It’s not new information that the Trump White House resembled a lunatic asylum more than a working branch of government. We’ve seen plenty over the years to validate that premise. But what Ginni Thomas brought to the Trump administration is just now coming out and it paints a picture of autocrat-loving Thomas flattering Donald Trump on the one hand, and then greasing him with lists of people that she thought should be hired or fired on the other.
The cast of characters that Thomas wanted to bring into the administration was incredible, and bear in mind, this was already an administration that had seen the likes of Jared Kushner, Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon. Daily Beast:
Ever since she became a welcome guest at Trump’s residences, Thomas—an influential and longtime conservative activist, and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas—had perfected a proven formula of enthralling and manipulating the president’s emotions and mood. On multiple occasions throughout the Trump era, Thomas would show up in the White House, sometimes for a private meeting or a luncheon with the president. She often came armed with written memos of who she and her allies believed Trump should hire for plum jobs—and who she thought Trump should promptly purge—that she distributed to Trump and other high-ranking government officials.
The fire lists were particularly problematic, as they were frequently based on pure conjecture, rumor, or score-settling, where even steadfastly MAGA aides were targeted for being part of the “Deep State” or some other supposedly anti-Trump coalition, according to people who saw them during the Trump administration. The hire lists were so often filled with infamous bigots and conspiracy theorists, woefully under-qualified names, and obvious close friends of Thomas that several senior Trump aides would laugh at them—that is, until Trump would force his staff to put certain names through the official vetting process, three sources familiar with the matter said.
….Some of these officials noticed that as the Trump term went on, the Thomas lists would increasingly feature a disproportionate share of names more suited to an OAN guest line-up than any functional government…..
That pretty much says it all. But as with every discussion of Trump world, it gets worse. One Thomas recommendation was a suspected foreign spy and the weirdness didn’t stop there.
Over the years, some of the specific names that Thomas had compiled and pushed to Trump and his West Wing have trickled out into the press. Among them were Fox News personality Dan Bongino, and the Trump-adulating Sheriff David Clarke.
And according to two sources with knowledge of the matter, Thomas had, unsuccessfully, advised the then-president to hire Frank Gaffney.
Gaffney, a former Pentagon official in the Reagan administration, has spent the past two decades embracing some of the more absurd conspiracy theories circulating in the far right. He has accused conservative anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist of being a secret agent for the Muslim Brotherhood and believes that American adversaries are working on secret electrical device-frying “electromagnetic pulse” weapons to zap America back to the pre-industrial age.
Sounds like exactly the kind of sane and sober thinking we need in government. Righto. And that led to scenes like this.
These fucking lists were so insane and unworkable,” said one former Trump White House official who had to personally deal with the Thomas-supplied memos and Trump’s fascination with them. “A lot of them were dripping with paranoia and read like they were written by a disturbed person.”
After Thomas departed, he would soon summon a variety of government personnel—West Wing brass, national security aides, lawyers, and other underlings, depending on proximity or the occasion—to inform them he’d just spoken to “Ginni.”
Trump would then identify an official— or, sometimes, he would rattle off a string of names—who he said needed to be sacked “immediately,” according to people familiar with the matter.
When they could get away with it, several of these Trump administration hands would slow-walk these Thomas-inspired firing directives, and wait until Trump invariably forgot about it, cooled off, and moved on to other fixations and gripes. Others would scramble to try to calm Trump down themselves, advising their boss to reconsider, telling him that a firing or a larger purge in the middle of the Trump term would make him look bad or attract negative media attention.
Reading between the lines here, the unprecedented turnover in the Trump White House, as illustrated nightly on Rachel Maddow’s wall, would have been even greater than it was.
And of course the footprint of QAnon is found, what else?
In her texts with Trump’s consigliere, Thomas also showed a fondness for Steve Pieczenik, a far-right pundit and onetime Tom Clancy co-author whose conspiracy theories and bogus claims were so far-fetched even InfoWars briefly booted him from appearing on the network. Before he began pushing the fake stories about watermarked fraud-catching ballots that earned Thomas’ endorsement, Pieczenik had pushed QAnon conspiracy theories, claimed to have arrested Pope Francis, and spun bogus stories about prominent mass shootings being false flags.
Martha Mitchell was considered pretty loony back in the Watergate era, but I don’t believe even she was hanging out with guys who claimed to have arrested the Pope, or who had cobbled together fantasies of secret technology that could destroy the world as we know it.
If you’re judged by the company you keep, Ginni Thomas is quite a piece of work.
In King Of Hearts, Alan Bates plays a solider that wanders into an ‘insane asylum’ in the midst of the war. He comes to realize the inmates have more kindness & sanity than the outside world. Since I saw it in the 70s, I don’t remember all the details other than how insane the decision makers of this world are time after time after time. In my memory, I believe he returns to the institution at the end, preferring that to the ‘world’.
Martha Mitchell comes off as someone who was correct at least part of the time, and not really a loonie.
It’s no wonder Justice Thomas is often pictured with such a sour face. He has to deal with this harridan, this battle ax on a daily basis. From the couple of sound bites MSNBC showed of him where he’s praising her, he sounded totally whipped. I doubt he’s able to maintain boundaries with her, and if that’s the case, he SHOULD NOT be on the court. They are both a danger to the court and the country.