Steve Sailer writes: Marco Rubio’s latest tactic is to denounce Donald Trump as a “con man,” pointing especially to the risible Trump University venture.
But a problem with this line of assault is that the landscape is full of giant buildings with Trump’s name on them, such as the 98-story Trump International Hotel and Tower on a great site on the Chicago River, which the Trump Organization managed to open in the teeth of the financial crisis in 2009. (The Chicago project was a storyline on Trump’s reality show The Apprentice.)
Voters tend to be impressed by the construction of tangible things, especially huge ones patronized by famously rich and demanding celebrities. We’ve all managed, at minimum, home improvement projects and recognize that they require a lot of work and a lot of decision-making. Looking at this enormous luxury hotel / apartment building, it’s pretty obvious that a lot of sweating the details went into it.
A big part of Mitt Romney’s problems in 2012 was that his business career, while no doubt energetic and cognitively demanding, mostly involved intangible financial abstractions and what PR people like to call creative destruction (i.e., laying workers off). He had something to do with Staples, but other than that, the Romney people could never seem to offer much inspiring detail on what he’d been up to.
COMMENTS:
* I was just reading an article recently–can’t remember where–that sneered at Trump because he would have made more money if 30 years ago he’d just put it all in T-bills.
That largely ignores the many jobs that Trump provided. So basically, he “spent” his money on America. The guy likes deals, he’s always wanting more, and he often loses. But in the meantime, actual jobs–not consulting jobs, either–are available.
* Working middle class white people better identify with Trump’s fortune than Romney’s fortune, because Trump making his fortune involved the hiring of a lot of working middle class white people to build his big shiny things.
* These calculations ignore that he’s also spent a lot of money on living large. He could have lived in a hut and saved all his money, but he seems to have had a pretty good time spending it.
By the way, I think there’s a subconscious connection between Trump’s current popularity and how 9/11 made people feel solidarity with New Yorkers, with Trump as the rest of the country’s image of a New Yorker.
Post 9/11, Americans seem to be prouder of New York’s gaudiness than they were before. It helps explain some of the popularity of superhero movies, such as Spider-Man in 2002.
The basis of Trump’s success was betting big on New York in the late 1970s. His optimism succeeded because of all the wealth generated in intangible ways on Wall Street from 1982 onward. But Trump represents wealth that everybody can understand and identify with: building big beautiful buildings.
Everybody has managed a home improvement project or two, so we can understand that putting up huge buildings where the fit and finish are good enough for celebrities must be a difficult job.
* I think you underestimate how many middle class and poor people know that Trump is a serial exaggerator (to be kind) but they like him because they don’t think any better of the people he’s running against. My barber told me yesterday that he knows Trump is a liar but so are all of those politicians he’s running against and at least he’s not another career politician.
My barber also said he enjoyed Trump’s campaign because of the pro wrestling aspect of it – the smack talk, finger pointing, etc. & how Cruz, Rubio etc are having to embrace Trump’s tactics. He thought that it exposes the system for what it really is.
My white collar friends and co-workers just reference President Camacho from Idiocracy.
* The national focus on New York also got sharper when Jimmy Fallon took over at the Tonight Show after Jay Leno mercifully quit phoning it in from Burbank. The new show, although not to everyone’s taste, is much more attuned to a younger, more circumspect audience. Cause, effect, both, coincidence? In any event, people probably notice New York more now, and if they didn’t then Trump would speak louder. Many Americans really want to feel proud of their country, which the parties don’t acknowledge.
* The problem with people listing all the negatives of Trump is that they give us no alternatives. Yes, Trump has skeletons. Yes, Trump has done stuff we are not proud of. He is a bragger, womanizer, etc.
OK, fine. Now whom do you suggest we vote? Most people on this blog consider immigration to be the biggest single issue. What other candidate is going to tackle it? With Trump we get a slim chance of attacking this issue versus zero chance with the others.
If Pat Buchanan were running, I’d support him. Trump is basically running on Pat’s platform of immigration, trade and to some extent non-intervention.
So if you are going to slam Trump, and in some cases rightly so, please give us an alternative that we could support with a straight face. Not one that a neocon could support. Not one that a progressive could support. But one that the majority of this blog’s readers could support.
* The other thing is that we’ve all had our sense of outrage numbed by two things over the last few years:
1) The seemingly endless string of goofball publicity stunts by supposedly serious and respectable politicians. Obama is the undisputed master of this but there are so many imitators.
2) The literally endless amount of politically correct screeching and shaming we all get hit with anytime we interact with the media or web. I’d guess the average person is exposed to about five or six “boy who cried wolf” outrages of this sort every day. We’re all totally numb to it now. Only the teenage girls and gays can manage the level of moral hysteria demanded of us.
* I just appreciate Trump as a ‘wrecker’.
Another thing. The sleaze factor paradoxically protects him because there is no pretense of being respectable.
This is how Howard Stern got away with so much stuff. Since he was shameless, you couldn’t tag him with anything. He’d just laugh and say So What?
This is where Romney was vulnerable. He looked some perfect 1950s TV dad. So, the dirt on him made him look really dirty.
Trump, like Clinton, wears his dirt on his sleeve.
In another time, I would have been offended by Trump, and in some ways, still am.
But this nation is so far on morals, decency, sanity, and etc., who cares?
It’s just a matter of who can wreck the system better.
The system needs to go.
* Romney had a “fire in the belly” problem (the lack thereof). Jeb had a similar deficiency. Or was it “low energy”?
Trump seems quite robust in this area.
* Trump’s really running a meta-campaign on these levels. He’s mocking the PC-folks, baiting them, and then going so over the top outrageous they “literally can’t even”, making his fans roar and boosting him in the polls. And then he decided that if Obama could spend one night a week on the Daily Show and the The Tonight Show answering softball questions, he could do such nonsense better, since he’s got more TV experience as a reality star.
In other words, Trump’s trolling. Gloriously.
