I was frankly surprised about how
often I’ve mentioned Donald Trump in my blog before this past presidential
race. Here are some of my mentions of Trump from the past:
March 2011
That guy with the bad hair, Donald Trump. Trump claims he can do a much
better job with the economy; the problem is he is one of a type who helped sink
it in the first place. Trump, by the way, has been in bankruptcy court
numberless times, and received a sweet heart deal from banks in 1991 that helped
him avoid both financial and personal ruin. He’s still trying to avoid paying
off loans he owes, making the bizarre claim that the current recession is an
“Act of God”—so it isn’t his fault that he can't honor his obligations to
Deutsche Bank. Let this guy run the country? Only if you believe in smoke and
mirrors.
May 2011
George Stephanopoulos allowed Donald Trump to air-out what are
essentially his own made-up “facts” as to Obama’s citizenship as a means to
“advance” his quest for the presidency, rather than expose the infantile nature
of Trump’s thought processes.
Some more thoughts on Donald Trump’s delusion that he is presidential
material: He’s obviously been conned by his own public relations machine. He’s
been portrayed as a “successful” businessman, but really he’s just a
“celebrity”—perhaps a little more substantive than Paris Hilton and her friend
Nicole Richie combined. The fact is that he’s made his money gaming the system,
having been in and out of bankruptcy courts for at least twenty years. And he’s
not a “self-made” man—his father, Fred Trump, was. “The Donald” benefited
immensely from his father’s success and good name as a builder of residential
homes and rental apartments in New York City, and Trump used his father’s
assets to set himself up; he’s a good salesman of the infomercial variety, but
otherwise people should not be fooled by this self-promoter and charlatan.
Meanwhile…Despite the fact that Barack Obama released his “long form”
birth certificate that should put to rest the birther business, Arizona is
carrying-on “humiliating” itself by an attempt by Republican legislators to
re-introduce the "Birther Bill," which applies only to persons
planning to run for president or vice president on the state ballot…as we
recall, the certificate that birther Donald Trump recently provided the media
wasn’t even a legal document.
August 2011
The Tea Party would also do away with Social Security and Medicare.
Think about it: The Tea Party believes that doing away with these programs with
lead to more tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, who will allegedly use
that money to create jobs. One problem is that outside the Warren Buffetts of
the world, the wealthy and people who run corporations do not have the national
interest in mind, let alone the common person. Surprisingly, Donald Trump—who
derided Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget cutting plan as “stupid”—recently admitted to
George Stephanopoulos that he thought that the super rich who did not want to
pay higher taxes were not “patriotic.” These people are not saying “We need to
create more jobs because too many people in this country are suffering.” They
are saying “How can we maximize profit?” Do we need to cut more jobs?” The
federal government is in fact the largest employer in the country, and has been
the most reliable; the smaller government that the Tea Party yearns for will
only send even more people onto the street—to an even smaller social safety
net, if there still is one.
December 2011
Bloomberg News recently reported on how some
billionaires have risen in opposition to the call of other self-styled
“patriotic” millionaires and billionaires—including the now party-unaffiliated
Donald Trump—to raise their tax rates to help maintain a civil society, instead
of one where the Prince Prosperos of the country try in vain to hide from the
consequences of their avarice. One millionaire hedge fund manager admitted on
NPR that businesspeople were not in the “business” of job creation, but in
sales and profits; if they could safely cut more jobs, they would do it without
the slightest pangs of conscience. They had to be “forced” to create jobs in
the face of increased consumer demand that on hand labor cannot meet.
Unfortunately, in this country the people who currently have all the extra cash
(the rich)--due to massive income disparity in this country and the
disappearing middle class--prefer to hide their income in tax shelters and
capital gains havens. That cash would be better used in the hands of ordinary
consumers, but greed and avarice rule the minds of the newly-surfaced,
super-rich "put-upons."
January 2013
Of course, there are variations in the level of common sense and
credibility. Take for instance Donald Trump; the good thing is that he doesn’t
hold public office, and thus isn’t as dangerous as, say, Michele Bachmann.
Another politician who seems intent on out-doing her colleagues in exposing the
ass-end of history is the blonde, blue-eyed demi-fascist and social
conservative Marsha Blackburn—who happens to be a representative from the state
of Tennessee, where there is no shame in ignorance.
March 2013
The CPAC conference—which not surprisingly did not invite a true
moderate like New Jersey governor Chris Christie, but did invite the
increasingly racially-polarizing and paranoid schizophrenic Donald Trump—is what it is: A coming together
of people largely out-of-touch with the views of most people in this country,
hoping to arrive at a strategy that will cloak their bigoted worldview in a
shroud of “rights,” but in fact narrows the rights of working people (begun in
earnest under the regime of the “hero,” Ronald Reagan) in favor of the
privileged “elite.” This is about changing how people “perceive” their
reactionary agenda. That an uncritical media gives this gathering a spin of “legitimacy”
only serves to cause utter revulsion to people who believe that “we the people”
refers to more than the caste who wrote those words. The people gathered at the
conference need to be exposed for who they: Blind fanatics with no purpose but
to create a country that serves the cause of the few over the many.
So what have we learned here?
That Trump is the James Watt of self-serving hypocrisy? He claims that the
2007-2008 recession was an “Act of God,” and not the fault of the financial
banksterism he now wants to re-instate. He is not a “self-made” man, but
someone who was provided the proverbial “silver spoon.” He was critical of the “super
rich” who do not pay taxes; they are not “patriotic.” What does that make him,
who hasn’t paid taxes for decades? That Republicans are a hypocritical bunch
when it comes to having a “good” thing fall in their laps. The extremist
far-right has their reactionary in the White House at last—bringing a boatload
of fringe fanatics in tow to “govern” this country—and Republicans who opposed
him on the assumption he would lose the election are suddenly “all aboard.”
But what is most interesting is that immigration was never mentioned; in
fact, it appears that it was tapping back in the dark, rat-infested corner of
anti-Hispanic racism that turned Trump from a mild joke into a “legitimate”
presidential contender.
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