unimaginable burden in cost, time, human resources and attention from an uncooperative man. And, of course, he could well be convicted. 

Joe Biden will turn 80 this month, clearly frail and with obvious mental lapses. This is, admittedly, a weak hand. But the Democrats yet have a critical advantage: the professionalism needed to administer a modern presidential campaign, which is one of the most intensive management efforts imaginable, a complicated, data-driven enterprise that involves not only raising $1 billion at the drop of a hat but also spending it wisely within months. 

The Republicans may find themselves stuck with a candidate who makes numbers what he wants them to be, puts family above professionals and has no doubt that his own advice is better than everyone else’s. Arguably, Mr. Trump won in 2016 only because, three months before the election, Steve Bannon stepped in with a Hail Mary strategy of concentrating on the normally Democratic states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania while sidelining Mr. Trump with an amped-up schedule of the daily rallies he craved. Mr. Bannon later claimed credit for the victory, guaranteeing that Mr. Trump would never again give someone that opportunity, even if it meant defeat — hence the appointment in 2020 of Mr. Parscale, an inexperienced and apparently unstable campaign manager happy to be a toady to the president and his family. 

In this petty vindictiveness lies the key point: Mr. Trump’s main goal isn’t victory. It’s holding the spotlight. His effort to upend the 2020 result was a colossal failure, but it succeeded in keeping him at center stage. Were he to become president again, we might see not a breaking of democracy, as liberals dread, but an ever more bizarre distraction from it. 

Mr. Trump does not learn from his mistakes but rather comes to see them as virtues. Another Trump campaign will — like the two before it, as well as his White House term — lack the most basic management controls. This may well help empower him, allowing him to be the spectacle he believes, not unreasonably, his base wants him to be. But it does not help make wise spending decisions. 

Democrats, in their inability to find a language to quiet or dismiss Mr. Trump, will continue to be his reliable dramatic foil. They will threaten, investigate and possibly indict him, to his immediate benefit, galvanizing his passionate base. The result will be another close election. The good news for Democrats — though those will confirm the resentments of the Trumpian base — is that a presidential election, along with the world itself, is financially, organizationally and data driven, demanding great expertise and keen attention. That’s not a reality that even the opera of a Trump campaign can change.