Hello and welcome to the Sensibly Speaking Podcast. This is Chris Shelton, the Critical Thinker at Large, coming at you on Stitcher, Google Play, iTunes and here on YouTube with video. This week, we are going to talk nothing but politics, centered around Michael Wolff’s new book about the Trump White House. If you can, you’ll probably want to watch this on my YouTube channel if you can because there will be some visual aids and you’ll get a chance to see me dress up too. I figured if I was going to talk politics, I might as well look like I’m taking it seriously.
On the other hand, if you are one of my long-time viewers who has decided that my politics are useless and stupid, then this show isn’t for you but I think that’s only a few of you. One thing a lot of people may not realize is that my channel is about my recovery from Scientology and application of critical thinking to all areas of my life and that includes politics. If you’ve been following me for a while, you may have noticed that my personal views have changed quite a bit over the last few years and I’m sure they’ll continue to. I have a lot more to talk about than just Scientology and destructive cults but I do get it that some people get sick of hearing about Trump and politics every day. It is an exhausting subject on both sides of the aisle. I think I have something fresh to say about some of this, so hopefully you’ll come along for the ride. Let’s start with this quote from All the President’s Men, which I think encapsulates a lot of what is going on right now:
“Look, forget the myths the media’s created about the White House — the truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.” (Deep Throat, All the President’s Men)
Michael Wolff’s new book, Fire and Fury – Inside the Trump White House was published last week to a great deal of, well, fire and fury from the White House about its controversial and allegedly fallacious content. Like millions of other Americans, I have been watching the dignity and rationality of both our Presidental election process and the Executive Branch of our government dive in free fall over the last two years, ever since Donald Trump announced his candidacy on June 16, 2015.
Having been raised in and then spending almost three decades of my life working deeply in the Church of Scientology, politics was never something I paid much attention to. Who was in office and what shenanigans they got up to were things we thought was just part of problem of life here on Planet Earth, and we were the self-appointed saviors. I came out of that nonsense five years ago and have been recovering from the experience ever since. Learning about and then following politics on the national and, to a lesser degree, the state and local levels, has been a new experience for me. Unlike most Americans, I didn’t learn to become jaded and disgusted with the whole process until much later in my life. I’d say I’ve reached that point now thanks to Donald Trump’s ascendancy to the most powerful office in the world. Wolff’s book helped me understand how and why our process is so flawed.
Much is being made about how Wolff’s book is about the power dynamics between Steve Bannon and Team Donald (meaning not only Donald Trump himself but his whole family, who he brought in to the White House in a shocking display of nepotism at a level never before seen in the US government). However, the central theme of this book is not to lay out in soap-opera-style the power struggles in the Oval Office. Rather, the theme is that Donald Trump, the individual, is wholly, completely and utterly incompetent; emotionally and psychologically unfit for the office he now holds. However, I think Wolff is being overly optimistic when he said on BBC Today that “we will end this presidency now.” I’ll get into this more below, but first there are a few points which become evident in this book which I haven’t seen too many people talk about so I wanted to address t
