Did Trump really choose Nick Ayers for Chief of Staff because he reminded 45* of a younger “nakedly ambitious” version of himself.
Was this another “gut” choice based on the telegenic superficiality of a Trump personnel policy based on “central casting” and so primitive as to be based on reproducing power because of vague physical resemblance.
Did the defection of Ayers, rejecting Trump in a clear humiliation, happen despite an insistence that Trump had no “plan B”, or was it the result of hubris, incompetence, or something else.
Aside from Ayers’s sleaziness as a political consultant, he may be angling for some future opportunity, depending on how a Trump impeachment happens, or how a Pence presidency unfolds. He’s not so ruthless as to not consider the long view of whose star he needs to follow. Individual-1 has become too toxic, especially after the felony news of last week.
Regardless of his support from Jarvanka, it appears that aside from some strong resistance among WH staffers, Ayers has no loyalty to anyone, even if the obvious calculus now looks like prison-time may be in the future for some Trump insiders.
(November 20)
Following the sting of the midterms—which Trump still insists were a victory—staff housecleaning was supposed to provide some satisfaction. After the defenestration of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, next on the hit list was Trump’s long-suffering chief of staff, John Kelly, possibly accompanied by Homeland Security chief Kirstjen Nielsen. Kelly has managed to hang on in part because there was never an obvious replacement. But last week, it appeared Trump had finally settled on Nick Ayers, Mike Pence’s 36-year-old chief of staff. On election night, Ayers attended a White House party and was seen mingling with the president and Melania Trump. A source said the president asked Ayers not to join Pence on his Asia trip last week so he could be in Washington for an announcement. But in recent days, Trump’s plan appears to have hit a snag. Ayers’s appointment has gone from a sure thing to “who knows?” after White House staffers mobilized against him. “They’ve gone to POTUS. There is a campaign against Nick. And it’s vicious,” a former West Wing official said.
www.vanityfair.com/...
Trump’s attempt to recover from his humiliations usually wind up as costly to the American people.
In a new column, Rubin counts off the people Trump has lost support from—including one that’s simply “humiliating.”
“Now even Nick Ayers, one of the most ambitious hired guns in the business — a man who has made millions from politics — won’t serve as his chief of staff,” she writes. “Having Ayers turn him down with no Plan B may not have been the worst moment of Trump’s presidency, but it’s certainly one of the most humiliating. To be blunt, when someone of Ayers’s ilk figures out it’s not in his interest to take one of the most sought-after jobs (normally) in government, you know Trump has become toxic.”
[...]
Rubin runs through the coalition that carried Trump to an electoral college victory and argues that the numbers bode very poorly for him, especially now that suburban white women are defecting in droves.
“With each staff shuffle, Trump’s staff and senior advisers get less professional and less willing to level with him,” she argues, citing the loss of UN ambassador Nikki Haley and her replacement with a PR person. “The result likely will be even more missteps and episodes such as the COS search (i.e., instances of abject incompetence). As Trump ‘wins’ less, those who admired him for his management acumen or who merely wanted to blow up the system may drift off as well. In sum, it’s very likely that Trump’s political isolation will get worse.”
www.rawstory.com/...
On that issue of refusal and resemblance because who wants to pick “people who don’t look like “us” offered by GOP Congress members against diversity, we have the latest bit of kinship klansmanship offered by Ann Coulter. More of “the majority race as (somehow) victim” meme.
In 1964, W.D. Hamilton popularised the concept and the major advance in the mathematical treatment of the phenomenon by George R. Price which has become known as Hamilton's rule. In the same year John Maynard Smith used the actual term kin selection for the first time.
According to Hamilton's rule, kin selection causes genes to increase in frequency when the genetic relatedness of a recipient to an actor multiplied by the benefit to the recipient is greater than the reproductive cost to the actor.[2][3] Hamilton proposed two mechanisms for kin selection. First, kin recognition allows individuals to be able to identify their relatives. Second, in viscous populations, populations in which the movement of organisms from their place of birth is relatively slow, local interactions tend to be among relatives by default. The viscous population mechanism makes kin selection and social cooperation possible in the absence of kin recognition. In this case, nurture kinship, the treatment of individuals as kin as a result of living together, is sufficient for kin selection, given reasonable assumptions about population dispersal rates. Note that kin selection is not the same thing as group selection, where natural selection is believed to act on the group as a whole.
In humans, altruism is both more likely and on a larger scale with kin than with unrelated individuals; for example, humans give presents according to how closely related they are to the recipient.
en.wikipedia.org/...