Fissures have appeared in the Dumbo Furzkreig with the Governor of Ohio and the junior US Senator from Florida waffling on their pledge to support the Dumbo presidential nominee, even it's an idiot with a bad combover. Der Blödmann has been running — and not running — for POTUS since 1987 and 2016 is no exception. The Dumbo frontrunner has been aided and abetted by criminally inaccurate polls and Twitter. It is no coincidence that Der Blödmann flirted with the Reform party in 1988 after meeting the most successful Reform party candidate — Jesse (The Body) Ventura, a former professional wrestler and later Governor of Minnesota — at Wrestlemania IV in Atlantic City, NJ. The current campaign by the Dumbo frontrunner shows the influence of Vince McMahon's Wrestlemania events (1985-2016). Wrestlemania IV was held at Trump Plaza. If this is a (fair & balanced) description of a nightmare, so be it.
[x New Yorker]
Crying Trump
By The Jillster (Jill Lepore)
Tag Cloud of the following piece of writing
To be fair, it’s not hard to understand why it took the G.O.P. and much of the press so long, too long, to take Donald Trump’s candidacy seriously. Many times before, he flirted with running, and, each time, he quit. His bids were stunts. Still, he learned something from those stunts, and the distance between his earlier bids and this one suggests that, while much in American politics has changed, Trump has not.
“A Trump Presidential Bid?” the New York Times wondered, in July of 1987. At the time, Trump was forty-one, and “believed to be a Republican,” according to Abe Hirschfeld, a Florida businessman who led the effort to draft him into the race in which George H. W. Bush, as Reagan’s Vice-President, was the presumptive G.O.P. nominee. “There is absolutely no plan to run for mayor, governor, or United States senator,” a Trump spokesman said, coyly. “He will not comment about the Presidency.” Meanwhile, Trump had taken out a full-page ad in the Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe, ahead of the New Hampshire primary. “There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Policy that a little backbone can’t cure,” the headline read, above a letter in which Trump complained that Americans were being ripped off by foreign powers.
The real-estate magnate, as the Times delicately noted at the time, had “no particular background in foreign policy.” All things considered, that was a generous, if not entirely accurate, assessment. Three years before, Trump had offered his services as the United States’ chief negotiator with the Soviet Union on nuclear disarmament. “Some people have an ability to negotiate,” Trump told the Washington Post, in 1984. “It’s an art you’re basically born with. You either have it, or you don’t.” Did it matter that he didn’t know anything about nuclear warheads or the capacities of missiles? No, because he could learn so fast you wouldn’t believe it. “It would take an hour-and-a-half to learn everything there is to learn about missiles,” he said. “I think I know most of it anyway.”
Trump never did become a negotiator during the nuclear-arms-limitation talks under the Reagan Administration. But in October, 1987, eyeing the election of 1988, he went so far as to give a stump speech before the Rotary Club of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. He arrived by helicopter and was greeted by “Trump for President” placards. “He’s very exciting,” Judy Taylor, the wife of a former club president, said. “Money is power and power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” “I’m not here because I’m running for President,” Trump said. “I’m here because I’m tired of our country being kicked around.” He promised to eliminate the budget deficit. He had a plan. He said he’d make countries like Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait pay it off: “There is a way you can ask them and they will give it, if you have the right person asking.”
The next month, Jim Wright, the Democratic Speaker of the House, asked Trump to serve as the host of the Democratic congressional dinner. Trump declined the invitation but, courted and flattered by Democrats, he put off his (presumptively Republican) Presidential bid, having sold a great many copies of the book he published that year, The Art of the Deal (1987).
Twelve years later, in 1999, Trump, fifty-three, was about to publish a new book, The America We Deserve (2000). That summer, rumors began to spread about a possible Trump candidacy. “Mr. Trump is trying to determine whether there is a place in American political life for a rogue,” Adam Nagourney reported slyly, in the Times.
“The polls have been unbelievable,” Trump said, citing his lead in a poll conducted by the National Enquirer. (The Enquirer polled a hundred people.) Vice-President Al Gore was the presumptive Democratic nominee; the Republican nomination was wide open, after Bill Clinton’s two terms, although the second George Bush drew well ahead of the pack early on. Then as now, Trump liked some polls but hated others. A CNN-Time poll gave Trump seven per cent of the vote in a race against against either Bush or Gore. Trump was unfazed. He told Larry King he wanted Oprah for his running mate, though he hadn’t mentioned this to her. “The only thing that could interest me is if I could win,” Trump said. “I’m not talking about the nomination. I’m talking about the whole megillah.”
Trump learned that his best shot was to run as a populist. He said, “I think the kind of people who support me are the workers, the construction workers, the taxicab driver. Rich people don’t like me.” Readers of the Enquirer, Trump said, were his natural followers. “Those are the real people,” he said. “That is the Trump constituency.”
He damned the Republicans. “The Republican Party has just moved too far to the extreme right,” he said. He reserved his greatest ire for Pat Buchanan. “He’s a Hitler lover,” Trump said, on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “He doesn’t like the blacks; he doesn’t like the gays.” Citing parties he’d been invited to by Puff Daddy, Trump said, “I am just very popular with the black populace.”
He looked, instead, to the Reform Party, founded by Ross Perot, in 1995, and headed, in 1999, by Jesse Ventura, who’d met Trump in 1988, at Wrestlemania IV, in Atlantic City. In the summer of 1999, Trump supporters launched a Web site, www.thedonald2000.org [now dark], to raise money for the Reform Party. That fall, Trump officially abandoned the Republican Party and registered to vote as a member of the Reform Party. The themes of the Donald 2000 campaign were more or less the same as the themes of this year’s Make America Great Again juggernaut. His new plan to eliminate the deficit was to make the rich pay for it. He proposed raising $5.7 trillion by levying a one-time 14.25-per-cent tax on the net worth of people and trusts worth ten million dollars or more. As for the rest of his economic plan, he had this to say: “All different taxes across the board. That would be determined and worked out.” His foreign-policy plans included insulting France (“a terrible partner”), Germany (“they failed militarily”), Japan (“ripping us big-league”), and Saudi Arabia (“I mean, the money they make”). He said that, as President, he would serve as the U.S. trade representative. “Our trading partners would have to negotiate across the table with Donald Trump,” he said on Fox News, “and I guarantee you, the rip-off of the United States would end.” He said, “I do a deal a minute.”
His relationship with women came up. “I love women,” he said. He also said that he’d have had more respect for Bill Clinton if he’d had sex with a supermodel instead of Monica Lewinsky. Often referred to by reporters in the eighties as a “hustler,” Trump had become, by the end of the nineties, “a twice-divorced, doll-chasing socialite.” His ex-wife Marla Maples warned that, should Trump run, she would tell all: “I will feel it is my duty as an American citizen to tell the American people what he is really like.” Trump was untroubled. Maureen Dowd interviewed him [in 1999] on the Trump plane. (“We could save money on Air Force One,” he said.) “I think the only difference between me and the other candidates,” he told her, “is that I’m more honest and my women are more beautiful.” Still, by November, it was clear that Trump had failed to gain much traction.
A lot of Trump’s momentum this time around has been fuelled by the public-opinion polling industry and by a communications revolution. This election season, there are more polls, and earlier polls, and they are both less reliable than ever before and more influential; meanwhile, Trump has been doing with Twitter what he could not do with a URL. In 1999, he couldn’t override the opinions of the political establishment; he couldn’t shout it down. Without a direct link to his audience, he couldn’t even effectively counter his critics. “I think he’s mainly selling books,” Dick Morris said. “You can’t think out loud in politics without consequences, and he likes to think out loud,” Ed Rollins said. “The whole thing is fraudulent,” Ed Koch, the former New York mayor, said. “He’s the greatest con artist in the world.”
He began to tank. For Thanksgiving, the syndicated columnist Mark Shields wrote a column listing everything he was thankful for. The list included Trump’s plummeting poll numbers. “The only thing standing between Donald Trump and the presidency is the good judgment of the American people,” Shields wrote. Happy Thanksgiving!
Much has changed since Trump’s early Presidential bids. Polls have run amok, becoming as tabloid as the Enquirer. A new populism has emerged, fuelled not only by political conviction but also by new forms of political communication. The party system is in disarray. And, not least, the Republican Party has moved even further to the right. Past and present Party leaders like Mitt Romney and John McCain have tried to distance themselves from Trump, and even to stop him, by charging him with being inconsistent. But nearly the only thing different about Trump in 2016 is that, this time, he’s winning.
Four Presidential elections ago, he fell fast. “Trump’s Seriousness Comes into Question,” one headline read by the middle of December. By early January, 2000, www.thedonald2000.org was for sale. Later that month, Citizen Trump watched theGOP debate. “Are these people stiffs, or what?” he asked the Times. He was unimpressed with the Republican field. “They’re losers,” he said. “Who the hell wants to have a person like this for president?” Ω
[Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University as well as the chair of the History and Literature Program. She also is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her latest books are The Story of America: Essays on Origins (2012), Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin (2013). and The Secret History of Wonder Woman (2014). Lepore earned her BA (English) from Tufts University, an MA (American culture) from the University of Michigan, and a PhD (American studies) from Yale University.]
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