Yup. When your employees and their family’s livehoods, the food on their tables and the roofs over their heads are on your shoulders week in and week out then you know what it’s like to really have to fend for yourself. It’s bad enough to deal with competitors, unions, vendors, customers who don’t want to pay, employees who are less than stellar, the banks, lawyers and accountants, the state agencies, but then the government in the form of OSHA and the EPA etc etc. step in and just make it worse. To hear Obama say “you didn’t build that” just shows his total sickening ignorance.
What Trump has done is absolutely amazing - in one of the toughest markets of all he has succeeded. Knowing what I know, but on a much smaller scale, I am in awe.
I am curious by what measure you regard Trump as successful? His vaunted deal-making and business building skills have so lagged the market that had he invest his inheritance in index funds (or rather chosen an investment strategy to mirror the S&P 500 since index funds are a new invention) he would have twice the net worth he claims to have (and a little under 5 times what some outside observers peg his net worth at).
It is quite possible that had you (or I) inherited as much money as Donald J. Trump did, you (or I) would be much richer than he is. Of course either of us might have done worse, too,. Still, I don’t see anything amazing or successful in underperforming that stock market, even (or perhaps especially) when it is done with lots of deal-making and braggadocio.