There's a new op-ed by George Conway in the Washington Post, I'm paywalled

[Nevilledog]

What Mary Trump’s book and the ‘Trump v. Vance’ case have in common

I can read it thru a link on Liker. Here's a snippet.


What do a gripping family tell-all book and a momentous Supreme Court decision have in common? Quite a lot, it turns out.

The book, to be published next week, comes from Mary L. Trump, a clinical psychologist who happens also to be niece of Donald Trump, the president of the United States. It describes how Donald Trump has been protected by institutions his entire life.

Trump v. Vance, the Supreme Court case decided Thursday, illustrates how the president has pushed those protections to the limit — and how they’re about to end.

Mary Trump’s ”Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man” tells a remarkable story, the broad strokes of which many already knew. Mary Trump offers a tale of what she calls “malignant” family dysfunction, and how it produced a malignantly dysfunctional president.

*snip*

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

1. More:

Above all, Mary Trump’s point is that her uncle has spent his life being protected from the consequences of his actions and shortcomings. It’s as though “Donald has been institutionalized for most of his adult life,” she writes, “so there is no way to know how he would thrive, or even survive, on his own in the real world.” Far from being the virtually self-made man he has always pretended to be, Donald Trump was the “vanity project” of his father, whose money he used “to prop up an illusion” of success. When sales of assets of his father’s estate weren’t enough to clean up his finances, a television producer, through artful editing and image-making, “presented him as a legitimately successful tycoon” — something he never managed to be.

And, as Mary Trump notes, her uncle has sought the ultimate institutional protection by invoking the presidency to serve his ends. For Donald Trump, the office has served as a bully pulpit from which he could lie and self-promote, with aides to solve, deflect or cover up his self-inflicted problems. In Vance, Trump tried to leverage the presidency for his personal benefit to an unprecedented extreme: His lawyers argued that the presidency should protect not just him from the legal consequences of his conduct — but his businesses, too.

The case, ironically, came about partly because of Mary Trump. As her book explains, she became a principal confidential source for a New York Times exposé that described how the Trump Organization, over many years, may have dodged taxes. Those allegations became part of the predicate for a New York state criminal investigation that the president sued to curtail. Trump argued that, because he’s president, not even his accountants had to respond to the district attorney’s subpoena....

But for Donald Trump personally, his niece’s book and the Supreme Court’s decision may someday be remembered as the beginning of the end of his institutional protections. And not just in a legal sense. Much of the power of the presidency comes from the perception of it, and that perception is now waning as the president bleeds out in the polls. As that power ebbs, more Mary Trumps and John Boltons will tell their stories, or give their evidence to investigators, with ever less fear.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/09/what-mary-trumps-book-trump-v-vance-case-have-common/

[Nevilledog]

3. Thank you!

[empedocles]

2. 'malignantly dysfunctional president' - the Mary Trump book and the SCOTUS 9-0

wallop on trump might also agree, they are both dealing with a 'malignantly dysfunctional president'!

[Thomas Hurt]

4. Can you imagine if the Pig woke up tomorrow morning and no one knew him as famous...

no money, no brand name, no company, no tv gig, just some dude on the street with an ill fitting suit and a bad comb over.

He would be in a mental hospital by the end of the day.

[chriscan64]

5. Quick, everyone pretend not to know him.

And hide the 55 gallon drum o' orange.

[scarytomcat]

6. I hope it is windy