* Those two guys are making it tough for media shakedown artists just trying to make a living. Poor millennial media grifters like Michelle Fields and Ben Shapiro are going to run out of places to work their con.
* I was a WCW fan back in those days but, as always, Trump knew where the big money was even if Vince McMahon’s WWF had to shamelessly plagiarize a lot of the WCW’s style and steal its stars.
The WCW was pro wrestling for adults. Sophisticated story lines that culminated in attacks during interviews and assaults far removed from the TV studio to the point you worried that the wrestler’s ( dressed in street clothes) would be arrested by police for fighting in a convenience store parking lot etc! It got to the point where Ric Flair actually feigned an attempted rape during one episode and I’ll never forget Tully Blanchard punching out his girl friend “Baby Doll’ after his manager, James J. Dillon, accused her of consorting with the enemies of the Four Horsemen.
Hulk Hogan was a cartoon character who could never risk his image engaging in those kind of story lines. Ironic, in a way, that Hulk Hogan and Donald Trump’s real lives more closely resembled a WCW story line than Ric Flair’s.
* Steve,
Like you, I’m a big fan of McMahon and the WWE/WWF.
You have to wonder how badly Vince wants to support Trump, but he knows advertisers will pull from his company faster than Macy’s dropped Trump.
Wrestlemania IV and V were held at Trump Plaza in Atlantic City (with the latter posting a HUGE live gate, actually making more money than Wrestlemania III did in Detroit).
Trump was even at Wrestlemania VI and VII (in Toronto and Los Angeles).
There’s nothing I want to see more than Vince to come out and give a big speech at a Trump rally. He could probably convince the Iron Sheik to attack him, just for the nostalgia value…
* This is the first presidential election where the republican candidate has a substantial following among the young crowd who produce a lot of the amusing content we see online.
* Great speech, I can see why he is so popular. Good work too co-opting traditional liberalism against the open-boarders fanatics: “We shall not import into Hungary crime, terrorism, homophobia, and synagogue-burning anti-Semitism.”
I wish Trump could give such a speech this eloquent. Really he could lift about 90% of this with minor changes. Orban uses a lot of formal rhetorical techniques like parallelism and metaphor: “beams creaking” “migration is a slow stream eroding the shores” etc. Besides being effective, it also signals to educated voters that he is not an uncouth con man the media portrays him.
* It is nice that Trump can fine tune the level of left-wing nut protesters at his rallies. I think his crowds like at least some of it as pure spectacle, so he’ll never want to dial it down to zero.
For Arizona, which I think is voting fairly soon, he probably wants to keep it down and focus on organizing and turning out supporters.
For Illinois, where resentment at obnoxious far left types is much higher among GOP voters simply because such leftists are all over the place in Chicago and college campuses, it helped Trump to dial up the leftist thug factor.
* Why again is it bad that the frontrunner is famous? I agree that a worthy candidate should have a little more beyond that, but winning the election is a necessary condition to do anything else. He doesn’t run the whole thing, he just has to pick the people who can run whatever part of it is actually operable.
Gordon Crovitz’s column in the WSJ made a good point in spite of itself: the expected Democratic opponent is another mere lowly celebrity as well, with no accomplishments, no credibility, no moral fiber… She’s such a celebrity in fact, that she’s earned first-name basis like Cher or Madonna. Nobody’s support for her is derived from tangible metrics or recent job performance.
* I hope Trump dials back the Rick Flair/Fred Blasie school of persuasion and starts adopting Orban’s approach. It would certainly help him burnish his image as presidential material.
* I wish a lot of things about Trump too, or I used to, now I’ve come to peace with the realization that he is who he is and so, when I get down to an Expected Value Calculation Trump saying the correct things on immigration, deportation, trade outweighs all of his negatives and the positives of the other candidates, and this with me knowing full well that his “extreme” positions are bargaining chips.
If not Trump, then no one else will champion these issues. Trump busts down the door. Hopefully better statesmen will walk through the door and continue the path he is blazing.
* Imagine Trump’s favorability and chances if the media weren’t all in against him. I know he benefits from some of the media attacks. But I think it does hurt him with a large segment of voters. These are people who are not political junkies. These are working stiffs who come home and watch the news served up by the MSM. I personally know a few of these. Good people who work hard, but are hesitant about Trump because of the non-stop doomsday vitriol directed against him.
* Some idiot feminist was on NPR today, going on and on about how much Hillary has sacrificed over the years to play the part of the dutiful wife. Like being Bill’s wife hasn’t been the single biggest boon to her career.
* No, it’s exactly like how much Governor Lurleen Wallace of Alabama back in the 1960s had to sacrifice her own ambitions for those of her shiftless husband George Wallace. Without his political deadweight dragging her down, Lurleen would have been Galactic Overlordess.
* There are a lot of ways to make a living as a celebrity if you are a gregarious extrovert, which Fabio looked to be. Ordinary people like a chance to meet a celebrity for a few seconds, so if you like doing meets and greets, you can milk a moment of fame for a long time. For example, I used to track how long the amateur hockey player who scored the winning goal in the 1980 Olympic “Miracle on Ice” victory over the Soviets could go without having to get a real job beyond motivational speaker and golf tournament celebrity guest.
On the other hand, it’s a tiring life for an introvert. That’s kind of what Sofia Coppola’s “Lost in Translation” is about: Bill Murray plays an introverted movie star making a TV commercial in Japan, which he finds depressing.
* Obama and Clinton did their best to turn Egypt, Libya and Syria into Islamist states under the pretense of bring the people living there a better life. The European migrant invasion is a direct consequence of the contemptible convergence of Obama’s hubris and stupidity. Obama destroyed enormous social capital to indulge his messianic fantasy. Tens and hundreds of thousands died, millions have had their lives irreversibly changed for the worse, and Democrats pretend to be interested in helping the weak, dispossessed and downtrodden.
Trump may indeed be unreliable, but he is not a Leftist cuck-socking idiot. Trump would have to hire a troop of Obamanoid nitwits to get a running start on the massive fluster-cluck Obama foreign policy has been.
Trump will be unreliable, but Trump has not been deluded by Marxist superstition. Vote Trump, and kiss the unforced errors of the last sixteen years goodbye.
* Sailer: I try to acknowledge a celebrity walking by with a respectful nod and saying his last name preceded by “Mr.:” “Mr. Voight” or whomever.
But when I’m out of L.A., I turn into: “Joey! Joey Ramone! I’m your biggest fan!”
* Trump is a black swan event, which means it’s a now or never type of opportunity. It’s inconceivable that a future candidate, intent on destroying the existing order, will be financed by that same order so that he can win the nomination and proceed to destroy the cozy oligarchy. I doubt that Trump will live up to expectations regarding the destruction of the existing order but he’s the only one who presents some chance of significant reform. There’s no upside to waiting for a better candidate because no better candidate will ever get this close to being in a position to do damage to entrenched interests. Money really does talk.
* You misunderstand Arnold.
I first met him at an agency party (we had the same agent); he was then the strongest man in the world and that and Conan was all we knew about him. He was very pleasant, and by chance the next day he met my wife in Nieman Marcus — it was a pre-Christmas party, and she was shopping for a present for me, we just having made a big sale (may have been Hammer, it was that long ago). He spent half an hour helping her look.
I know other such stories, all true.
He ran for governor as a lark, and when he was elected he got a pretty damn good team together to draft some fundamental propositions and constitutional amendments. They were pretty damned good.
The campaign for governor didn’t get very bitter — most thought he was a joke and the pro’s didn’t bother spending any money smearing him.
But the long knives came out over those propositions. Nurses in uniform at rallies screaming curses at him although most of the health professionals I know thought his reforms were needed and good; but wow did the unions hate them. It was the same all over: organized labor in particular called him the Austrian Hitler. He hated it. It really hurt him — he has a thinner skin than you might imagine. It got uncomfortable at home, too, what with his wife being a Kennedy clanswoman.
So when his propositions failed, he said the hell with it. They want crony government and gemutlicheit they can have it. Never took the job seriously again.
I’m not excusing him; he took the job, and he didn’t resign when he lost interest in it. He spent the rest of his office years making nice with everybody. Sure he became a joke and knew it, but it was better than nurses in uniform screaming NAZI at him.
* Trump and Arnold are quite different, but still, Schwarzenegger is about as good a precedent for a unique figure like Trump as we are going to get.
