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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

I’ve never seen a set of voluntary fall guys like Noem, Patel and Miller. (And Hegseth for when a military operation fails.)

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Every one is a potential fall guy except the King. First sign you're a liability and under the bus you go. And unless you're on Truth Social you're usually the last to know.

Miller is not the fall guy. The other clowns, yes, but not him. He's the most hard-core fascist in the bunch.

I don't know if I'd classify Noem as a patsy or fall gal, either.

When you mention an anecdote about shooting a hunting dog in your autobiography, that shows something beyond just being a "true believer" or stooge. That is willingly pointing out that you are willing to act out your lack of empathy through violence towards an animal.

I'm not a clinician (and haven't met Noem) but that just seems to me to be something indicative of a personality disorder.

Noem strikes me as a loyalist and a team player through and through, so probably a fall gal.

Miller is different. He has his own agenda, a lot of which has becomes trumps agenda. But trumps agenda changing does not change what Miller’s agenda is.

Trump has loyalty only to himself and in his first term was constantly throwing people under the bus after he decided they were a liability to the Main Character.

I could imagine we'll see the same thing again, before or after the midterms, and Miller and Bessent are two I expect to see have a dethroning at some point simply on account of Trump never taking responsibility for anything.

That and I've seen both try to speak "on behalf" of Trump, something the authoritarian personality doesn't appreciate.

However some of that logic is based on 1st round Trump not being as senile and insane as 2nd round Trump. It's possible his weakening cognitive faculties have made him even more open to manipulation.

From the outside it seems like he is so far gone that his inner circle is actually making all the decisions now.

Honestly Miller strikes me different. It’s not coincidence he’s survived so long.

He’s not an idiot. He knows how much damage he can absorb and how to position himself to not take more than that. He never positions himself as the implementation person who will take the hits. He’s the idea guy, and the manipulator/cheerleader. He doesn’t seem to expect trump to take care of him for his loyalty, so he doesn’t position himself to require it.

I think ultimately he won’t be thrown under the bus because his relationship with Trump is mutually beneficial, and they both see it as transactional. For both of them, the other is a means to an end. Soul mates in hell I guess.

She's an opportunist. For someone like her to be nationally relevant they have to latch onto MAGA and embrace the crazy. See MTG, Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz.

To me, those people you list are absolutely opportunists, but there's just something different about Noem. Like they're hedonists who are engaging in a grift and know that they have to sling arrows that will own the libs in order to keep the gravy train rolling. MTG seems to have, at least for a while a few months ago, found her limit on what she'll put up with. Gaetz had at least enough shame/self-awareness to realize that his continued career was untenable at the time he was being considered for AG. Boebert's the girl who told your science teacher to go fuck himself when he caught her smoking behind the high school gym with her age-inappropriate boyfriend.

Maybe I'm just really hung up on the dog thing, but that is the crux of it. There's basically no one who hears a story of shooting a dog for misbehaving and thinks, "yeah, that'll show the libs". That's not a story out of a politician's biography as much as it is a story out of a book profiling a serial killer's childhood.

71% of American households have pets [0] and there's a good chance that those who don't have had at least one in the past. There was absolutely no benefit to including that in the book, and I'd be stunned if the publisher didn't at least try to talk her out of putting it in there, given her political ambitions. If they didn't try to get it cut, they didn't do their jobs; if she ignored them, then she really does display a tendency to take pride in behavior that is recognized across the political spectrum in American society as cruel and antisocial.

She genuinely gives me the creeps.

[0] https://worldanimalfoundation.org/advocate/pet-ownership-sta...

She's complaining (via 'sources') that she's 'being hung to try' for parroting Stephen Miller's approved line, so I have a hunch she'll bite their ankles on the way out.

That's because miller is the only "smart" one to never defy trump. Of course, that means being his lap dog, but that's the position he chose.

> Miller is not the fall guy. The other clowns, yes, but not him

He’s going to jail in a way Trump isn’t. That’s ultimately a fall guy.

I no longer have any reason to think that justice will prevail.

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