|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
Posted on 02/18/2016 6:00:37 PM PST by SoConPubbie
Even if he loses at the polls, Trump will call it a win. It's what he's always done.
In a boardroom on the 26th floor of Trump Tower, in a meeting in the late 1980s in the offices of the Trump Organization, one of Donald Trump's deputies had had it. Blanche Sprague earlier in the day had learned of the death of a friend in a car wreck, and Trump was berating one of the people seated at the conference table, and so Sprague angrily stood up. "It just became too much," she said the other day on the phone from New York, "and I said, 'I can't take it anymore,' and I just walked out."
She regretted it immediately, thinking surely Trump would fire her. Then her phone rang. It was him. She told him she wanted to write letters of apology to the 20 or so people at the meeting.
Don't, Trump said.
"He said, 'No, that would hurt you, possibly change you-I don't want you to do it,'" Sprague said. "He didn't want to put me in a position of having to be weakened by my mistake."
Over these last 40 lime-lighted years, Trump has won a lot, but he has lost a lot, too-four corporate bankruptcies, two failed marriages and a vast array of money-squandering business ventures. He lost his signature Trump Shuttle airline to his lenders. His self-branded casinos in Atlantic City struggled consistently to turn profits. In each case, though, he has heeded a form of the advice he gave that day to Sprague: Never acknowledge failure. Never admit defeat.
On Monday, after months of denouncing rivals and critics as "losers," the man who has promised "so much winning" America "will get bored with winning" and who has broken every conventional campaign rule on his improbable rise to the top of the GOP field will face his first real electoral test. Finally, there will be quantifiable results. Though the latest polls suggest otherwise, Trump might lose. And if it doesn't happen in Iowa, maybe it will in New Hampshire, or South Carolina, or Nevada, or in any of the many primaries to come over the next frenzied few months. And if that happens?
He will deny and distort and belittle his critics and change the subject.
He will say that he won.
He always has.
"He's probably the greatest self-promoter and self-spinmeister that's ever lived," said Harry Hurt III, the author of Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump. "By claiming victory over and over again, it starts to become a self-fulfilling prophecy."
"He's been able to create his own reality," said Wayne Barrett, the author of Trump: The Deals and the Downfall.
"It's admirable in a way, how he defines himself as succeeding where others see failure," said Michael D'Antonio, the author of Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success. "It's a remarkable performance, and one he's been giving all his life."
***
"Man is the most vicious of all animals," Trump told People in 1981, "and life is a series of battles ending in victory or defeat."
Two years after he said that, he bought the New Jersey Generals of the second-rate United States Football League. It got him in Sports Illustrated and on the back page of the New York City tabloids, adding considerably to his fledgling celebrity. Eager to challenge the National Football League, he wanted the USFL to shift its schedule from the spring to the fall. Most of his fellow owners didn't want that. TV networks weren't interested in putting the USFL up against the better quality NFL. Trump sued the NFL and its commissioner, saying the NFL was a monopoly, seeking more than $1 billion in damages. Jurors ruled that the NFL essentially was a monopoly but that the USFL was the cause of its own problems. The NFL was ordered to write a check to the USFL … for $3.76. USFL owners had lost more than $150 million. Trump had lost $22 million. The USFL folded in 1986. Many people blamed Trump.
Trump?
"The sports business is a lousy business," he told Playboy.
Years later, in an interview with the Buffalo News, he drastically underplayed his role in the decisions that led to the USFL's demise. "That wasn't a Trump thing," he said.
In the late '80s, he went on a shopping jag, overpaying for properties with hundreds of millions of dollars borrowed from banks.
He bought for $29-million a 282-foot yacht, which could sleep 52 staff and came with gold doorknobs and a sundeck protected by bulletproof glass. He used it primarily as a trophy. "I'm not even interested in boats," he told the Chicago Tribune.
He took out a $425 million loan, personally guaranteeing $125 million of it, to buy the Plaza hotel in Manhattan for $407.5 million-the most money ever paid for a hotel-without even doing a careful inspection, according to Gwenda Blair in her book The Trumps. He bought the space for a full-page open letter in the New York Times. "For the first time in my life, I have knowingly made a deal that was not economic-for I can never justify the price I paid, no matter how successful the Plaza becomes." He said he had purchased "a masterpiece-the Mona Lisa."
He took out a $400 million loan, personally guaranteeing $100 million of that, to buy the Eastern Air Shuttle for $365 million-even though the company itself had just valued the shuttle at $300 million. Talking to reporters, he compared this, too, to the Mona Lisa. He wanted to decorate the insides of the planes with marble before being told that would make them too heavy to fly.
In 1990, he opened his third casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey-the Trump Taj Mahal joined the Trump Plaza and the Trump Castle-and the launch was chaotic, with underprepared, overburdened staff and malfunctioning slot machines. Trump went on CNN and told Larry King his casino was doing so poorly because his casino was doing so well. The machines, he suggested, simply couldn't keep up with the demand.
"It would be, like, too much use?" King asked.
"They were virtually on fire," Trump answered.
But soon it was clear: Trump was more than $3 billion in debt, $900 million of which he had personally guaranteed, and his casinos were struggling, in a city that was struggling, in an economy that was struggling. Trump blamed it on the recession. He blamed it on the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein, "that madman." He blamed his employees. In the New York Times, he denigrated the president of one of his casinos, calling him "a Type C personality," and he said he also was "upset with the people running the Trump Shuttle." He said the press was "dishonest." He said people were "jealous."
Trump's marriage was crumbling, too, due in part to his infidelity-this was the first of his divorces-but he saw it at least as a publicity victory because the high-profile unraveling made him and his name fixtures on the fronts of well-read tabloids.
"This is great for business," Trump told John O'Donnell, a president of one of his casinos-not the one with the "Type C personality"-according to a book he wrote later called Trumped! "The way this works is, this'll bring all the men in," O'Donnell said Trump told him. "They're going to want to be with Trump."
O'Donnell wrote the book after he quit working for Trump. In it, he portrayed Trump as an intemperate, incompetent, self-centered racist. O'Donnell, Trump said, was "a fucking loser."
In late 1990, in Palm Beach, Florida, banks forced him to hold an auction to get rid of empty, unsold condos in a building of his. Embarrassing? "You know what I think?" he said. "I think there's something very sophisticated and intelligent about auctions."
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
This is it! Trump’s poll numbers will tank now, I tell ya!
Doesn’t this need the (barf) tag?
Trump is imperfect, not like the rest of us lol.
Trump “wins” when he destroys conservatism, backstrack on everything but the universal healthcare and planned parenthood, and switches back to being a democrat.
If he is such an idiot how is it that he has not lost everything for good and now hopelessly in debt? I don’t get it Vern?
I think that the story put him in a positive light. He didn’t fire her or berate her. He supported her and mentored her.
He knows when to rip someone apart and when to take a gentler approach.
That’s the mark of a good leader.
Waaaaaaah. Delicious tears.
GO BERNIE! That's the way you do it. Get your money for nothin' get your chicks for free.
People who I know that are successful and harvest no envy refer to that kind of man as a champion winner.
Those who cannot compete ridicule and on the other side of their mouths pretend to espouse how great America is that would allow you to accomplish such a feat...unless of course it isn't someone they happen to like
By posting Politico garbage like this , you do realize that in the almost impossible scenario that Cruz does win , this won’t help in getting support from the Trump Army ? Or do you not care ?
And in unison, all the Crewzers went...
Still blowing smoke out yer azz, eh?
Still clinging on the "one" proven "conservative" that isn't gonna do the Lucy - Charlie Brown football prank eh?
Look up Einstein, he had a definition for that...
Because he’s a sue-happy bully.
We got to move them microwave ovens!
Since Donald Trump threw his hat in the ring, every political pundit has suddenly been blessed with a PhD in psychology.
He sold and used drugs, and went to college, but we don't know who paid for it or what his grades were, and he most likely was given foreign student aid. He never registered for the draft and had someone forge his Selective Service file. He illegally used the Social Security number of a man who was born in 1890 and died in Connecticut. He traveled to Pakistan on an Indonesian passport and lived with a Muslim “roommate.” He conned his way into and through Harvard law, and somehow had his law license revoked after entering the workforce. He became a political agitator, and falsely claimed he was a full University professor when he only taught an extension school course as an add on. He wormed his way into Illinois state office, and won a US Senate seat only because his political thugs illegally unsealed the tawdry divorce details of his chief rival, who was married to a TV star. He attended a racist “church” for 20 years, where homosexuality was a mainstay and where two homosexual men on staff were found murdered after they threatened to disclose their sexual past with him. He illegally accepted foreign contributions during his first Presidential campaign. And that is just for starters.
“Trump’s marriage was crumbling, too, due in part to his infidelity-this was the first of his divorces ...”
He betrays his loved ones. Literally screws around on them. He will do the same to the electorate.
He is faithless with those closest to him. We expect the adulterer to treat us any better?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
