STORYLINE / NARRATIVES / NARRATORS: Marjorie Taylor Greene...

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2022

...helps script a mad, mad world: Within our fallen "political discourse," it's basically Nothing But Storyline Now. Our warring tribes run on the fuel of Storyline, on competing tribal narratives.

For a small example, consider the headline which appears today on the latest (weekly) "Conversation" between Bret Stephens and Gail Collins in the New York Times:

Welcome to the Madness of Our Trumpy, Trumpy World

That headline certainly catches the eye. From our perspective, it refers to an accurate fact:

From our perspective, we do live inside a "Trumpy, Trumpy world"—a world which is spilling with "madness," however defined. Tens of millions of voters disagree with our general point of view, but that's the way the state of play basically looks to us.

That headline plainly catches the eye—and in our view, it tends to capture the actual shape of our world. That said, we'll note one major problem with that headline:

That headline has virtually nothing to do with the weekly "Conversation" which appears beneath it—with the exchange which appears today between Bret and Gail.

Today, in their latest weekly exchange, Bret and Gail mainly discuss an important policy matter—the question of whether colleges should be allowed to consider race in their admissions decisions. 

By the standards of this weekly feature, they produce a surprisingly decent exchange about this important question. That said, their full Conversation today has virtually nothing to do with Donald J. Trump, or with the existence of a "Trumpy, Trumpy world" which is madness-driven. 

The eye-catching headline atop their piece has little to do with its contents—but it will almost surely please the Times' blue tribe subscribers. The eye-catching headline doesn't fit the Conversation appearing beneath it, but it captures our controlling tribal narrative—our blue tribe's view of the world.

In a small and tiny way, we'd say that headline is itself an example of the madness of our Trumpy, Trumpy world. In our view, very large amounts of madness do emerge from red tribe sources at the present time. But our own blue tribe has often reacted by churning large amounts of shaky or unhelpful Storyline ourselves.

These shaky, unhelpful narratives create a lesser form of "madness," one which is wholly our own.  And no, this isn't helpful.

We blue voters meet our tribal tribunes on cable every night. They serve us our nightly platter of tribal reassurance, and our familiar platter of mandated tribal beliefs. 

In the example we cited yesterday, Tali Farhadian Weinstein joined a cast of thousands in telling us that it's now clear that Donald J. Trump always knew, all along, that he lost the 2020 election.

For various reasons, we don't think the matter is anywhere near that clear. For one thing, we'll take the following guess:

We'll guess that Farhadian Weinstein thinks Trump is a much more rational player than we're inclined to do.

At any rate, an array of pundits joined Farhadian Weinstein last week, saying there's no longer any doubt. Donald Trump knows he lost the election—and he knew it all along!

Who are the people who tell us these things—who serve us our platter of tribal narrative? We plan to return to that question tomorrow. For today, let's consider a profile of one of the people who is currently scripting the other tribe's Storylines, viewpoints, beliefs.

We refer to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.). Greene was profiled by Robert Draper in Sunday's New York Times Magazine. 

How much madness inhabits the Trumpy world within which our culture is swimming? In the passage shown below, Draper describes a widely discussed presentation Greene made to the Republican caucus shortly after she was elected to the House in November 2020.

Based on prior reporting, it's our impression that Draper's account of this event is fundamentally accurate. In this passage, we're hearing from one of the tribunes who is currently scripting red tribe Storyline and tribal belief:

DRAPER (10/16/22): Greene then tried to explain how it was that she came to embrace the conspiracy theories of the QAnon community that now scandalized the Republican Party and jeopardized her political career. “I was upset about Russian collusion conspiracy lies that I was seeing on the news every single day,” Greene recalled to her colleagues. “So I looked into the internet—and was like, ‘What is going on?’ I stumbled across something called QAnon. Yep, I did. I read about it, I posted about it, I talked about it, and I asked questions about it.”

Here, more precisely, is what she did: 

By the summer of 2017, Greene had made contact online with a counselor in the New York public school system who shared her affinities for both President Donald Trump and dark conspiracy theories. That July, she began writing for the counselor’s online publication, American Truth Seekers, under her great-grandmother’s name, Elizabeth Camp.

Greene’s argument was that the “Russian collusion conspiracy lies” had created a kind of permission structure in her mind. As she would say on the House floor, “I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true.”

In this passive-voice explanation, Greene was “allowed to believe” that a Democratic staff member named Seth Rich had been murdered by Hillary Clinton’s top adviser, John Podesta, in order to cover up the fact that it was Rich, not Russia, who had leaked Democratic emails to WikiLeaks. (Later, Greene would modify this conspiracy theory: It was the Latino gang MS-13, “the henchmen of the Obama administration,” who had murdered Seth Rich.) Greene was “allowed to believe” that Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Trump’s ties to Russia, was actually quietly working to bring down the Clintons. And that “many in our government are actively worshiping Satan.” And that Trump was single-handedly battling evil—that, as she reposted from the website MAGAPILL, “thousands of Pedophiles and Child Traffickers have been arrested since Trump was sworn in.” This “Global Evil,” she was allowed to believe, was all being funded by the Saudi royals in concert with Jewish billionaires: George Soros and the Rothschild family.

Greene believed all this, she claimed, not only because the media had made up lies about Trump but also because in some dark corner of the internet, an anonymous person claiming to have military intelligence “Q clearance” had said so.

She concluded her monologue to her new G.O.P. colleagues with an admonition: “Let’s make sure we keep our eyes on the enemy. Because they’re really wanting to take all of us out.” About a third of her colleagues rose to applaud her as she took her seat among them.

In that passage, we're barely scratching the surface of Draper's profile of Greene's bizarre alleged beliefs. The fact that people can believe such things is a lesson in what might be called "abnormal anthropology." 

Not too many years ago, it might have seemed very hard to believe that any sane person would ever believe such an array of unfounded, implausible claims. By now, we've all been exposed to a startling anthropological fact:

Millions of people can be persuaded to believe such unfounded, implausible claims. It only takes the spirited leadership of people like Trump and Greene—and an anonymous person named Q.

If you say it, they will believe! It almost seems that someone once said that to Donald J. Trump.

By any conventional standard, Greene has apparently come to believe a wide array of apparently crazy claims. Her sponsorship of these apparent beliefs has helped spread these beliefs to many millions of people.

This is part of the world which is captured by this morning's New York Times headline—the headline which has virtually nothing to do with the material appearing beneath it. 

The headline atop today's Conversation has virtually nothing to do with the Conversation's contents. In such perhaps peculiar ways, our blue tribe elites have tended to respond to the madness of the Trumpy world into which we've all been thrown.

That one strange headline will have zero effect on the prevailing public discourse. It's a tiny pebble on the beach compared to the giant world of unfounded, highly implausible claims which millions of red tribe voters have come to take as gospel. 

That said, the headline struck us as instructively strange. In our tortured mind, it raises this key question:

How skillful have our tribunes been in responding to the madness of that "Trumpy, Trumpy world?" 

How skillful have our own tribunes been in responding to that madness? Tomorrow, we'll return to a related question:

Who are the high-profile tribunes our tribe has come to trust? We'll start by asking a different question:

How wealthy is Farhadian Weinstein and the tribunes arrayed around her?

As we noted yesterday, Farhadian Weinstein is a highly accomplished person. Beyond that, she has always struck us as being completely sincere.

That said, we feel less sure about some of the other tribunes we see arrayed around her. 

How wealthy are those tribal leaders? While we're at it, how deeply are those people connected within our nation's "power elite?"

Just how wealthy, and just how connected, are the people who promulgate our tribal narratives? Also, should you think it makes a difference—and why aren't you ever told?

Tomorrow: The apartment


26 comments:

  1. Narrative does not mean fiction or lies. It refers to the arrangement of information in chronological order, with a beginning, middle and end. Somerby intends the word to refer to fiction, but it is also the way history is typically described and that is factual.

    "Our warring tribes run on the fuel of Storyline, on competing tribal narratives."

    There is an important difference between versions of reality on the right and the left. The right tells deliberately concocted lies to attacked the left. The left tries to hew to truth and talk about reality to combat the lies of the right wing. The left doesn't make up fictions to use as attacks on its political enemies. The truth is sufficient for that.

    When Somerby refuses to acknowledge this difference, even in the con-man leader of the Republican Party, Donald Trump who told over 30,000 lies in his term in office (according to the Washington Post), he makes it clear that he himself is supportive of the lies told on the right. He is telling his own big lie by equating the truth-telling of the left with the right and pretending that the right does not lie for political gain.

    In fact, you can know who to trust by the lies someone tells. Somerby's lying proclaims him a tool of the right, more than anything else about his meme-spewing support for Republican talking points. And this is a Somerby big lie -- there is a huge difference between the left and the right when it comes to presenting FICTIONAL narratives and representing them as truth when they are deliberately created lies.

    Want an example? Republicans claim that schools are providing litter boxes in hallways for children who identify as furries (cats). This is a lie told by at least 10 Republican candidates for office. There is no school anywhere in the USA who has done this. It is not true.

    Want another example? Republicans are claiming that hospitals have been conducting surgeries on minor children (not of legal age to consent to medical treatment) in order to produce trans children. Their supporters have been attacking hospitals over this lie. There is not one single hospital that has conducted such surgery on a child anywhere in the USA. But this claim is what Republicans are campaigning on. It is entirely a lie.

    Somerby has never called out a Republican lie here on his blog. Instead, he daily pretends that Democrats tell whoppers like these and presents a false bothsiderist equation of the two parties. And that makes Somerby a huge liar himself.

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  2. tl;dr

    Sure, say what you want about Marjorie Taylor Greene, dear Bob, produce all the smears demanded by your superiority complex.

    One thing is clear, however: Marjorie Taylor Greene is a way smarter, better, and more decent person than any of your fellow tribesmen.

    ...watch this for example:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37N-2b0Py8g

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    1. How Russia prepares for winter: destroy Ukrainian infrastructure.

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    2. Yes but Greene’s supposed virtue must be judged in context of your own clearly degenerate personality; obvious to all since Bob’s sugar daddy charged you with monitoring his blog.

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  3. "In a small and tiny way, we'd say that headline is itself an example of the madness of our Trumpy, Trumpy world. In our view, very large amounts of madness do emerge from red tribe sources at the present time. But our own blue tribe has often reacted by churning large amounts of shaky or unhelpful Storyline ourselves."

    First Somerby describes a reasonable conversation between Gail Collins and Brett Stephens, then he explains that the headline doesn't really capture what they discussed, then he leaps to our blue tribe producing unhelpful storyline.

    The blue tribe didn't create that headline. The headline is not storyline, but true about Trump and his Trumpy world being mad, something Somerby acknowledges himself. But a mismatched headline doesn't illustrate whatever problem Somerby thinks is occurring over storyline. Bret and Gail are not blue tribers, one is a conservative and the other some sort of moderate Democrat, but their conversation is intended to be "bipartisan." Nor is the NY Times with its nameless headline writers liberal. How then does this errant headline illustrate anything about liberals or even blue tribers?

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  4. "These shaky, unhelpful narratives create a lesser form of "madness," one which is wholly our own. And no, this isn't helpful.

    We blue voters meet our tribal tribunes on cable every night. They serve us our nightly platter of tribal reassurance, and our familiar platter of mandated tribal beliefs. "

    Bret Stephens and Gail Collins are opinion writers. So are many of the cable news hosts and their guests. It almost seems as though Somerby, setting himself up as the arbiter of truth, is saying that it is unhelpful when members of the blue tribe express their opinions about news in editorials (which is what that conversation under that headline was) and commentary. It is as if Somerby were saying that we blue tribers should not go around expressing our contrary opinions to the Republicans. Should we then just let their outright lies stand? Should we leave a vacuum on the left where opposing views should appear? Do we have no right to participate in the give and take of political discourse?

    Or should we only say what Somerby thinks we should say -- whatever that is, since he rarely expresses any personal viewpoints of his own. It is as if he were telling Democrats to leave the field of political battle and cede it to Republicans, unopposed, because Somerby doesn't like some of the things we say (despite claiming to be one of us, a blue tribe member himself).

    I don't see that happening, nor should it. The point of our free speech is to express views before an election so that voters can hear different viewpoints and make up their own minds about what to think and how to vote. Suppressing any of those viewpoints is not a service to voters either, any more than the lying done on the right. And leaving those lies to stand unchallenged is a huge disservice to our democracy.

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  5. "In the example we cited yesterday, Tali Farhadian Weinstein joined a cast of thousands in telling us that it's now clear that Donald J. Trump always knew, all along, that he lost the 2020 election."

    Farhadian Weinstein didn't make this up. She is summarizing the evidence presented by the 1/6 Committee during its hearing, which clearly shows that Trump knew all along that he had lost the election. That is presenting a FACT to the public, not making up "pleasing tribal narrative." It is telling the truth about Trump, based on the evidence presented by Republican witnesses, members of Trump's own staff, who saw and heard what Trump did immediately after the election.

    Is this "narrative" pleasing to our blue tribe? No. We all would prefer to have had a normal president who was not a lying con artist, one who cared about the people and governed with public well-being in mind. We didn't want the 1/6 insurrection to happen. We didn't want most of what we received at Trump's hands. So, this narrative that Trump did this on purpose as part of a huge lie is in no way "pleasing" to us. It is a huge insult that Somerby thinks it would be. It is a slander against the blue tribe that he thinks we are happy about who Trump is and what he did to our nation. And yes, we want him to be held accountable, but it doesn't make anyone happy that such a thing is necessary.

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  6. "At any rate, an array of pundits joined Farhadian Weinstein last week, saying there's no longer any doubt. Donald Trump knows he lost the election—and he knew it all along!

    Who are the people who tell us these things—who serve us our platter of tribal narrative? "

    Somerby can only maintain the farce that Trump didn't know what he was doing by denying the facts of the 1/6 Committee and pretending that cable news is making shit up. This "platter of tribal narrative" comes straight from the mouths of the Republican witnesses who testified to Trump's words and actions. In a sense, the info comes from Trump himself via the 1/6 Committee testimony (under oath) by Trump's allies and hand-picked staff. Somerby is lying when he implies that cable news hosts are making this up. They are reporting what is now obvious to anyone not stuck in denial (as Somerby appears to be, or is pretending to be for whatever pay he receives for writing crap here).

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  7. Bob hates Liberal narratives like 2+2=4.

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  8. Bob,
    What makes you think Trump ran for election in 2020? Some narrative you read?

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  9. "The fact that people can believe such things is a lesson in what might be called "abnormal anthropology."

    No, it would be a lesson in abnormal psychology. Why does Somerby go to such lengths to avoid psychology and shift his non-existent authorities to anthropologists? The only time he refers to psychology is when he calls on Bandy Lee or Mary Trump to declare Trump insane. But Greene is just as delusional as Trump and yet Somerby refers to a field that does not exist: abnormal anthropology to call her on it. Why?

    (There is a book of essays called Anthropology and the Abnormal, by Ruth Benedict, 1934, but there is no subfield of abnormal anthropology.)

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  10. "Not too many years ago, it might have seemed very hard to believe that any sane person would ever believe such an array of unfounded, implausible claims. "

    There have always been people with extremist fringe beliefs like these. Some have founded religions, others cults. The difference now is that an opportunistic right wing has co-opted the beliefs in order to mobilize voters. The difference now is that someone expressing those beliefs has been elected to office.

    This is not about weird beliefs. It is about the degradation of a political party that is so desperate for power that it would use those beliefs to convince voters to elect a con artist, a grifter, in it for his own personal profit and aggrandisement, in order to hang on his coattails and benefit politically from what he let them do (appointing SC justices, lowering taxes, undoing environmental protections, lining their own pockets) while Trump enjoyed the privileges of office without doing a bit of work for the American people.

    We do not know whether Marjorie Taylor Greene believes any of the things she "was allowed" to believe. The odd wording suggests perhaps she was trying to avoid directly lying about her personal beliefs while presenting herself as a Q-Anon follower. It seems to me that she is cynically feeding raw meat to her constituents, following party line to distract voters from substantive issues, and engaging in Republican-style political tactics to the maximum.

    Somerby will not tell you that MTG was present at a meeting with Trump at the White House on December 21 at which plans for the insurrection were discussed. This occurred before she was sworn in to her House seat.

    https://www.businessinsider.com/house-republicans-white-house-meeting-december-21-2020-election-2022-7

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  11. "How wealthy is Farhadian Weinstein and the tribunes arrayed around her?"

    What on earth does this have to do with anything she might have said from her position of authority as a prosecutor? Are we now to believe that no one with money over a certain amount can express an opinion on TV?

    How wealthy is Marjorie Taylor Greene? She will be less wealthy after her divorce, but she essentially bought her house seat. She couldn't get elected from Atlanta so she found the reddest, rural district in GA that she could find and ran there using her husband's money. Since then she has done nothing whatsoever to help her constituents. She is entirely a gadfly for the Republican noise machine, making a fool of herself by tormenting Parkland survivors advocating gun control, opposing gun restrictions by evading the metal detectors in Congress, and behaving like an idiot. And that gets her lots of attention, which seems to be as important to her as to Trump.

    But don't fool yourself that she is acting alone in any of this. She is part of a political machine that is highly disciplined and does these things for a political reason, right down to fools like MTG, Matt Gaetz, Ron Johnson, Lauren Boebert, and the rest of them.

    And Somerby, sadly, has joined that team in its antics. His claim yesterday that Trump believes his own lies, is about as crackpot as anything MTG says because it runs just as counter to reality as her purported belief in Q's teachings.

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    1. The GOP has been spinning down the toilet bowl for more than two decades, when everyone who isn't a bigot, or isn't perfectly fine with bigotry left the party.

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  12. "If you say it, they will believe!"

    This is, of course, a riff on "If you build it, they will come!" from Field of Dreams (a film). Once again Somerby rips off an author without attribution, suggesting meaning that the author would not have expressed in his baseball movie. But who cares about other people's intellectual property, amirite?

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    1. I would say Bob is using a popular catch phrase as a reference to another situation, but as usual when Bob does this, the idea doesn’t carry.

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  13. Somerby is a little misleading about the content of the editorial with Stephens and Collins. Perhaps he didn't read it all the way through?

    It starts out by talking about college admissions but it works its way around to discussing the midterm elections and other current events, then finishes by speculating about possible presidential candidates in 2024. It has a variety of topics that might be captured by an overall title such as:

    "Welcome to the Madness of Our Trumpy, Trumpy World"

    Except they didn't use the term madness or Trumpy. But they did discuss a lot more than just college admissions and reverse discrimination. In that sense, Somerby has misrepresented both the oddness of the headline, which can fit their entire range of topics, and he has mischaracterized the narrowness of their discussion.

    That isn't unusual with Somerby. You always have to check his links and references, and in this case, read what the op-ed said -- I should have done that sooner, but Collins and Stephens are not my favorite columnists. But there is a kind of due diligence that must be done whenever Somerby makes any kind of claim about something.

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  14. "Who are the high-profile tribunes our tribe has come to trust? We'll start by asking a different question:

    How wealthy is Farhadian Weinstein and the tribunes arrayed around her?"

    First, what is a tribune?

    Tribune definition -- "a popular leader; a champion of the people"

    Farhadian Weinstein is not a popular leader or champion of the people. She isn't any kind of politician or spokesperson for any group. She is a former prosecutor, an expert on law with academic credentials and training. That isn't what is meant by the term "tribune" at all.

    But Somerby is happy to misrepresent her as a blue tribe tribune because apparently she has family money, as if it is a crime or a disqualification to have been born rich.

    And are the others on cable news tribunes? Not so much. They are neither popular leaders nor champions of the people. They are either reporters who tell us the news or they are opinion columnists who express their own views in order to stimulate discussion, often interviewing experts and people from various walks of life with input on a topic. That isn't what a tribune is either.

    Thus Somerby shifts his focus from the actual thought leaders among liberals to media figures who he has singled out because he dislikes them for some trivial reason. In this case, this woman has dared to have a good education before pursuing a career that has given her the expertise to speak knowledgeably about Trump's legal difficulties. That makes her suspect in Somerby's world. But it doesn't make her any kind of tribune.

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    1. Harvard Bob is so charming when he desperately whips out the class resentment.

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  15. Here is a historical review of the right wing attacks on higher education:

    https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-50-year-war-on-higher-education?utm_source=Iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=campaign_5321654_nl_Academe-Today_date_20221018&cid=at&source=&sourceid=&cid2=gen_login_refresh

    To the extent that Somerby demonizes anyone with education and expertise, he is part of that attack. This article does not spend a lot of time discussing the role of academia in maintaining democracy, but the attacks on it are an assault on those who uphold free speech, public transparency, and participation by an educated populace in our government.

    As for Trump, he appears proud of his educational attainments, but he cheated his way through K-12 and college, gaining admission by having others take the entrance exam for him, buying his way into a university, and doing none of the work that would have made him an educated person, competent in his job. He is a walking example of why we need our colleges and universities to undo the supposed madness of our Trumpy nation.

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  16. So…. Bob notes half the Country is believing things that make no sense and are obviously false. As a media critic, his solution is to critique the outlets where they don’t get their information
    and pay no attention to.


    We can only conclude Bob is an idiot.

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  17. Noting it’s a controversial point, but Trump is worth over a billion dollars.

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  18. "STORYLINE / NARRATIVES / NARRATORS: Marjorie Taylor Greene...
    TUESDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2022

    ...helps script a mad, mad world:"

    MTG isn't scripting anything. She gets her script from Q and other Republicans. She just has a big big mouth.

    I suspect that the point is to distract liberals from our own campaigning by enticing us to answer their loony talking points. Much as Somerby does here every day.

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  19. Meanwhile we have serious problems that need to be investigated, concerning what is happening to our trusted institutions:

    "Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said that as rioters raged inside the Capitol on January 6, she was concerned about the Secret Service’s treatment of then-Vice President Mike Pence, Politico reports.

    Said Pelosi: “I myself wondered if he could trust the Secret Service to take him to a safe place. I don’t know.”

    Her comments were echoed by Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL): “There is something going on at the Secret Service, either pure incompetence, all the way on the scale to potentially very criminal activity … or just having a preference for one side or the other.”

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  20. And this is why you cannot trust GOP candidates to tell the truth (Political Wire):

    "North Carolina congressional candidate Bo Hines (R) bemoaned the state of the economy in a recent interview: “I know in my household, my wife and I can’t afford to give up one month’s salary. We have bills to pay, we have rent to pay.”

    But Insider reports the 27-year-old Republican upstart, backed by Donald Trump, reported having no salary at all, according to his certified personal financial disclosure.

    A trust fund is the only reported asset in Hines’ financial disclosure."

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  21. I'm sure you won't be disappointed when you join this very special game, it will make you happier emoji

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