Holiday Reading: Jon Swift Memorial

 

One of the meanings of Italian "batocchio": The thing you use to whack your Tibetan therapeutic singing bowl, in black chamois and wood, with wooden bowl, €49.90 from macrolibrarsi.

Oh, hell, the gang's all here! OG blogger Batocchio has mounted the annual Jon Swift Roundup for 2025, honoring the late Jon Swift/Al Weiser and the ghosts of blogs past and blogs present and Blogmas yet to come, and the blogiverse itself, such as it is gathering the bloggers' best posts of the year, in the bloggers' opinion (and we're nothing if not opinionated!). So pay it a visit!

Epstein Narratology

 

Not finding a credit for this widespread image. Can't reach the T-shirt company, Picturestees, that was selling it at Halloween.

Everybody loves a good Christmas ghost story, and I don't mean the Dickens of A Christmas Carol, but something a lot darker, the kind of ghost story that offers a real chill without a compensatory sweetness. This one is maybe altogerther too creepy, in fact, especially in the sense that you can easily imagine it's true, though that's unlikely. It's about that postcard that showed up in the Epstein document dump yesterday, purportedly addressed by Jeffrey Epstein shortly before his death to the notorious child molester Larry Nassar, the team doctor of the women's national gymnastics team, who assaulted the young athletes under his care for years before he was finally stopped:

Dear L.N.

As you know by now, I have taken the “short route” home. Good luck! We shared one thing … our love and caring for young ladies and the hope they’d reach their full potential.

Our president also shares our love of young, nubile girls. When a young beauty walked by he loved to “grab snatch,” whereas we ended up snatching grub in the mess halls of the system.

Life is unfair.

Yours

J. Epstein

Some time after the documents went on line, Department of Justice issued a statement on this one, to the effect that it was conducting an inquiry about its authenticity, about which there were some reasonable doubts: the card had been mailed from Virginia, not from the jail in New York where Epstein was being held, gave an incorrect name for the jail in the return address (it also had the wrong prison for Nassar, who thus never received it), and was processed three days after Epstein died on August 10, 2019.

Also, the authenticity had come into question before: another document in the dump tells how the card was returned to the jail (September 25), and made its way to the FBI investigation of Epstein's death; nearly a year later, they sent the letter to the lab with a request for a handwriting analysis. The request was posted yesterday, but DOJ hasn't posted the analysis itself, or the samples of Epstein's handwriting that had been sent with it. (Indeed, it's extremely hard to find an example of Epstein's handwriting; at least, I haven't succeeded in doing it.)

A couple of hours after that, though, DOJ did post a notice that the card was a fake, for the reasons cited, and because "the writing does not appear to match Jeffrey Epstein's."

That's when I started getting suspicious. They had to look at the analysis, presumably, to determine that; why didn't they post it? Unless, of course, they were lying, as if Pamela Jo Bondi's Justice Department would ever do something like that!

Bye, Elise

 

21st congressional district, New York, via Wikipedia,

Some gossip, mostly from a caller from New York's 21st congressional district, on the radio WNYC Brian Lehrer, unable to link at the moment), about Rep. Elise Stefanik: that she's never liked the district, the state's largest geographically and most sparsely populated and of course poorest, if only because it's too cold, not too mention plagued by awful unemployment and alcohol and drug abuse. She's not even from there but from Albany; she's a carpetbagger, claiming residence on the basis of what upstaters call a "camp", or summer place, owned by her parents. She hasn't done a town hall for six years, and in what the local press categorized as a "rare visit" for a ceremonial function in August, to Plattsburgh, the booing stopped her from addressing a crowd consisting mostly of anti-Trumpers:

"Well, Elise has not shown up in our district for months and months," said protester Mavis Agnew. "She won't hold a town hall, she won't take questions. She's never in her office. People show up at her office constantly, door's closed. Her representatives, her employees won't talk to her... So this was her first appearance, the first opportunity we had to let her know we're unhappy."

She got a more positive response in February, but that was what was advertised as her farewell tour, when she was expecting to leave the House for a stint as US ambassador. Then, when Trump ordered her to stay in Congress instead to protect his razor-thin majority, a visit to Saranac Lake celebrating a federal grant for the firehouse (in an appropriation signed by President Biden) was received with "mixed emotions".

The other thing is, the district isn't inevitably Republican; it was held by Democrat Bill Owens, defeating a GOP torn by culture war issues, from 2009 through 2015, and voted for Obama twice, along with Schumer and Gillibrand (whose 20th congressional district overlapped a good deal with where the 21st is today).

Her dropping out of the governor's race is pretty easy to understand: she was certain to win the Republican primary, but very likely to lose the general election, and certain to lose, at least as long as Trump refused to endorse her, which he did for his own Trumpy reasons; perhaps he was mad at her for even considering giving up the congressional seat, like she valued herself more than him. You can see how that would be hard for him to take. Whatever happens to her next, she's certainly an instance of the Trump Curse. I"m sure she'd love a job in Washington, but I really feel she's headed for being relatively alive on the proverbial Farm Upstate. 

Cross-posted at The Rectification of Names.

Are We There Yet?

For a while yesterday, it seemed that the Kennedy Center's new name was simply "THE DONALD", like an Upper West Side co-op dedicated by the board to somebody named Donald who lived and died there, as my building briefly contemplated naming itself "The Virginia" after Virginia in the apartment above me passed away (Eileen the board president and I had to break into her place through the fire escape to find her body in the bathroom, so it's intensely memorable)—the rest was just subtitle. But there's also a tradition of referring to our emperor as "The Donald", going back, if I remember right, to Ivana, who had an English learner's confusion over the mysteries of when English uses an article. Photo by Heather Diehl/Getty Images via MS-NOW. 

Later, it was revealed that that grammatical weirdness had been was really part of the plan, sitting atop the old name:

THE DONALD J. TRUMP AND
THE JOHN F. KENNEDY MEMORIAL CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS

That is, it now has two names, "The Donald J. Trump", and the other one, also starting with "The". Unlike the Donald J. Trump United States Institute of Peace, on an independently owned building illegally seized and depopulated last March by DOGE as a squat for themselves, for which workers couldn't find an approximately appropriate font. The State Department suggested that in ordinary usage it would be best to just omit the name of the country, though they didn't take it off the edifice:

Steve had a fine commentary the other day on Trump's increasing preoccupation with monumentalizing himself, with these renamings and the astonishing Trumpese-language plaques in the White House's new "Presidential Walk of Fame", and the paved-over Rose Garden and destroyed East Wing and gigantic "ballroom" under construction and proposed triumphal arch across the water from the Lincoln Memorial, which I like to call the Arc du Trumphe (the Arc of the Trump bends slowly, but it will bend all the way over sooner or later), the projects he and his munchkins sometimes refer to as his "top policy priorities", even as 20 million or more Americans face the imminent loss of their health insurance, and the negotiations ove Russia's attempted conquest of Ukraine have been taken away from the State Department and taken over by billionaires with unconcealed financial interest in the outcome (including the president's son-in-law).

Steve sees it as an attempt on Trump's part to reconfigure the little world to which he is now largely restricted (the White House and a couple of his own commercial properties) into a bubble in which he is a success, and none of the bad news is real, the way his father before him, another psychopath, commanded his family: "Do what I want. It'll be better for you."

But I think it's also compensatory, connected to a growing awareness that he is a failure, as even Fox News reports the bad economic news and the increasing belief that he's not innocent in relation to Jeffrey Epstein and the strife within the Republican party. He doesn't have time for those matters, he's busy marking Washington forever with the labors of what he regards as his real skills, being "a builder" and interior decorator. He doesn't feel guilty about not knowing anything about health policy or fiscal policy or foreign policy, he simply doesn't accept that he has any responsibility for them, and as far as he's concerned, whoever is responsible (generally a cabinet secretary) is doing fine, and the reporters who suggest he's missing something are bad and stupid.

Of course he's never had any interest in any policy anyway, other than hurting the defenseless, and shouting the slogans that have worked for him, on immigration and tariffs. (I connect these with his father too; it's Charles Lindbergh's America Firstism, which was to Fred Trump's generation of reactionaries what Pat Buchanan has been to the current one, now for the moment triumphant over the bloody-minded neoconservatives.)

But also de-compensatory, if you know what I mean. I know I've said it before, but this time I think it's real, he's decompensating under his personality disorder, from the pressure of his many terrible mistakes, fruits of his abuse of the near absolute power the Supreme Court has given him and his complete incapacity for productive action. First he can't hide his indifference to everyone who isn't him, then he goes wild:

In rare moments of self-awareness, the narcissist realises that without his input - even in the form of feigned emotions - people will abandon him. He then swings from cruel aloofness to maudlin and grandiose gestures intended to demonstrate the "larger than life" nature of his sentiments. This bizarre pendulum only proves the narcissist's inadequacy at maintaining adult relationships. It convinces no one and repels many.

The narcissist's guarded detachment is a sad reaction to his unfortunate formative years. Pathological narcissism is thought to be the result of a prolonged period of severe abuse by primary caregivers, peers, or authority figures. In this sense, pathological narcissism is, therefore, a reaction to trauma. Narcissism IS a form of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder that got ossified and fixated and mutated into a personality disorder.

Quod erat diagnostandum.

Cross-posted at The Rectification of Names. 

THANKS

I'm off for Christmas. I'll be back on December 27. I'm not feeling especially jolly right now, but maybe we can hope that a few dams will burst next year. Meanwhile, I think there'll be guest posts here, so stop by. And thanks for joining me in this all year.

THE WHITE HOUSE WILL NEVER RELEASE ALL THE FILES

Yesterday was the day when all the Jeffrey Epstein files were supposed to be released. That didn't happen.

Garcia: In our initial estimation—It could be that we're only getting about 10% of what the DOJ has. And of that 10%, 5% of that has already been released. And the other 5% is highly redacted. So we're getting very little so far

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— Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social) December 19, 2025 at 6:41 PM

What was missing?

Financial records, internal memos from prosecutors who investigated Epstein’s alleged sex-trafficking ring, key material obtained from the searches of Epstein’s palatial homes — none of it figured prominently in the documents released Friday.

Interested in records that would help explain how Epstein grew so wealthy? None to be found.

Want to read emails from federal prosecutors deciding who to charge — and, equally importantly, who not to charge — during their 2019 investigation? You’re out of luck.

Curious about the role of Maurene Comey, the prosecutor who co-led the probes into Epstein and his co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, before being fired without explanation in July? Nothing from her to see here.

We all think the administration is trying to protect Donald Trump, but it may also be trying to protect the kinds of people he regards as his C-suite peers:

... the documents and photos were largely silent about a roster of ... well-known people who have long been associated with Mr. Epstein and his finances, including businessmen like Leon Black and Leslie H. Wexner.

The lead sponsors of the Epstein Files Transparency Act are not satisfied:

Unfortunately, today’s document release by @AGPamBondi and @DAGToddBlanche grossly fails to comply with both the spirit and the letter of the law that @realDonaldTrump signed just 30 days ago. @RepRoKhanna is correct. https://t.co/gZQyQBUT4R

— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) December 19, 2025

In his video on X, Khanna said:

“We will prosecute individuals regardless of whether they’re the attorney general, or a career or political appointee. We need full transparency and justice for the survivors.”

He added in his written post: “Any person who attempts to conceal or scrub the files will be subject to prosecution under the law.”

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche has promised a drip-drip of files:

“The volume of materials to be reviewed ... means that the Department must publicly produce responsive documents on a rolling basis,” Blanche wrote. “The Department’s need to perform rolling productions is consistent with well-settled case law that statutes should be interpreted to not require the impossible.”

Blanche also said in TV interviews that while “hundreds of thousands” of documents would be released in the initial round, hundreds of thousands more would be processed over the next few weeks.

Maybe this will happen. Maybe a few more documents will trickle out between now and the Monday after New Year's, when normie Americans will be distracted. Or maybe the follow-ups will be like the Trump healthcare plan -- something we're supposed to get in the next two weeks, forever. Whatever happens, I'm certain that we won't get a full document release.

Culturally, the pressure is off. Some documents were released in time to meet the deadline for all of them, and GOP/QAnon voters (the only voters the administration cares about) got what they wanted, more or less: lots of pictures of Bill Clinton. Republican voters don't care about getting to the bottom of this case. They don't care about following the facts wherever they lead. They don't care about justice for the victims. All they care about is their ongoing war against Democrats. They're either happy now or frustrated because they were hoping for evidence against Clinton that was genuinely incriminating. They want Clinton and other people they hate, like Bill Gates, tried and convicted (and maybe executed). But shamed is reasonably satisfying.

Now there's no deadline to meet. No one's going to create a new one. In this Congress, you won't get 218 House members to vote for impeachment of any Republican over this, or vote for any reprimand, really -- remember that one of the few sincere GOP antagonists of the White House on this issue, Marjorie Taylor Greene, is leaving Congress altogether in a couple of weeks.

This just feels like the culmination of the Epstein moment, the Epstein year -- I question whether the moment can be sustained after ordinary people have seen these documents and photos. Most people don't pay close attention to the details of political stories -- I'm sure they believe a lot has come out, not just a tiny percentage. I think this document dump relieved a great deal of the pressure on the White House. And if Democrats win one or both houses of Congress back next year, this might seem like a story that's far back in the rearview mirror by 2027 -- never mind 2029, which is the earliest moment a post-Trump Justice Department could possibly prosecute anyone for failure to comply with this law (and there'll be many more crimes to focus on then, assuming the new administration doesn't just decide to "turn the page").

I hope I'm wrong about this. I hope we don't find ourselves in mid-January with perhaps 15% of the documents released and the White House saying that, well, actually, there are no additional document releases scheduled. But that's what I expect.

BARI WEISS'S ELITIST BUBBLE

A few days before CBS News broadcast Bari Weiss's town hall with Erika Kirk, I said that Weiss didn't really understand the country if she thought Kirk's husband was a universally beloved figure outside a few small liberal enclaves. As YouGov polling has noted, only about half the country was really familiar with Charlie Kirk at the time of his death, and only about a quarter of the country has a favorable opinion of him. After the town hall aired, Variety reported that all but the most desperate advertisers questioned the town hall's viewer appeal and chose to avoid buying time on the broadcast:

During the hour, commercial breaks were largely filled with spots from direct-response advertisers, including the dietary supplement SuperBeets; the home-repair service HomeServe.com; and CarFax, a supplier of auto ownership data. Viewers of the telecast on WCBS, CBS’ flagship station in New York, even saw a commercial for Chia Pet, the terra-cotta figure that sprouts plant life after a few weeks.

Direct-response advertisers typically pay lower prices in exchange for allowing TV networks to put their commercials on air when convenience allows. A flurry of the ads appearing in one program usually offers a signal that the network could not line up more mainstream support for the content it chose to air.

A more monied class of sponsors was evident during the first commercial break appearing in the 9 p.m. hour on CBS, a rebroadcast of a 2024 episode of “48 Hours.” Marketers appearing included Amazon, Ferrero Group, and Procter & Gamble.

And then we learned that the town hall was a ratings flop.

According to early numbers from Nielsen’s Big Data + Panel measurement, the one-hour CBS News town hall ... drew 1.548 million total viewers and 237,000 in the coveted advertising demographic of viewers aged 25 to 54. Those numbers rose to 1.867 million viewers overall 265,000 in the advertising demo when Nielsen released its final numbers Tuesday afternoon.

Based on Nielsen’s final ratings, the Erika Kirk sitdown declined 11 percent in total viewership compared to the network’s standard programming in that time slot year to date – and was down 41 percent in the key demo.

But Weiss and CBS News are undaunted. They're doing more town halls, although the guests seem a bit more upmarket.

CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss is ... launching a series of primetime town halls and debates alongside Weiss’ The Free Press under the banner “Things That Matter.”

CBS says that Vice President JD Vance, Maryland Governor Wes Moore, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have all agreed to participate in the town halls, with the debates set to address topics like “Does America Need God?” “Has Feminism Failed Women?” and “Should Gen Z Believe in the American Dream?”

CBS has lined up people like Isabel Brown and Harry Sisson to debate the American dream, Steven Pinker and Ross Douthat to debate the God question, and Liz Plank and Allie Beth Stuckey to debate the feminism question.

While Weiss might think she's making CBS News more appealing to Americans in flyover country, what she's really doing is creating a right-leaning version of the sort of lecture series that upper-middle-class Manhattan dwellers love, the kind of programming you'd expect at the 92nd Street Y or the New York Historical Society. I live among these people, and this programming seems maybe a few inches to the right of what they enjoy -- and some of it would be appealing to them just the way it is. They'd flock to a chat with Wes Moore or Sam Altman. They read and occasionally agree with Ross Douthat. And while they might not be J.D. Vance fans now, a Vance talk would have sold out quickly on the Upper East Side or Upper West Side in his pre-Trump days.

All this leads me to believe that while Weiss may have regarded Erika Kirk as a blood-and-soil heroine of the heartland Volk, she also saw her as the head of a well-connected political organization -- just the sort of high achiever (or at least the widow of a high achiever) whose opinions should be valued most.

Weiss thinks other top news media decision makers are out of touch with ordinary Americans, but she's as out of touch as she thinks they are. She thinks Americans sit down in front of the TV after a long day's work hoping to be educated and lectured to. I wonder how many of these broadcasts she'll be allowed to do before her employers pull the plug.

TRUMP'S DESPERATE ATTEMPT TO IMMERSE HIMSELF -- AND THE REST OF US -- IN AN ENTIRELY TRUMP-SHAPED WORLD

You know about the plaques, right?

White House staff updated the so-called “Presidential Walk of Fame” Wednesday by adding lengthy descriptions of each former president, in rhetoric that aligns with President Donald Trump’s – such as calling former President Joe Biden “the worst President in American History.”

As part of the president’s ongoing effort to customize the White House to his liking, Trump set his well-known opinions of each former president in stone by adding plaques underneath the portraits that now hang along the colonnade.

For instance:

“Sleepy Joe was, by far, the worst President in American History,” the plaque underneath Biden’s portrait, which is an autopen as opposed to his official portrait, reads. “Taking office as a result of the most corrupt Election ever seen in the United States.”

We saw those plaques before we heard last night's speech.

Wearing a blue suit, white shirt and red tie, Trump unleashed a shouty stream of consciousness with barely a pause or punctuation mark....

“Eleven months ago, I inherited a mess, and I’m fixing it,” Trump said, starting as he meant to go on by telling a lie: he claimed that inflation was the worst in 48 years when he took office, when in fact it had come back down to 3%.

He went on to place blame at the feet of Biden, previous trade deals, immigrants and what he described as a corrupt system. As at his campaign rallies, Trump painted a lurid picture of Biden forcing “transgender for everybody” and throwing open the border to criminals from insane asylums. He claimed to have “broken the grip of sinister woke radicals in our schools”.

... he conceded that prices remain high while arguing that the nation was “poised” for an economic boom. “I am bringing those high prices down and bringing them down very fast,” he said. By way of example, he claimed a sharp drop in gasoline prices, even though a White House graphic displayed by Fox News as he spoke showed only a slight decline in the national average....

Trump delivered his customary boasts about settling eight wars and bringing peace to the Middle East “for the first time in 3,000 years”. He repeated ugly remarks demonising Somali Americans and echoed European far-right extremists by stating: “We are now seeing reverse migration as migrants go back home, leaving more housing and more jobs for Americans.”

Trump rants on Truth Social. He adds captions to photos in a White House presidential gallery that read like those same Truth Social posts. Then he gives a speech that also sounds like his Truth Social posts. And he has regular press availabilities where his pronouncements sound like ... well, you guessed it.

I see this, I see the changes he's made to the White House, I see his plans for an "Arc de Triumph" in Washington (it amazes me that he's not calling it the "Arc de Trump"), and I think that Trump is trying to create an entire world where everything he sees appears to be of his own making -- his words, his opinions, his visual effects. What's more, he wants the rest of us to live in that world. How dare we not recognize his greatness! How dare we have opinions different from his!

I always go back to the steak story, as recounted by Trump's first wife:

Once she was a Trump, Ivana encountered the patriarch of the family, her husband’s father, real estate developer Fred Trump.

"Fred Trump was [a] really brutal father," she said. "We went to Tavern on the Green for the brunch one Sunday and [Trump’s] father ordered a steak. So all the, you know, the sisters and brothers, they ordered a steak."

"And I said, 'Waiter, can I have a filet of sole? And Fred looked up at the waitress and, 'No, she's going to have a steak.' I look up at the waiter, I said, 'No, Ivana is going to have a filet of sole,' -- because if I would let him just [roll] right over me, it would be all my life and I would not allowed it."

As The New York Times noted when it reviewed the book, Donald took his father's side rather than his wife's.

... Ivana holds firm. Donald doesn’t back Ivana up then or afterward, but rather is displeased that she didn’t knuckle under: “Why didn’t you just have a friggin’ steak?”

Or as Donald said when asked about this on a separate occasion:

Mr. Trump defended his father’s conduct. “He would’ve said that out of love,” he said. If his father had overruled her fish order, Mr. Trump said, “he would have said that only on the basis that he thought, ‘That would be better for her.’”

More than anyone else, Fred Trump is the man who made Donald the monster he is today. Donald Trump believes what his father believed: Do what I want. Think what I think. That would be better for you.

As I said on social media:

Bill Clinton: I feel your pain. Donald Trump: I don't feel your pain, and neither do you.

— Steve M. (@stevemnomoremister.bsky.social) December 18, 2025 at 6:12 AM

Trump thinks it would be better for all of us if we believed the lies he tells himself about his own greatness and every rival's inferiority. More than 40% of the country is still on board with that, but the majority of us aren't. So Trump thinks he'll just have to shout his words louder.

WHY THE SUSIE WILES STORY WILL CHANGE NOTHING

You might have expected the Vanity Fair profile of Susie Wiles to cause friction in Trump World and harm the administration overall. But I regret to say that the Trumpers are responding shrewdly. Rachael Bade, a former Politico journalist, writes on her Substack:

Within hours, the long tail of Wiles’ power and deep relationships across Trump World whipped into a rescue mission. Without so much as a summons, longtime allies from the campaign trail and others inside her orbit cleared their schedules and showed up at the White House to ask how they could help, I’m told from multiple sources. During a huddle in the West Wing, a fire crackling in Wiles’ office, they set to work on a damage-control plan to push back on the story as unfair — and activated the entire Cabinet.

All day, MAGA figures and Cabinet secretaries alike took to social media to defend Wiles and deride the story as a “hit piece” with “cherry-picked” quotes taken out of context....

“That’s called circling the motherfucking wagons,” as one Wiles loyalist and Trump ally told me tonight. “If you look at the reaction on the Hill, if you look at MAGA World and all the people who rallied behind her in a period of eight hours, it shows the depth of loyalty to the president. It shows the depths of loyalty to the chief of staff.”

For example:

Hilarious. The WH had all the Cabinet members simultaneously put out statements supporting Susie Wiles after the Vanity Fair article came out.

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— Ron Filipkowski (@ronfilipkowski.bsky.social) December 16, 2025 at 12:34 PM

Wiles, a seasoned political operator, is pretending she was snookered.

Lady with obvious daddy issues who is wily as fuck pretends she was snookered by an all powerful magazine writer. Hey, Susie: It’s 2025 and you have been the main handmaiden to your boss dad’s heinous war against the media. As if you are a victim.

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— Kara Swisher (@karaswisher.bsky.social) December 16, 2025 at 7:42 PM

That will be persuasive to the only voters Trump and his aides care about: the base. They think literally every story they don't like is 100% fabricated, so they'll believe that there was some "context" in which the things Wiles said didn't have the plain meanings they obviously had.

There's another reason this won't have an impact:

Trump and Vance literally said they agreed with Wiles, Musk has acknowledged his ketamine habit, and Vought probably thinks Wiles was complimenting him.

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— Steve M. (@stevemnomoremister.bsky.social) December 17, 2025 at 8:36 AM

Trump addressed the "alcoholic's personality" assertion in a phone conversation with a New York Post reporter:

“No, she meant that I’m — you see, I don’t drink alcohol. So everybody knows that — but I’ve often said that if I did, I’d have a very good chance of being an alcoholic. I have said that many times about myself, I do. It’s a very possessive personality,” Trump said, a teetotaler who has frequently cited the 1981 death of his older brother Fred at age 42 of an alcohol-induced heart attack as the main impetus for his abstinence.

Vance copped to conspiratorialism in a speech yesterday afternoon.

"But, conspiracy theorist. Sometimes I am a conspiracy theorist, but I only believe in the conspiracy theories that are true," he [said] as the crowd cheered and applauded. "And by the way, Susie and I have joked in private and in public about that for a long time."

And we know Musk has no shame about his drug use, nor does Vought have any shame about his extremism. In fact, one of the main reasons the White House doesn't see this as damaging is clearly the fact that Wiles accused the administration of doing things and believing things the rest of us think are unconscionable, but Republicans don't. Trump freed even the most violent January 6 rioters? Trump's base loves that! Trump is leaving hundreds of thousands of people to die by shuttering USAID programs? The base thinks it's a good thing when non-Europeans from countries that are seen as shitholes die painfully! Compassion? Soft power? Who cares! And so on.

And finally, the president is presumably fine with the story because Wiles made her deference to him clear:

“There have been a couple of times where I’ve been outvoted,” Wiles said. “And if there’s a tie, he wins.”

As did Vance:

Vance described Wiles’s approach to the chief’s job. “There is this idea that people have that I think was very common in the first administration,” he told me, “that their objective was to control the president or influence the president, or even manipulate the president because they had to in order to serve the national interest. Susie just takes the diametrically opposite viewpoint, which is that she’s a facilitator, that the American people have elected Donald Trump. And her job is to actually facilitate his vision and to make his vision come to life.”

Sure, she said he doesn't understand the details of what his administration is doing. On USAID:

“The president doesn’t know and never will,” she told me. “He doesn’t know the details of these smallish agencies.”

But Trump is proud of his ignorance. He believes he has such a superior brain that he makes better decisions without knowing what he's talking about than other presidents have made after learning the facts.

So, sadly, the White House is shrugging this off. The voters Trump and his people care about will be unfazed. The rest of us are horrified, but the White House doesn't care what we think and never will.