The Art of the Meal

The latest dog-and-jackass show in Asia turned out the failure any sensible person might have expected, and for all the obvious reasons. People can parse empty phrases like "sometimes you have to walk" all they want, but that's a waste of time. Sometimes you do have to walk, and we all have been there, whether it's buying a car or on a blind date or working out a business negotiation. But at this level, the only reason "you have to walk" is because you didn't prepare in the first place.

The thing about statecraft that one gets accustomed to just taking for granted is the principle that by the time the "summit" is held, the work has already been done. That is, the various diplomatic minions from both sides, armed with policy direction and strategic goals and interests, have hammered out the details, extracted and made concessions, feinted and weaseled and wheedled and cajoled, and finally arrived at some flawed agreement that both sides can live with.

The summit is really just supposed to be a public ceremony to affirm that which has already been agreed upon. Maybe some final details need to be smoothed out, but again, the pros have already stepped in and done the actual work.

Clearly, these basic concepts have never occurred to anyone of any standing in this inept goat rodeo of an administration. One imagines a human centipede consisting of Trump, John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, maybe Lindsey Graham, and whoever else is unlucky enough to be in the room with them. And in this instance, the segments of the centipede continually trade positions and rearrange, the front becoming the middle, the middle rotating to the end of the line, and so on, an endless parade of mutual shit-sucking.

I mean seriously -- what the fuck did anyone in this group do to prepare for this nonsense? Anything at all, besides the usual dopey marketing boilerplate?

People talk a lot of shit about MBAs, business consultants, that sort of breed, as purveyors of empty jargon and Ponzi-style catchphrases, endlessly rolled down to the next level of hustlers on the pyramid. And they're not entirely wrong; from books to courses to TED talkers, there's obviously no shortage of tent-revival hucksters hustling rubes with the secular religion of productivity hacks and customer engagement strategies and renaming the Deming cycle and such like.

But I can tell you something firsthand:  one of the most basic principles they teach you in grad school is the value proposition. That is, a customer will want to employ your business because you provide value. Either you do something they cannot do themselves, or they can do it but you can do it more efficiently, better and/or less costly.

Just as fundamental to the legit b-school acolyte is the sacred nine-word dictum handed down from Mt. Sinai by the Moses of the MBA religion, Peter Drucker:  If you can't measure it, you can't manage it.

So this "Hanoi Hail Mary" nonsense serves as a perfect crystallization of what's being going on with these morons the entire time, seen through the prism of the above two business principles. What has been accomplished with these two pseudo-summits, aside from an increasingly embarrassing series of sorry genuflections to a brutal dictator, with nothing at all to show for it? He stopped testing? Big fucking deal -- he's already got several dozen functioning weapons. He hasn't needed to test for a long time. The only reason North Korea "tests" missiles anymore is to get attention. It's saber-rattling. Once Genius Q. Dealmaker let him into the country club, the need for showboat launches into the Sea of Japan was done. Anyone who doesn't at least know that much doesn't belong anywhere near this game.

He's going to run the gubmint like a business, they said. Yeah, like one of his businesses, was our retort.

Both of the above principles (value and measurement) should be obvious to all, that a real business earns its keep, and that success and failure can be measured and predicted, in order to set controls and projections. But how do they square with what we know -- what we've all observed for decades, again and again -- about Trump and his approach to business?

Inheriting a real estate portfolio from your tax-dodging dad does not make you a businessman, it makes you a rentier, and there's a very stark difference. To heavily paraphrase Gordon Gekko, the rentier does not create or innovate or produce or deliver, he owns, he collects, he hustles. And then he finds ways to avoid paying taxes on money he didn't really work to earn in the first place.

Every other "business" Trump has been involved in, or tried to start, has failed miserably. There is a clear reason for this, one that goes beyond the usual "Trump is a gravy-brained dipshit" smackdown.

In the Tolstoyan sense of happy families being alike, successful businesses tend to share many traits, one of the most critical being that they know who their customer is. Who is my customer? A business that doesn't ask themselves that question regularly (because your customers and their needs change, and your perception of them changes, and your ability to deliver to them can change, and so on) is destined to fail. When that business is run by an idiot with a load of ill-gotten pelf, those deficiencies can be masked for some time, until the bankroll runs out, and then they fail all the same.

(That's how he ended up as a bratva launderer. That's why he won't show his tax returns. Again, anyone who denies it or can't see it needs to be excluded from any serious conversation.)

So look at Trump's businesses (or "businesses") over the years through that prism, and you see the key to what he now regards as statecraft. All of the jokey failures, from the USFL team to the airline to the steaks to the casinos, the common thread is that Trump is his own customer. He sees himself as a glamorous man-about-town, women want to fuck him and men want to be like him.

As ludicrous as that sounds, that is obviously how he's always seen himself, and continues to see himself. The fact that most people see him as an insufferable blowhard with a comical wig and spray-tan does not pierce his megalomania. This poorly informed self-image, and his innate sense of corruption and incompetent self-dealing, has poisoned all of his value propositions over the years.

And there are certainly successful businesses where the founder asked themselves, what if I made this product for me, and it turns out to be a popular innovation. But "innovating" means taking an existing product and making it better, whether with a superior design or product delivery or whatever. Something about the product is improved, in comparison with other products of the same type and market segment.

But there was nothing better about his steaks, nothing different about his casinos. The USFL could have been successful -- the NFL still had Up With People doing its Super Bowl halftime shows during the 1980s, and had endured two lengthy player strikes. But even there, Trump found a way to fuck up what could have been a good thing. This is because he obviously doesn't believe in that second principle, the Drucker maxim about measuring everything.

If I had to boil down business grad school to a single essential thing, a consistent ideal to which all of the components point directly toward, it would be this:  Measure twice, cut once. That's it, that's pretty much everything put as concisely as possible. You can take a leap of faith from time to time, if it's something you believe in strongly, but you damn sure don't ever do it without knowing the ramifications and potential consequences beforehand. Anyone who really holds an MBA degree and actually paid attention in class understands this. You don't take any major action without charting out the possibilities, and then you keep measuring as you go along, so that you can take corrective actions as needed, since they're always needed sooner or later.

You never "go with your gut". Ever. Even when you "know" that your product or your innovation is "better" you still do analyses to figure out the market positioning and segmentation.

Let's take the Trump Steaks as an example. Let's pretend that it's a serious, viable opportunity, that the meat really is top-grade, that there's a reliable supply at a relatively fixed cost. Let's assume that the proposition should fit into Trump's vision of himself as a luxury-item promoter, that the steaks are part of a portfolio of "status items" that are sold. People pay thousands of dollars for fashion items like handbags, that are made for a few bucks in some Asian sweatshop by child slaves, so forty-dollar mail-order steaks are not necessarily a ludicrous idea.

So all of these things are given in our hypothetical:  I have a better product. Who is my customer, and how do I find them and sell my superior product to them?

I could put you through a boring mini-seminar of how to research this sort of thing, much of which revolves around the simple (but time-consuming and vital) process of closely examining competitors from varying market (price) segments, identifying and exploiting gaps and differentiations, repositioning, branding, etc. But for a quick thumbnail example that essentially illustrates the same point, I would say to look at Omaha Steaks for a successful example of how to do that. You may or may not like their product or how they do it, but the fact is that they understand their customer and the product, and why barbecue enthusiasts will pay more for a better cut of meat.

Trump, on the other hand, chose to market his steaks like he "marketed" everything else he slapped his name on:  I'm an awesome guy, and I like this product, therefore you'll like this product too! This is an Underpants Gnome equation at its very heart, something that never adds up. Especially if you're asking someone to pay a premium price for a highly subjective product like steaks.

Using a person or personality to sell a product is always a dicey proposition, even when it's a universally liked celebrity. But Trump has always been an abrasive figure, deeply crass and vulgar, a loudmouth blowhard who fucks around on his wives and talks shit out of his neck. So the steak commercials went over much like an "Easy Eddie" used-car commercial might, and no one fell for it.

But the commercials point out one other important trait that is also very consistent in everything Trump has ever done:  not only is Trump his own customer, he's also the product! From a true business perspective, this is nothing more than a perverse feedback loop -- selling yourself to yourself. Nothing good can come from it, certainly not any good product. It's basically jerking off in public, which is Trump's career in a nutshell (giggity).

You know who else sells themselves to themselves? Cult leaders and banana republic dictators. Televangelists. Con artists of every breed and stripe, including just about every knuckle-dragging bible-humping shithead politician from the South. But politics aside, you can see why this feedback loop can never work in the long run. The numbers simply cannot pencil out. There's only a "product" for as long as enough suckers are around to convince themselves of that.

And so, to make a long story just a little bit longer, this is why none of these stupid summits with North Korea can work out, as long as they're being done like this, like an inept product launch for a piece of shit sold on a late-night infomercial. Because Trump is both his own customer and his own product, and no one in his inner circle has ever told him no, he is incapable of approaching anything as a problem to be analyzed and solved with knowledge and expertise. Since he believes he knows more about every subject than the so-called experts, he's his own sole resource. Since he's a fucking idiot, it's a pretty sterile resource. And so the feedback loop continues.

Long before any sort of "summit" date was announced -- and this goes back to the Singapore thing last year, which was equally useless -- you send scientists and diplomats over to talk to their counterparts on the other side. This means nuclear scientists, people who understand how the uranium and plutonium is mined and refined and processed, what the steps and the equipment look like, and therefore how to verify that those things have been curtailed as part of the agreement. You have sub-agreements in place to ensure the physical security of these verification teams, that their findings jibe with your existing satellite data, that they aren't being impeded or menaced by internal security goons, etc. You have experts who understand the history and geopolitics of the country and its larger region, so that you can anticipate their interests and needs -- potential bargaining chips. You send diplomats over to find out what they need from us in order to make the concessions we want out of them. This is what we want from you -- what will it take to make that happen?

None of this seems to have happened, instead it's all been a loose thread of vaguely theatrical -- I don't even want to say "events" since they don't qualify as such -- punctuations with no consistent meaning or direction. The corporate media, of course, focus on Pompeo saying one thing and Trump saying another:  oh noez, they're contradicting each other, are they trying to fool the wily Norks?

A competent, serious media would start by asking what are America's interests in North Korea in particular, in East Asia in general, and how those interests square with ongoing policy in the Pacific theatre. Yes, we want them to denuclearize, but what are we willing to do, in terms of positive (bribery) or negative (threats) leverage, to achieve that goal? What is our strategy in North and East Asia overall -- that is, do we want to withdraw out troops from Korea and Japan, and if so, what are the geopolitical ramifications of that? Does a Japan that seems to be incrementally militarizing become more isolated, and begin pursuing their own nuclear program? How does that square with US interests in the region?

What happened in Singapore last year, and in Hanoi this week, is the natural result of people who don't even think about such questions. These fools run things as if they had simply binge-watched The Sopranos and The Office (American), and combined the worst features of both bosses, the cruel entitlement of Tony Soprano and the gibbering, mendacious incompetence of Michael Scott.

For the twentieth anniversary of the first season, HBO recently reran the entire Sopranos series in January, and I hadn't seen them for years, so caught probably half of them. What jumped out again and again, aside from the coal-black humor laced throughout, was how parasitic the wiseguys really were. They talked about garbage routes and union jobs and things like that, but none of them actually did anything, they merely extorted money earned by the peons that actually did those things. They ran boiler-room penny-stock scams on gullible seniors. But they talked about their livelihoods among themselves as if they were actual working people, instead of feudal lords overseeing extrajudicial fiefdoms. Their wives and grown children collectively participate in and enable that delusion of respectability.

The easy explanation is that since most people are innately "moral" to some degree, those who choose the apparent ease and convenience of the "amoral" lifestyle say these little things to themselves as rationalizations or justifications for their choices. But by the end, it becomes apparent that the reality of it is that they know better, they just don't care. If a landscaper gets beaten up in a turf war between rival crews and turns to one of them for help, he ends up working for free under implicit threat of further harm -- a literal slave. There is no introspection on anyone's part. This is simply the way "business" has always been done. Heads I win, tails you lose. Sucks to be you.

You could see some of that in Michael Cohen's open testimony in the House on Wednesday. Per usual, the media fixated on the rather pedestrian "revelations" that we already knew -- that he's a conniving hustler who fucked over small businesses and used his "charitable foundation" as a tax-dodge-slash-piggy-bank, paid off his mistresses from his campaign coffers, etc.

What was interesting to me was what Cohen revealed about how he saw himself, how he talked about his actions. He talks about how he had already achieved some measure of personal success before working for Trump, and then talks about his rather mundane goon tasks he performed for Trump -- sending out the various letters and documents by which Trump would threaten and cajole various interlocutors, to avoid paying his bills, to intimidate his former schools from releasing his grades and test scores.

It says something about Cohen that, as he recounts his vile activities on Trump's behalf, he seems absent from any contemporaneous bouts of introspection or conscience in performing those tasks. What sort of "successful" person goes to work on behalf of a shameless hustler whose primary activities consist of not paying contractors and hustling morons? At no point did Cohen -- who shamelessly and repeatedly reminds us that he is the son of a Holocaust survivor -- say to himself, what the fuck am I doing, and why am I doing it for this fucking asshole?

Even at the end of Cohen's opening statement, his mention of Melania Trump as a "kind" person who doesn't deserve any of this, felt tacked-on, like something Cohen thought would come off as a grace note of sorts. I don't think any reasonable person who has observed Melania Trump's actions and words, during her husband's campaign and during his tenure as an appalling excuse for a chief executive, could characterize her as "kind."

To be sure, she is quiet and polite, understands her place and role intrinsically. But she is on record as an Obama birther, she supports her husband's idiotic and destructive policies and statements implicitly and explicitly, and is at best a mercenary. If she has any lingering guilt for what she's abetted over the years, like Carmela Soprano, she has rationalized it away with the expensive trappings and trinkets of a spoiled courtesan. But she can't say that she hasn't been told.

It is helpful to look at Trump, both as a person and as a businessman, in that Sopranos light as well. His father and Roy Cohn taught him that greasing palms and cutting corners, schmoozing the media and lying through your teeth, was simply how "business" gets done. There's no need to measure or analyze anything if you know that the main obstacle to getting your permits and tax abatements is getting the campaign donations to the mayor and the councilman for your district.

And remember, he came to local and then national attention via the New York media, starting with the Times. He was a registered Democrat, donated to Hillary and Kirsten Gillibrand and others. They took his money, they took his calls. They printed his self-serving lies for years, they gave him a teevee show and a public platform, because they -- like Trump -- lie about who their customers are and what their product is.

And so he's not entirely wrong when he excoriates the corporate media for their self-serving bullshit. It was not until he threw his wig into the political ring that suddenly the media tried to grow a conscience about who and what he really was. But it was too late, and it rang false because they aren't very good at that sort of thing. The media's sudden "principled" stance re Trump hung off them like a pulsating tumor. That's why CNN is still trying to have it both ways by hiring a Jeff Sessions staffer to oversee their 2020 election analysis. They are "fake" in the sense that there is no moral core underpinning their editorial approach or even their objective delivery of their news-like product.

Their product is conflict, and their delivery device is panel shows and bullshit commentary. Really their product is their audience, and their true customers are the insurance and pharma and telecom companies that underwrite the panel shows -- and have various and sundry deals under consideration by various and sundry makers of the laws, approvers of the proposed mergers. Interests are vested, and intertwined.

CNN is (imho) the worst violator, but really just about all the corporate media monkeys are complicit in some form. As are we. Let me be more blunt, and put it the way Dr. Krakower might:  if you're still watching CNN for anything at this point, you're part of the problem, and like Carmela and Melania, you can't say you haven't been told. Fucking boycott them yesterday, and never look back.

It's more realistic -- if perhaps not healthy -- to look at the Hanoi "summit" as just another episode in this dopey reality show we're all forced to live in now, and as such, it will have relatively little consequence in and of itself. It's the overall dynamic that eroding what was already a shaky foundation. Turns out all it took to bring the whole edifice down was a handful of idiots who just didn't give a fuck.

The keys to getting rid of Trump are there, for the Dummycrat with the cojones to step up and use them. Again, Cohen's testimony yesterday was a reminder of part of it, that while he is indeed a convicted felon and liar and all-around weasel-for-hire, he brought corroborating documentation with him this time, as part of his allocution. One part of that documentation is three years' worth of financial statements for Deutsche Bank, back when Trump was trying to buy the Buffalo Bills. Guaranteed there will be something in there that will provide probable cause to go ass-spelunking for that fucker's tax returns -- and there will be the evidence of money laundering, or worse.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, is the need for Democrats to understand where this asshole's weaknesses really lie. Remember, everything is projection with this guy. The childish nicknames he uses on opponents are all characteristics that he dreads being called himself -- crooked, low-energy, little, lyin', etc.

It's helpful to dial down some of the hysteria a couple of notches and to keep in mind that he is not Hitler or Mussolini, he's Wile E. Coyote, and they need to start addressing him as such. Attack him on his incompetence, on what a ridiculous person he is. Use the things he says against him, which then forces him to lie further. I didn't say that. Well, we have the video, asshole.

His weakness is his narcissism; he cannot stand to think that people don't respect or admire him. These are deeply rooted daddy issues manifesting themselves, but they are very real all the same, and it is foolish not to exploit them. This latest public belly-flop is just another example to exploit, not just because of the more apparent non-results, but because of the obvious lack of preparation that led inevitably to failure.

Exploit those holes to their fullest potential, and you don't just bring down the cult leader, you take down the cult as well, because their self-esteem is tied inexorably to his. Once they understand that liberals are not crying but laughing at him, they can no longer support him.