Roosevelt's trip through Michigan was one continuous triumph.  In the auto centers, where we were trying so hard to reanimate the workers, those same workers put on spontaneous demonstrations of overwhelming enthusiasm.  In Lansing, thirty five thousand came out to hear FDR speak from the rear platform of his train.  Flint, with its pathetic UAW membershhip of 136, put more than a hundred thousand people along his path.  In Pontiac, where we had no members at all, there was a "tremendous gathering," according to the Detroit News of October 15, 1936.  It described the cheering crowds in the hub city as rivaling the Armistice Day throngs, those at Lindbergh's visit after his transatlantic flight, or the World Series Jamboree of 1935.  The News estimated the number of people lining the streets from Hamtramck to Detroit at five hundred thousand.  Frank Winn and I, who followed the president's motorcade in the press section, doubled that figure.

There were 250,000 gathered in City Hall Square to hear Roosevelt's speech, to hear him lashing the auto manufacturers for thinking only of their own profits while ignoring the dire problems of their workers.  They roared their approval but they also listened intently, as I did, for I could not fault a single word of what Roosevelt said.  I had never before had so convincing a political experience.  But beyond that certitude was my realization that the UAW's fate was linked with FDR's victory, my conviction that success was within our grasp.

Novelist Saul Bellow recalled hearing a fireside chat while walking in Chicago one summer evening. "The blight hadn't yet carried off the elms, and under them, drivers had pulled over, parking bumper to bumper, and turned on their radios to hear Roosevelt. They had rolled down the windows and opened the car doors. Everywhere the same voice, its odd Eastern accent, which in anyone else would have irritated Midwesterners. You could follow without missing a single word as you strolled by. You felt joined to these unknown drivers, men and women smoking their cigarettes in silence, not so much considering the President's words as affirming the rightness of his tone and taking assurance from it."

Minutes of the Murray Body Committee Local 2 at Executive Board Meeting, April 26, 1939, Toledo Ohio, Addes Collection, Box 14.11, Reuther Archives. re. the competitive situation in the spring industry.

Trump's meeting with the Joint Chiefs in the Tank on July 20, 2017 provides us with a spectacular example--a performative tour-de-force--of this accelerating disintegration of discursive and cognitive performativity.  We have a detailed description of this meeting in A Very Stable Genius, chapter 9, "Shocking the Conscience."*  A close reading of that chapter can be found here.  The chapter in its entirety can be found here.  The most striking aspects of the Tank meeting, as reported in A Very Stable Genius, are the primitive cognitive performativity of The Great Leader, his brutish behavior toward the Joint Chiefs, and the degree to which the Joint Chiefs were flabergasted by this brutish stupidity.  "He's a fucking moron", said Rex Tillerson. (Slate, "The Great Leader's Nuclear Meltdown", October 11, 2017.)

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*an appointee who served in the United States Department of Homeland Security from 2017 to 2019, including as chief of staff of the DHS. He was first recruited into the department by former DHS Secretary and White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, serving as his senior advisor.

Donald Trump has made antipathy to China a cornerstone of his campaign to return to the White House next year, but according to a new book, he allowed another obsession, over women and sex, to derail a White House meeting with a senior US tech executive meant to address Chinese threats to US telecoms networks.

“You don’t say no to the president,” Randall Stephenson, then chief executive of AT&T, tells the New York Times reporter David Sanger about a summons to the Oval Office in 2019.

Trump had seen Stephenson talking on television about China and wanted to discuss the matter further, Sanger writes. But in the event, Stephenson says, Trump ranted about women and in particular Stormy Daniels, the adult film star who claimed an affair and whose hush-money payments from Trump are set to be the subject of his first criminal trial, starting in New York on Monday.

“Trump burned up the first 45 minutes of the meeting by riffing on how men got into trouble,” Sanger writes in his book, New Cold Wars: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend the West.

“It was all about women and private planes, he claimed. Then he went into a long diatribe about Stormy Daniels, the former porn star who claimed she had had an affair with him. It was ‘all part of the same stand-up comedy act’, Stephenson later recalled … and ‘we were left with 15 minutes to talk about Chinese infrastructure.’”

New Cold Wars will be published in the US on Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy.

Stephenson says that when Trump finally got round to discussing China, he “seemed fixated on the question of whether the Chinese, by moving their equipment into western markets, could listen in on phone calls or read emails – the ‘back door’ problem that intelligence agencies often briefed Trump about”.

Stephenson was less concerned, given Chinese proficiency in hacking that made such fears largely irrelevant, and tried to explain bigger risks: that China, through companies such as Huawei or ZTE, might be able to “cripple the US communications grid”, and that Beijing might gain global dominance through investment in Europe, Africa and Latin America.

But Stephenson “could see that the president’s mind was elsewhere. ‘This is really boring,’ Trump finally said.”

An entrance by Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and adviser, gave Stephenson his excuse to change the subject then leave.

Ironically, it was the publication of a book this week that crystallized the reality of just how little The Great Leader reads. While, like many of the tendencies described in Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, The Great Leader’s indifference to the printed word has been apparent for some time, the depth and implications of The Great Leader’s strong preference for oral communication over the written word demand closer examination.  “He didn’t process information in any conventional sense,” Wolff writes. “He didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-­literate.”

Wolff quotes economic adviser Gary Cohn writing in an email: “It’s worse than you can imagine … The Great Leader won’t read anything—not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers, nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored.”

In March, Reuters reported that briefers had strategically placed the president’s name in as many paragraphs of briefing documents as possible so as to attract his fickle attention. In September, the Associated Press reported that top aides had decided the president needed a crash course on America’s role in the world and arranged a 90-minute, map-and-chart heavy lecture at the Pentagon. And amid the hype over Wolff’s book, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough wrote a column Friday saying that in September 2015, he confronted The Great Leader over poor debate performances, saying, “Can you read?” Met with silence, Scarborough pressed again: “I’m serious, ******. Do you read? If someone wrote you a one-page paper on a policy, could you read it?” The Great Leader replied by brandishing a Bible from his mother and saying he read it all the time—probably a self-aware joke, given The Great Leader’s proud impiety and displayed ignorance of the Bible.

The reporting is pretty clear: The Great Leader doesn't read briefings, on politics or anything else. He doesn't appear to have absorbed the basics of public policy, whether on health care or national security or even issues, like trade, that he cares about. Instead, he seems to pick up fragments of information in conversation or, more often, from cable television. Often, it's partisan talking points, which isn't surprising since much of what airs on Fox News, CNN and MSNBC consists of partisan talking points.

We had Senator Marco Rubio and my daughter Ivanka was so impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue. But I think, when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that, because the child care is child care, couldn’t, you know, it’s something you have to have it in this country, you have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to, but they’ll get used to it very quickly and it’s not going to stop them doing business with us.

Apparently, what he’s saying here is that he would make child care more affordable by raising tariffs on imports, though he did not explain how that would work.