Me and Trump

Have to say I was never much of a Trump fan.

I read his "Art of the Deal" book back in the day, and mostly I recall shaking my head and muttering "what an asshole" on pretty much every page. I was especially chagrined by his germ-phobia that prevented him from shaking hands with the commoners.

Looks like he's gotten over that.

But, what I took away from the book was that at the very end he went out of his way to pay respect to the union workers who build his shit. It was a step outside of the overall tone of his tome. He didn't have to do that, but he did.

By the time his next book came out, he was in the midst of bankruptcy proceedings of some sort. "Of some sort" is the key clause here, because after multiple bankruptcy proceedings it is apparently true that, as he claims, he has never filed for personal bankruptcy.

And why would he? Apparently his dear daddy Fred left a legacy of some 15,000 apartment units in NYC, and I've never seen any stories about them being sold off, so I assume they're still somewhere in Trumps portfolio. Given the nature of real estate inflation over the past forty years or so, that alone would make Trump a multi-billionaire, no matter what he did or did not achieve on his own account.

Those bankruptcy proceedings were hugely entertaining. I remember reading shit about how he needs to keep his yacht because it was a platform for hosting fundraisers for charitable organisations. As I recall, the courts let him keep it.

When I was at Frankel we fabbed up the steel for a new Trump casino in Atlantic City. We were a well paid union shop and as far as I know everybody got paid. The Trump casino initiatives eventually went tits up, but not before Trump won huge on them.

But that's the capitalist way, is it not? Move in fast, make your money, let the taxpayer clean up your mess. That happens everywhere all the time. You can't blame Trump for inventing predatory capitalism. And where is capitalism not predatory?

When Trump announced his candidacy for a 2016 White House run I initially thought Mountain Dew Comacho. Yup, Trump is gonna give real-world cred to the film Idiocracy. It's not sci-fi anymore; it's a documentary.

Then he trashed the non-fiction GOP candidates in the primaries, and suddenly I had a new view of Donald J Trump.

Hey! This guy could actually bring down America's rancid, rotten, self-dealing political establishment!

And he could.

That's why the entire right wing of the GOP and the entire PNAC crowd have been deserting the GOP and aligning behind Hillary.

And that's why, if you're against perpetual war, if you're against universal "free trade," if you're against more of the same old same old, you need to take a chance on Donald Trump in November.