There are two types of people living today: those who hate him, and those who adore him. Regardless of where they stand, they know who he is. It would come as a surprise to no one if his Q-score were to exceed that of the most ignominious of pop singers, the most admirable serial killers, or the most incompetent world leaders. He is bigger than Elvis, Hitler is rarely mentioned these days without the use of his name in the same sentence, as much as it saddens me, I wouldn’t be surprised if he turns out with more voters than Christ currently has believers, but to offset the balance, no one mentions The Beatles much these days because people are no longer enamored with millennials bragging about their vintage musical tastes.
Without question, he is the most famous man alive today, and one cannot help but wonder, especially given his stunted verbiage, how he got so far despite saying so little. The little that he said was enough to upset entities that were previously unanimously decried. The feminists, who were infamous for their obnoxious presence in academia, were crying “sexism”. Black Lives Matter who were ignominious for their inchoate manner of protesting, were crying racism, which seemed to hold steam until they made the solipsistic claim that it was directed toward them. The neoconservative GOP, who were previously known for proclivity toward war in the name of patriotism were calling him “dangerous”. The mainstream media, despite being less trustworthy than Congress, slandered his name every chance they got.
Take, for instance, this shameless falsification of a 1990 interview he did with Playboy from the Huffington Post:
“When Donald and Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the black people off the floor,” Kip Brown, a former employee at Trump’s Castle, told the New Yorker for a September article. “It was the eighties, I was a teenager, but I remember it: they put us all in the back.”
Trump disparaged his black casino employees as “lazy” in vividly bigoted terms, according to a 1991 book by John O’Donnell, a former president of Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino.
“And isn’t it funny. I’ve got black accountants at Trump Castle and Trump Plaza. Black guys counting my money! I hate it,” O’Donnell recalled Trump saying. “The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.”
“I think the guy is lazy,” Trump said of a black employee, according to O’Donnell. “And it’s probably not his fault because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that. It’s not anything they can control.”
Here is how the interview actually went:
Hochman: What about your temper? In the book Trumped!, an unauthorized biography, your former employee John O’Donnell describes your ripping upholstery out of a limo, ramming your fist through tile in a casino, yelling at pilots for rough landings. How’s that Donald doing these days, and why didn’t we see him on The Apprentice?
Trump: O’Donnell is a loser. He totally made that up. I hardly even knew this guy. He wasn’t very good at what he did. I’ve had many books written about me, and in almost all instances they just make things up and say whatever they want, even if it’s total nonsense. I ripped the interior out of limousines? Give me a break.
It seems as though he just sat back and let the dissenters do the talking for him by responding to him the way they’ve been known to respond to everything else. As one of the oldest men to run for President, he’s lived long enough to know that life is too short for that.
Nonetheless, his grandiloquence has balkanized the nation in ways unlike it had ever seen, even in the Jim Crow era and when their attacks began to lose steam, the dissenters became more advanced in their arguments against him. However, what seemed to be evolving into more in-depth criticism, was really devolving into ad hominem attacks against his character that only amounted to non sequitur. “How could he be entrusted with nuclear arsenals if he has weak temperance?” “Since he’s insulted women and made exaggerative comments on the pulchritude of his own daughter, he is unfit to be president.”
Economist Robert Reich, for one, had something to say to those who claim that Trump would make for a great economy, given his business experience.
I finally found a Trump supporter – this morning when I went to buy coffee. (I noticed a Trump bumper sticker on his car.)
“Hi,” I said. “Noticed your Trump bumper sticker.”
“Yup,” he said, a bit defensively.
“I hope you don’t mind my asking, but I’m curious. Why are you supporting him?”
“I know he’s a little bit much,” said the Trump supporter. “But he’s a successful businessman. And we need a successful businessman as president.”
“How do you know he’s a successful businessman?” I asked.
“Because he’s made a fortune.”
“Has he really?” I asked.
“Of course. Forbes magazine says he’s worth four and a half billion.”
“That doesn’t mean he’s been a success,” I said.
“In my book it does,” said the Trump supporter.
“You know, in 1976, when Trump was just starting his career, he said he was worth about $200 million,” I said. “Most of that was from his father.”
“That just proves my point,” said the Trump supporter. “He turned that $200 million into four and a half billion. Brilliant man.“
“But if he had just put that $200 million into an index fund and reinvested the dividends, he’d be worth twelve billion today,” I said.
The Trump supporter went silent.
"And he got about $850 million in tax subsidies, just in New York alone,” I said.
More silence.
“He’s not a businessman,” I said. “He’s a con man. Hope you enjoy your coffee.”
One thing to note, while tangent to anything that needs to be said, is the way he describes the man’s response to his approaching him; if a 4’ 11” stranger came up to me to ask me about my politics before I’ve had my fucking coffee, I, too, would be defensive. For another thing, you would think that as an economist, Reich would know the difference between a tax break and a tax subsidy. In fact, I know he does. The condescending tone of this scenario reflects that he is playing his subject for a fool, while inadvertently duping those who read his testimony with sincerity; the Trump supporter, like most people, didn’t know enough about economics to argue with some munchkin about index funds, and I doubt Reich’s neophytes do either. We should also note that just because registration for a mutual fund becomes effective, does not mean that an account should be immediately opened. In fact, it was wise of him not to invest in dividends, at the time. He, in actuality, beat the S&P 500 with his $4.5 billion net worth. With a Top Manhattan marginal tax rate of 75.9%, the highest it had been throughout his career, in 1976, it would have been a risky and volatile investment that, nonetheless, would have left him with less than he had after income tax was collected.
This, and many other arguments against him raised questions, but failed to cost him any voters. They are far too complex for the layman to grasp, and thus base their decisions, even if these assertions were correct. Well, it seemed that the public responds better to four-letter words, because blatant vulgarity had to surface before the public opinion underwent any overhaul and the infamous conversation from 2005 between him and Billy Bush was the straw that broke the camel’s toe—er, back. If the decline in polls from female voters wasn’t enough, accusations of rape and sexual assault that coincided his remarks began to proliferate. Prior to this, the media went so far as to invoke a his ex-girlfriend who was offered a bathing suit at a pool party and exploited her testimony to aggrandize his poor history with women. Never have the headlines covering any election cycle read this much like a TMZ article this frequently. This tactic would not have worked as well as it did in alienating female Republicans, had his opponent not been female. Her attacks against him during every debate and every mention of him she made during her speeches were moralistic and made mention of misogyny or his ambivalent response to the Iraq War on the Howard Stern Show, in some form or another, which her voter base, which was predominantly female, absorbed this noise as if they were made of wood...like puppets.
To his demise, however, just as she frequently commented on his “racism, sexism, homophobia[?], and bigotry,” he just as frequently alluded to her email scandals. Coincidentally, the two were let off the hook for the accusations that faced both of them; there is no telling what the verdict will be in these next two days and it has me on the edge of my seat.
Trump in the Twilight Zone
Let’s say that that the hot air that he spewed wasn’t inflammatory, or was, in this case, nonflammable. Let’s say his publicists are honest 100% of the time. Let’s say he never tried to promulgate a closing of the borders to Muslim refugees and illegal immigrants. He still would’ve been called a racist just for running as a Republican. He could’ve run as a Democrat and given his eventual opposition to the Iraq War and his opposition to global capitalism, he would not have been out of place there, but he chose the party of rich, old white men, and he is the richest, oldest, and WASPiest of them all. His presence made the other candidates seem less “problematic” in comparison.
The neoconservatives who now populate the party would not have felt the need to obscure their intentions to wage another war on terror and attacks against the Party would have been on their foreign policy rather than the bombast of a billionaire. This might have breathed fresh life into the antiwar Left, if only for a brief moment, but long enough for them to balkanize their protests to their various rallies. The establishment candidate who received the most notoriety for his foreign policy stance, or the lowest score in an American Conservative article, would have been the main target of the antiwar Left in their new form, and it has been made apparent throughout this election, that Republicans respond defensively to the grievances of the Left. An establishment candidate—like, say, Cruz—would have been the presumptive nominee for the Republican Party and our antiestablishment candidate would have either been cheated out of, or simply lost the nomination.
His incendiarism has given rise to fringe movements, mainly the alternative right. What would have attracted them if the wall were never considered? To answer the question as to why white nationalists and supremacists currently endorse the current Republican nominee, the alt-right and the like, have always been Republicans, and while they aren’t necessarily pro-war, they are certainly anti-ISIS and anti-refugee; they would support whomever wins the Republican nomination, be it Cruz, Bush, Rubio, or whomever, but only reluctantly.
His incendiarism has also exposed the superficiality of the progressive left. Their concern for the working class was nowhere to be found when they found out that blue-collar and union workers were endorsing a racist misogynist. As their attacks grew worse, they became less likable and more pusillanimous. Conversely, their attacks would seem par for the course in an election cycle and they wouldn’t be hated as much. The activism against him and protests outside and inside of his rallies would’ve been minimal. Resultantly, vox populi journalists would have very little material on which to report, unless they are willing to defend the establishment Republican based on foreign policy, at which point, the public would be skeptical toward even alternative media outlets, decrying them as shills for warmongerers or alt-right insiders.
In order for all of this to happen, political correctness would have to have never been an issue, but before the election, it was.
This is why we have a Trump.