General Discussion

NRaleighLiberal

(60,015 posts) Wed Aug 15, 2018, 12:03 AM Aug 2018

TPM - Marshall "High Trust, High Fear: Inside the Dystopian Hellhole of Trumpism"

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/high-trust-high-fear-inside-the-dystopian-hellhole-of-trumpism

Yesterday we decided to dig deeper into this matter of Trump White House NDAs. Kellyanne Conway said they all sign them in the Trump White House. Then President Trump confirmed the existence of NDAs for White House employees in one of his broadsides against renegade ex-employee Omarosa Manigault-Newman. I want to first discuss the NDAs and then some broader lessons we can draw about Trumpism from this latest turmoil. In this storm of back-biting, intrigue and betrayal we see in microcosm the world system on which Trump wants to build US relations with the rest of the world. But first, let’s discuss the NDAs.

As Allegra Kirkland explains here, there appears to be a two-tiered system of Trump White House NDAs. Some ex-staffers are put on what amount to retainers for their silence. Longtime Trump bodyguard Keith Schiller apparently signed one of these for $15,000 a month. Omarosa says she was asked to sign one and then declined. Those are what we’ll call the post-White House NDAs. It appears that a handful of ex-White House employees are covered by them. To the degree these retrospectively cover the ex-employee’s time working for the government, it seems highly dubious that these are enforceable. But that’s not really the point. As the Cohen/Stormy Daniels saga has demonstrated, enforceability has never counted terribly high in Trump NDA thinking. The point isn’t to win cases but to get a license to terrorize or bankrupt signee with predatory litigation.

Then there are the NDAs that most White House staffers have signed. On its face, this is an oxymoron. You can’t make government employees sign NDAs. They would be unenforceable. Early in the administration Trump started pushing for them. White House Counsel Don McGahn initially refused to create them for the reasons I note. But he eventually relented to calm Trump down, even though he made clear they were unenforceable and thus essentially meaningless. There were apparently early drafts that included massive cash penalties payable to the US government if staffers divulged things they had learned in the Trump White House. Those provisions, though, were apparently stripped out. The final NDAs had all the vast and encompassing demands for silence you would expect from a Trump NDA. There just weren’t any penalties.

The upshot was that McGahn relented and drew up the un-teethed NDA to calm Trump down – a sad commentary on all involved. Legally, those can’t mean anything. McGahn appears to have said as much and used that reality that mollify staffers who resisted signing. But contracts often have an intimidation value beyond their legal power. That’s a core strategy of the Trump world. Today we learned that the Trump Campaign, the only entity here with a possibly legitimate NDA in hand, is taking Omarosa to binding, secret arbitration over the NDA she had with the campaign – more or less the tactic that Trump and Michael Cohen tried at first with Stormy Daniels to such great effect. This latest move fits in with the general model. Trump NDAs aren’t necessarily meant to be binding or legally actionable. They’re licenses to force the target party into ruinous litigation

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including last paragraph

Trump’s White House is simply a microcosm of this dark and self-defeating worldview: a system of aggression, betrayal, unpredictable behavior and dishonesty, all of which foster and encourage similar behavior from everyone who enters it. Trump clearly attracts people who are either like him or aspire to be like him. But even for relatively normal people, he creates an environment in which his values and behaviors become rational. It a classic Hobbesian world, the war against all against all – a comic dystopia Trump is building in the White House and aspires to create worldwide.