This I could believe. From Clinton’s perspective, there’s no version of events where Trump in the race is harmful to her. Trump getting into the race is almost always a net benefit for her.
So yeah, that might have happened. But you can be sure that, if true, he doesn’t know about it. The idea that Donald Trump is putting time, money, and effort into any enterprise intended benefit someone other than Donald Trump is ludicrous.
I’m not endorsing the conspiracy theory, but I think there are a couple reasons why the Occam’s Razor test isn’t quite as straightforward as you say.
First, by all actual, available data, Trump seems to be a very successful businessman. Usually that requires detail-orientation, a good bullshit detector, and a very deep understanding of all policy details related to your business. He’s exhibiting none of these. For example, he shouldn’t fall for articles in The Enquirer. For another, I would expect Trump to be able to go very, very deep on interest rates, different types of debt instruments, maturities, etc. Yet he doesn’t.
Trump does, however, have experience playing a blowhard on TV for a decade-plus (The Apprentice.) It’s not unreasonable to resolve Trump-the-successful-businessman with Trump-the-public-figure-running-for-President by conceiving of the businessman Trump as the real Trump and the public figure as a persona he’s adopted after years of seeing how successful that persona is on The Apprentice.
Second, Trump-the-candidate’s positions make no sense given his experiences and role in the world. A hugely successful construction and real estate magnate is against low-wage immigrants? A worldly New Yorker wants to ban all Muslims? A successful user of debt thinks the federal government reneging on its debt is good policy? A billionaire is against free trade? It’s not that that’s impossible, but it seems unlikely. Where would these points-of-view come from? Maybe he’s faking it all by adopting a populist persona instead?
As I said, I’m not endorsing the conspiracy view. I really don’t know what to make of Trump. I have no idea what parts of his public persona are real and which aren’t. I hope I never find out.
I’m not one of those people who think Trump is a business fraud, but calling him a “very successful business man” might be stretching it. According to a well known Forbes article, he’d have about 3-4 times as much money right now if he’d just put his inheritance into index funds.
And because the Democratic party would have laughed him out of the room.
Remember he gained traction this cycle in the very beginning by trafficking in birther conspiracies and winking at the yahoos, on the right, that he was speaking their language. Without that he wouldn’t have become the small snowball that became the larger one that resulted in surprising poll results and voila.
Do Not Taunt: I agree with you, and I restate that there’s a difference between taking on a new demeanor, faking support for dumb policies, and even playing dumb yourself, and being enough of an actor to fool your campaign staff when you’re a deep-cover mole for the opposite party.
I also don’t think Trump’s policy flip-flops are acting. I think he might just be that malleable, because he isn’t interested in politics and wants to say what he thinks his support base wants him to say in order to get the applause. We think policy is important, but if Trump doesn’t and if Trump supporters don’t, that alone could explain a frankly incoherent platform.
For example, anyone who knows the debate surrounding abortion in this country knows that women who’ve had abortions are off-limits as far as punishment goes. People don’t even talk about it. Trump did, and he walked it back, which is rare for him. I think he just thought “abortion… my people think it’s bad… I gotta double down on that… get some headlines” and didn’t know or care enough to research the issue. When he saw that nobody was applauding, he acted all political and recanted. No deep strategy, just a dumb statement nobody even minimally aware of the issues would have made. He’s like a moderately more awake Carson.
I know we’ve discussed that article a few times. IIRC, it makes some invalid assumptions about the dates of his gift receipts and inheritances from his father, and fails to take into account Trump’s spending as well. Of course, we don’t know his current wealth with any certainty, so it’s hard to so anything on the topic without massive caveats.
If you start from the premises that Trump is seriously running to become President (as opposed to running for some sort of PR reason or agree with the Cracked conspiracy theory) and that Trump has business competency to level needed to become a billionaire real estate developer, then it’s really, really odd that he wouldn’t have experts briefing him on the ins and outs of a hot-button issue like abortion. I think that’s where the conspiracy really comes from - his statements on abortion (for example, and there are many examples) are really, really tough to reconcile with those premises. If you can’t reconcile them, then you conclude that the premises are in some way incorrect. And one way they could be incorrect is that Trump is not attempting to win, but that he is rather a deep cover mole doing a solid for the Clinton campaign.
I think the best that any outsider can really do to resolve the contradictions in the Trump campaign are to enumerate all the possible theories, no matter how crazy, and then attempt to assign various probabilities to them. To pretend that we know what’s really going on is just grossly overstating what we know. To me, one of the most terrifying aspects of a possible Trump presidency is that it’s basically impossible to have any solid expectation on a whole range of issues, even with very wide error bars.
…unless you take into account his solar system-sized ego and the quite likely possibility that he thinks he knows better than everyone else…about everything.
The problem is that this theory is contraindicated by his business success. If you always assume you’re right can’t absorb new data, you’re unlikely to be successful. This isn’t to say successful political leaders (such as Obama, for example) are modest; just that their egos push them towards, “I’m awesome in spite of not knowing/understanding x, so I’ll seek out an expert on x.” The Trump persona is more along the line of, “I’m awesome, therefore I’m already the foremost expert on x.”
Well most people who deny Trump is those things are blinded by willful ignorance of the facts. If he isn’t an thin-skinned egocentric narcissist he wouldn’t still be so bent about being called a “short fingered vulgarian” in the pages of Spy magazine that 25 years laterhe still sends the man who coined the phrase pictures with his hands circled and the phrase “See, not so short” written on the picture.
You need to reset this assumption.
Think of Trump as a terrific salesguy, one who reads the room really well. You can get far with that. Especially if you don’t have to climb the corporate ladder and never have.
But he isn’t an analyst. He hasn’t run a large organization in a meaningful sense: Trump HQ is fairly small. Folks who have worked with him say he’s brilliant in the 2 weeks leading up to a deal. Then he loses interest. He bought the Plaza Hotel with the idea of slicing it up into condos. But he couldn’t execute the plan. He handed refurbishment over to his wife and over the next couple of years the Plaza went into the red. That’s some grade A level poor management. He lost the Plaza to the banks when his businesses suffered massive failure during the 1990s. In the early 2000s an entirely new set of investors took over the Plaza and… successfully chopped it up into condos.
And that was one of his success stories. Sort of. Nothing like the Trump Airlines or Trump University or his failed Atlantic City casinos. Those were disasters, albeit in differing ways.
After the early 1990s, Trump left property development and emphasized branding. Most of the buildings with his name on it are owned by others. Branding is a good match for his skill set. Business management is not. He’s not a numbers guy and he isn’t a details guy.
Indeed, during the campaign he grasped that too much knowledge of policy details would interfere with his populist act. So he doesn’t worry about it. This has served him well the Republican base. It might not be sufficient for a broader audience.
I haven’t studied Trump’s business career in any sort of detail, so it’s within the realm of possibility for me that he’s less wealthy and successful than he lets on, more of that is due to his dad’s success than his own, and what contributions he’s made have been around sales and branding rather than solid, rigorous decision-making, but I’d be curious if you had a cite for your claims. In particular, if you had seen some sort of even-handed analysis of his business career, rather than an article or two where the author had a clear axe to grind.
Thanks in advance.
It appears that the information comes from this pretty lengthy piece in the New York Times. I consider it even handed, but I’ll leave it to you to decide for yourself.
And if you consider the New York Times to be a commie rag, then perhaps I can interest you in a National Review editorial which questions Trump’s business prowess, essentially asking if he is just another celebrity who makes money by virtue of being famous.
What is ultimately clear is this: Trump got his start in New York real estate because his father was a wealthy New York real estate developer. Trump purchased some lucrative properties, although not all succeeded. And when he expanded his reach into other areas (e.g. casinos, an airline, professional football) he tended to fail, although not every venture was unsuccessful (for example, his line of clothes or his book sales).
Like lots of rich people, he has used money to make money. But he has also risked and gambled his fortune and made some poor decisions. He is known to be litigious, and many banks will reportedly no longer work with him. He is not a business genius by any stretch of the imagination, nor is he self-made. Ultimately, his greatest business success in recent decades has been through self-promotion and “branding”.
I won’t read the Cracked article just yet because that leads me to reading everything they posted since the last time I got lost there. However, a conspiracy like what I’m hearing requires Trump’s involvement. Not needed. All Bubba needed to do is casually mention that Donny has a good head on his shoulders and would do well in politics (a “Don’t you think she looks tired?” moment). Don would take it from there and, wanting to upstage Bloomberg, go for the only job yuuuuger and more fabulous than Mayor of NYC.
This is about the extent of what I’d be willing to buy, but even this has one epicycle too many if you’re being strict: There’s no evidence Trump needed that push. He’s dallied with the idea repeatedly, attached himself to the Reform Party, and generally acted like an opportunistic infection. This year, the GOP was too weak to fight him off, and now the underlying syndrome has a defining disease.
I agree that all this is plausible. That’s what Occam’s Razor is good for: Helping you rank multiple plausible theories in order of likelihood, based on a simple heuristic. Occam’s Razor might be wrong sometimes. The more complex theory might be the most correct. But it isn’t the way to bet.
The cite is from a solid article in the Sunday New York Times business section. Recommended for those with an interest in business or management, though it’s a little long. I was working from memory, so if you see some quotes to balance out the narrative, feel free to post them.
I like the article because as I said it doesn’t touch upon one of his notorious investment errors. In fact, it displays some of his strengths.
Here is another Times’ piece about Trump’s broader influence in NY property development. “The major banks, for their part, say they are leery of lending to him after having lost millions of dollars on past deals. Lawyers and contractors he has hired in the past say he is slow to pay his bills, and often shortchanges them. Even the few Wall Street executives who say privately that he is a friend are loath to speak publicly about him.” Trump acknowledges that his NY imprint isn’t what it was, but says (reasonably and accurately) that he has branched out to other geographic areas.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/24/nyregion/donald-trump-nyc.html
FWIW, a friend of my parents was one of those contractors who found Trump slow to pay his bills.
There are too many ins and outs on too many hot button issues for a guy who doesn’t really study hard for a long time to master them all. You can get by with briefings from experts when you’re preparing your official policy statements (& executing policy - I don’t think Trump would be nearly as big of a disaster as President as he is as candidate). But if you’re going to get peppered with questions in interviews or debates which require on-the-spot responses, there’s no way some experts can prep you for them all.
I once read that Obama expressed skepticism that Sarah Palin would get up to speed quickly enough on national issues, based on the fact that he himself had spent years doing that. And Obama is a pretty smart guy and a guy who planned to run for president for years.
And when you consider that Trump is a big egotist, who is unlikely to think he needs to work hard to master anything, it’s not surprising that you get what we got.
My experience is that business leaders - and this especially goes for businessmen who own their own businesses, as opposed to the employed CEO types - are not particularly knowledgeable about things like economics, or in general, anything not directly related to what they’re doing.
I think you have it backwards.
He trafficked in birther theories because he was playing to a Republican audience, not the other way around. If he had thoughts about the Democratic nomination he would have picked a different conspiracy theory. In that case, the Republicans would have laughed him out of the room and the Democrats would have lapped it up.
What am I, chopped liver? 
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It appears that the information comes from this pretty lengthy piece in the New York Times. I consider it even handed, but I’ll leave it to you to decide for yourself.
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FWIW, a friend of my parents was one of those contractors who found Trump slow to pay his bills.
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I once had lunch with a group of airline mechanics, who were name dropping (when you work on multi-million dollar private jets, you tend to run across celebrities). When the subject of Trump came up, they said that his lawyers would dispute every bill, and arbitrarily remove line items from the invoice. This was before he was in the Presidential race, so it wasn’t a political axe they were grinding - Trump just really does have a reputation for being difficult to deal with.
I don’t like him, but I think the reality TV star, Trump is a much better actor than you would give him credit for. He could easily be a democrat mole. It wouldn’t take any studying of issues to say what he’s saying. It wouldn’t take any direction from some higher up on when to make outrageous statements to direct attention off of crooked hillary. He just needs to follow the news and use his brain. He’s a wrecking ball. When it’s looking bad for her, just make up some obscene position. I can’t even think of a position he’s had long term that he didn’t change his mind on except building a wall, McCain isn’t a hero because he was captured, and deporting all Mexicans and Muslims. And even that was opposite what he said just a few years ago. That my friends, does not make a well studied candidate. Nor does it a take a "good actor " to pull off.
It’s naïve to think it’s not possible, or even unlikely that trump is a mole. I’ve yet to hear anyone in this thread make a convincing argument that he’s not. He’s got an ego that would prevent him from doing it? His ego is what would make him do it in the first place. The billionaire business man isn’t smart or slick enough? “Never trust a man who owns his own plane”… or 747 in this instance.
If I’m ignorant, fight that shit! But occams razor isn’t going to do it.
Proving a negative is extremely difficult to do. It’s part of the insidiousness of the hatchet job Republicans have been doing on the Clintons for decades.
It’s equally as naïve to think it’s likely unless you have something approaching hard evidence, which you don’t. Ultimately, though, it’s on believers to prove it, otherwise it’s just a theory. Like flat earth and birthers.