Fakery and Bullshit - some Trump reading

It won't be dull with President Donald Trump in the White House, with even the transition period providing plenty of comment.  Here's a few reads to keep up to date.

At the UCL Mishcon Lecture last night, Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian gave the liberal tour-de-force warning of the appalling times to come under President Trump.  More on that below, but one article he recommended is the Tony Schwartz one from the New Yorker.  Schwartz ghost-wrote the Trump book "Art of the Deal", and in a fit of buyer's remorse, as Freedland put it, came clean about the real Donald Trump.  The New Yorker piece is here.

Trump has tried to re-awaken the memory of the Republicans' favourite president of recent years, Ronald Reagan, but how good was Reagan really?  An article in Salon suggests Reagan was the most ill-informed president to ever take office, and slept through much of his presidency - read it here.  Some may indeed be wanting Trump to sleep throughout most of his presidency as well - but that would mean leaving the governing side of things to Mike Pence, Stephen Bannon and Reince Priebus, with Mike Flynn steering foreign affairs.  Hardly a recipe for calm.

Salon gave Chris Christie one of their un-coveted "Bullshitter of the Day" awards and it makes entertaining reading here, as Christie tries to persuade everyone he'd rather play out his governor's term than accept the non-existent role coming from the Trump team.

Freedland also mentioned the phenomenon of "fake news", and the Washington Post carried a great expose of it in this piece, as they interviewed two prolific - and definitely not true-believing - manufacturers of news to the gullible right. Perhaps the most eye-opening thing you'll read this week.

Oh, and that Trump victory?  Two million votes behind Clinton, as this Politico report reminds us.  Forget the "Revolution in America"; what about "A broken democracy"?

Finally the Mishcon Lecture itself, as delivered by Jonathan Freedland and attended to in person by a few of SGS's finest and brightest, can actually be accessed in glorious video here.  If you missed it, give it a watch.  Well worth an hour of any Trump sceptic's time.