As a business genius, Donald Trump is, like Conrad Black or Edgar Bronfman Jr., one of those guys whose net worth would be substantially higher today had he just stuck his inheritance into blue chips and left it alone. But no, some guys have to take over the world.
It's an ego thing.
The opinion makers at Canada's newspaper of record are treating me to endless denunciations of Donald Trump's ego today. Yup, it's pretty much wall-to-wall Drumpfobia. Margaret Wente has done passed out at the possibility of President Trump and needs you to pass the smelling salts. Doug Saunders posits Trump outside "acceptable society and basic morality." Tabatha Southey sees Nazis.
Acceptable society and basic morality are of course what guides the civilized political establishment in Washington. Those are the responsible adults who have presided over the destruction of America's middle class. Where was the outrage when the supreme court hammered the last nail into the coffin of American democracy with the Citizens United decision?
Where was the horrified hyperventilating when the Koch boys announced they planned to spend 900 millions meddling in the 2016 election?
Saunders says the Trump phenomenon was predicted in a 2009 book.
It was also predicted in a 2006 movie.
The think tank here at Falling Downs doesn't necessarily see the rise of Trump as a bad thing. Sure the guy's a loudmouth and an egomaniac, but you'd have to be to get noticed in an election process that's pretty much become the plaything of the plutocrats.
And the fact that he's getting noticed tells me American democracy is not quite dead yet. There's a great big swath of middle America that's sick to death of shitty health care, homeless veterans, ninety-million working age citizens excluded from the workforce, serial wars on random Muslim countries, and the manifold further outrages foisted on them by their political establishment.
When Leonard Cohen promised "democracy is coming to the USA" he couldn't have imagined Donald Trump would be bringing it, and Wente is right; it won't be pretty.
But it's long overdue.
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