Posted on 09/11/2015 6:24:09 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
“I don’t like to analyze myself because I might not like what I see.”
— Donald Trump, in an interview for Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success, by business journalist Michael D’Antonio.
“Trump was willing to say and do almost anything to satisfy his craving for attention. But he also possessed a sixth sense that kept him from going too far.”
— D’Antonio’s conclusion to the book.
One often-underappreciated virtue of U.S. presidential campaigns is that their extreme length makes it very difficult to conceal what makes a candidate tick. (Barack Obama in 2008 was an exception, and he had help from an actively complicit media.)
This reality is finally catching up to Donald Trump.
As good as his “sixth sense” may be, Trump seems unlikely to avoid “going too far” in the long four-month stretch between now and the Iowa caucuses in February.
On Wednesday night, it came to light that Trump had made fun of rival candidate Carly Fiorina’s looks to a Rolling Stone reporter. “Look at that face,” he was overheard to say. “Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?” Trump now claims he wasn’t talking about Fiorina’s appearance, but her “persona.”
Before the news of his Fiorina remark broke, Trump spoke at an afternoon rally protesting President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, and blasted Obama for failing to secure the release of four Americans jailed in the Islamic Republic. Then he misapplied a lesson from history: “If I win the presidency, I guarantee you that those four prisoners are back in our country before I ever take office. I guarantee that. They will be back before I ever take office, because [the Iranians] know what has to happen, okay?”
Trump no doubt remembers that Iran released the hostages it had held for 444 days at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran on the day Ronald Reagan was sworn in for his first term as president. But foreign policy experts I’ve spoken to say that for Trump to “guarantee” a similar outcome for the four Americans imprisoned there today will likely lead to one of two disappointing outcomes: a) the Iranians stubbornly refuse to lose face by appearing to knuckle under to Trump; or b) Trump will feel pressure to use military force against Iran after he is sworn in so he won’t lose face.
“Reagan was careful not to comment on the hostages before he became president,” Martin Anderson, his late policy advisor, once told me. “That allowed him to exploit a vacuum and helped bring them home.”
In addition to the nationalistic fervor he can’t help whipping up, much of Trump’s support is predicated on his self-proclaimed genius in business deals. But National Journal reported this week that his business instincts are greatly exaggerated:
>>>If he’d invested the $200 million that Forbes magazine determined he was worth in 1982 into (a mutual fund of S&P 500 stocks), it would have grown to more than $8 billion today. . . . That a purely unmanaged index fund’s return could outperform Trump’s hands-on wheeling and dealing call into question one of Trump’s chief selling points on the campaign trail: his business acumen.<<<
Then there is the matter of Trump’s net worth itself. In June, Trump announced his presidential bid brandishing a document that claimed he was worth more than $8.7 billion. By August, when he filed reports with the Federal Election Commission, the number had ballooned to $10 billion.
The game of hide-and-seek Trump plays with his “billions” was described by Tim O’Brien, a former New York Times reporter, in his 2005 book TrumpNation. The book quoted sources close to Trump as claiming he “was not remotely close to being a billionaire.” Trump promptly sued O’Brien for $5 billion in damages.
During the resultant litigation, O’Brien’s lawyers deposed Trump for two days in 2007. “Among the documents discussed was a Deutsche Bank assessment that pegged Donald’s net worth at $788 million in 2005,” O’Brien recalled in a Bloomberg View article this past July. “At the time, Donald was telling his bankers and casino regulators that he was worth $3.6 billion; he was telling me he was worth $5 billion to $6 billion.”
When Trump was asked about the wide discrepancy between his claimed net worth and the various independent estimates of his wealth, he revealed how his mind works. As D’Antonio reports in the excellent new Never Enough, “[Trump] explained the wide swings as a function of market conditions, and his own sense of the value of his name. This brand valuation — [Trump] estimated it was worth $6 billion.” Trump said in the deposition that the value of his brand “goes up and down with markets and with attitudes and with feelings, even my own feelings.” He then added some thoughts about his net worth:
>>>[Wealth] can change when somebody writes a vicious article like O’Brien. I mean, I didn’t feel so great about myself when I read that article. I would have said that — after reading that article I would have said that this psychologically hurt me.<<<
Trump is perfectly suited for the current media age. He provides enough outrageous quotes and distractions to remain such a source of endless fascination that the press has trouble catching up with his contradictions. D’Antonio says Trump “understood that in the media age, the frontier that might challenge a man or woman was found, not in the wilderness, but in the media. The boundary of this wilderness was marked by propriety, which was an elastic concept.”
Donald Trump has tested the media’s limits of propriety for three decades, and he’s usually succeeded in expanding them.
We will learn in the next four months just how far Trump can expand the equivalent political limits. As much as he may have mastered many of the lessons of the Robert Ringer classic Winning Through Intimidation, he might have forgotten a key one. “The secret to bluffing is knowing when not to bluff,” Ringer told me. “Some people don’t know when to stop, and they always regret it.”
Does anyone remember reading 1/10,000th as much negative reactions to Barack Obama running for president?
Trump isn’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea, but seriously folks, this is an eye-opening moment.
Look at the collective against Trump.
That alone should scare the —— out of anyone not thinking of voting for him.
Be on their side, that side...
If I hadn’t planned on voting for him prior to this, I would be after this.
You will vote for a man who supported the Clintons, wanted (and got) them to his 3rd wedding, said they were great people, praised Hillary for her skill as Secretary of State?
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB120277819085260827
In case you have forgotten how Hillary Clinton won her New York Senate Seat:
“...........On Aug. 7, 1999, the one-year anniversary of the U.S. African embassy bombings that killed 257 people and injured 5,000, President Bill Clinton reaffirmed his commitment to the victims of terrorism, vowing that he “will not rest until justice is done.” Four days later, while Congress was on summer recess, the White House quietly issued a press release announcing that the president was granting clemency to 16 imprisoned members of FALN. What began as a simple paragraph on the AP wire exploded into a major controversy.
Mr. Clinton justified the clemencies by asserting that the sentences were disproportionate to the crimes. None of the petitioners, he stated, had been directly involved in crimes that caused bodily harm to anyone. “For me,” the president concluded, “the question, therefore, was whether their continuing incarceration served any meaningful purpose.”
His comments, including the astonishing claim that the FALN prisoners were being unfairly punished because of “guilt by association,” were widely condemned as a concession to terrorists. Further, they were seen as an outrageous slap in the face of the victims and a bitter betrayal of the cops and federal law enforcement officers who had put their lives on the line to protect the public and who had invested years of their careers to put these people behind bars. The U.S. Sentencing Commission affirmed a pre-existing Justice Department assessment that the sentences, ranging from 30 to 90 years, were “in line with sentences imposed in other cases for similar terrorist activity.”..................................
I remember reading TONS and TONS of opposition rants and articles about Obama. I posted many of them.
You have already proven yourself to be a clueless wonder.
Lying about this isn’t going to help your cause.
If Trump doesn’t win FL, Bush will get the nomination. Is that what you’d prefer?
What lie?
Thank you for your daily “Trump is bad” post.
I will continue to support him for speaking truth to power & for his stance on immigration, caring for our veterans & most importantly for talking about what’s best for AMERICA & not for the GOPe.
Till tomorrow. Peace :)
I don't know if Trump ever leaned his left.
If you think the full court press against Trump was in any way mirrored by a full court press against Obama, you’re absolutely stark raving nuts.
Was the GOPe trashing Obama as it has Trump? No.
Was the complete Leftist media doing it? No
As I said, you have absolutely destroyed your credibility here.
I understand the winner take all rule in FL and the primary season schedule (and the screwed up primary rules) but you ASSUME something and then decide to back a jerk and a liar because you think that FL decides the primary.
You’ll probably end up getting exactly what you don’t want. Once all the other candidates are knocked off and Trump blows up we’ll end up with Jeb!
Footnote:
http://www.DCwhispers.com had a post story about the GOP-E planning an all out attack on trump after labor day.
Today we have Jindal, Maria Bartelomo (of FBN), Fiorina, jbush all ganging up on attack mode.
This really defines the useful stooges of the insider class.
I concur. CW & others are pushing “hard” to comply with their GOPe mandated scree.
The funny thing is, the hard they try to trash Trump the higher he polls. Reminds me of a definition for insanity: doing the same thing over & over hoping for a different result. Peace :)
It was an honest worry.
You clearly care.
But you sometimes seem obsessed with Mr. Trump.
And you seem to be a Walker partisan.
Which is fine.
I lean towards Cruz myself, but I’m enjoying this primary because the elitist Washington power brokers are having daily conniptions.
All the best.
I see that you have now conveniently added “GOP-e” to your previous comment that I responded to.
So much for your credibility.
I will keep my integrity, thank you.
Insult away.
Trump would admire your technique.
that is the plan of the GOP-E.
Have multiple vote splitters for the “not jeb voters” so they can not firm up behind one “not jeb” candidate.
Jeb needed 17(!) splitters in order to make this work. Trump was NEVER supposed to succeed. Remember Bill Clinton is a good friend of HWBush. A primary alliance to have Trump persuaded to enter the race is SOP for DC insiders.
I told you exactly what i thought you chose to ignore what i said.
No matter how much Dump Trump propaganda you post it will not make Scott Walker President. Scott Walker could have been President if he had the guts to stand against k-street but he didn't.
You regurgitate that stuff onto the forum, and get huffy when someone calls you on it?
I can’t even respect the work you do for your candidate, the lengths you’ll go to in your attempt to lie about things everyone here is aware of.
Keep your integrity? I gain no pleasure from noting you haven’t had any for some time now.
How Alinksy of you.
Gov. Scott Walker is a rock solid conservative and he's done (to use a Trump word - but this time it fits) amazing job fighting and winning against Wisconsin's Left (and all their fellow liberals that flocked to try and overpower his actions).
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