Not quite
Wiki, natch.
To be fair, someone who agrees with you on one or two points, even a huckster like Trump, is going to look better than someone you totally disagree with.
Then again, when the US sneezes, Canada catches a cold. Not that I’m picking on Canada. Fantastic country. Great people. The best. Nothing like the Chinese - who are really smart by the way. Jobs. China. I mean I’ve made so much money fighting against the Chinese. One of the best deals I ever did was against the Chinese, and they respect me for it. And I know them. And they say, we can’t believe what we’re getting away with. We can’t believe how stupid your leaders are. They tell me that. Now they don’t know I’m going to go and make a speech about it, but why not. But they tell me that.
And by the way, especially for the folks here that sell so much–goods, I mean the goods you sell are incredible; I don’t know if you’ve been watching what’s happening with the devaluations of so many countries. The Euro, China is going crazy with the devaluation. I never thought that they’d have the guts to do what they’re doing. They are devaluing down to nothing. And what it’s going to do is make it impossible for you to sell your product; it’s going make it impossible for you to compete. And they’re getting away with it. And they wouldn’t have even done it two years ago, but now they feel we’re so weak and we have so many different problems all over the world that they can do it. But you watch this devaluation of all of it. I mean the Euro, China, Mexico; everybody is devaluing. And when you hear the dollar is getting stronger, it sounds good. You know it’s one of those things, sounds good. Be very careful. Be very careful. Because we’re just going to lose more and more business to these foreign countries that really know what they are doing. They have it set. Don’t forget another thing. China became the number one economic power a year ago. That was unthinkable; to think that that was going to happen. It was absolutely unthinkable. So it happened and it’s very, very sad.
Recall that the right wing’s fury at Hillary abated when she was Secretary of State. This is pure tribalism at work, as well as authoritarian nationalism. If policy played a big role, they wouldn’t have nominated Romney and Trump back to back.
Persuasion is a continuing mystery. That Colin Powell had a private email address won’t matter, just as the back to back debunking of Benghazi conspiracy theories didn’t matter.
My current take - and I’m not happy with it - is to respond Leaper’s sister thusly, “Then vote for Gary Johnson.”
Frankly, I’d like to know what she thinks Hillary is going to do exactly.
This is terrifying and IMO symptomatic of a clinical condition of some kind. Whether it’s hypomanic personality or adult ADD, something is wrong there. As a perfect example witness his so called introduction speech for Pence at the RNC convention.
There’s a mentally ill man who regularly stands on a corner in my city and rants at passers by. There are probably one or two points on which I agree with what he says concerning religion for example.
I’d still rather that a basically competent person who is my political opposite be the leader of my country than that madman on the corner.
I’m not sure if I fully believe that part. Penn Jillette (who is no fan of Trump’s politics) said that on The Apprentice those boardroom scenes that had 10 minutes of footage shown were sometimes 4 hours long. Trump is capable of concentrating he just probably doesn’t do it often. That’s as close to a positive you will get from me about him.
Sure, but they were all about Trump, which fits the ghost’s thesis: that he can’t concentrate on anything but himself.
“Thinking of,” yeah, maybe still could be saved. "Already decided"s will shrug it off as a sour grapes hit piece from a butthurt libtard.
Who knows? It could be. I mean, it does fully reinforce my assumptions about Trump all along, that he’s not just a self-aggrandizing blowhard who exaggerates when it suits him, but an utter fraud from top to bottom, that the mythos of Trump as a savvy negotiator and enfant terrible who made his fortune by dint of his own genius is nothing but vapor, that even those who don’t think he’s Presidential material but nonetheless admire his accomplishments and entrepreneurship have been bamboozled into believing decades of barefaced lies from a man who for all intents and purposes doesn’t exist, but who’s to say?
By design, the boardroom bits involved judging the contestants.
Trump is a horrible human being but the idea that he’s some sort of mentally deficient hummingbird is difficult to take literally. He IS good at what he does, which is scamming people. But even scamming people takes effort, concentration, memory, and attention to some detail. However nasty his personality, he would not be *at all *successful if he was actually incapable of concentrating on something for more than five or ten minutes. If it were literally true he wouldn’t have ever gotten any deals done; someone else would have beaten him to it. He would have gone completely broke and exhausted his father’s ability to bail him out by 1980.
A much more realistic scenario is a synergy of Schwartz’s observations and the logistical necessities of running the Trump brand; Trump has no attention span to anything that doesn’t benefit him. Trump can pay attention, but whereas a normal person feels the need to pay appropriate attention to other people on the basis of established social norms and common decency, Trump, being a sociopath, acts only in the pursuit of profit, to an extent that you won’t even see in characters in a movie about greed like “Wall Street.” Of course he didn’t give a crap about Schwartz, why would he? Schwartz had no money for Trump to take, and therefore didn’t matter. That would also explain why Trump does not read books; reading books doesn’t result in profit. Family? Friends? Unprofitable. Sad!
Where Trump would have expended his efforts of concentration are areas Schwartz, even with allegedly extensive access, would have not necessarily seen and might have been blind to; examination of finances, investigation of opportunities, digging into potential suckers, er, business partners, and the like.
That article certainly is an interesting read:
Bolding mine. I guess we don’t have any corroborative sources for the above. But if it’s true, that’s some nerve Trump has. If Trump gets elected, I wonder if he’ll try to pass the cost of his campaign onto the voters. Not that he could get away with it, but maybe he’ll try anyway.
Nah, he’ll just stiff all of the suppliers. I said some time ago, that anyone supplying ANYthing to the RNC should be very wary. Speechwrighters, signmakers, venues, catering, security… and on and on. All are in danger of being offered pennies on the dollar after the convention, or face the prospect of being bad-mouthed by The Donald. It’s how his business functions.
Any supplier who expects any other outcome is a fool.
The Republican National Convention is run by the Republican Party, and its expenses paid for by the Republican Party, not Donald Trump. Reince Priebus is the de facto boss of the GOP. The party is good to pay its bills.
Trump’s CAMPAIGN, or Trump himself, I wouldn’t trust to sell a sandwich to.
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Schwartz ended up following Trump around because the weekly interviews didn’t work out. Trump loved the attention. If there was evidence that Trump was not ADD, Schwartz would have come across it first hand. Recall that he was trying to write a puff piece and intentionally excluded unflattering aspects of Trump’s career.
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Trump made a lot of bad deals. His casinos were unprofitable when his competitors were doing well. He does have a skill set. He can read a room exceptionally well. He can also read what people want. He is unconstrained by truth, so he can promise them their desires. But I can’t find any evidence of analytic ability on his part.
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He’s actually not such a great negotiator, as traditionally conceived. He routinely over-payed for properties. Then he would renege on agreements and take people to court. That’s not the sign of a good negotiator. In the end banks and suppliers wouldn’t do business in him except in arms length transactions such as branding. h/t Kevin Drum
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And Daddy bailed him out several times.
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ETA: If you’re dealing with someone with ADD who can’t stay focused, yeah, it would take 4 hours to get the 10 minutes of material. But then again, I suspect such ratios are routine in reality show land. I don’t see this as evidence of anything frankly.
The article is long and I understand why folks won’t want to read it all. So here are some good summaries:
As is often the case, Kevin Drum does the best job IMHO: Tony Schwartz Tells Us What It’s Like to Spend 18 Months With Donald Trump – Mother Jones
James Fallows agrees that the ADD part is the takeaway: Trump Time Capsule #43: The Sociopath - The Atlantic
People with attention problems can do a four-hour boardroom meeting. They just jump from one topic to another. They may even think this is them being in control and keeping subordinates on their toes.
I see the problem when I try to deal with accounting issues for some ADD-style business people. I’m halfway into a discussion of the advantages of S corporation status over partnership and they suddenly say “What if I lease a car? Is that better than buying one?” I get halfway into that comparison - which depends on whether we’re an S corporation or a partnership! - and they’re like “OK, that’s fine. Now tell me about…” So, yeah, we had a two-hour meeting, but did we actually finish any discussion on any issue? Were any decisions made? Did anyone learn anything? No, because we’ll cover the same three dozen questions the next time I meet with them. :smack:
And the letter threatening the ghostwriter with a defamation lawsuit has duly arrived from Trump Tower:
Mr Trump apparently can still find time in his busy schedule to threaten litigation. He will find, however, that his ghostwriter now has much stronger First Amendment protections, precisely because Trump is nominee for President.
I was just coming here to post that. Typical, isn’t it? Trump is, as Jon Stewart put it, a man-child, an immature sociopathic oddity who absolutely cannot abide criticism. How this guy is now running for president is unfathomable.
Anyway, Tony Schwartz was on the first of the two Bill Maher convention specials this week. He’s a very animated guy and sounds very sincere and passionate. I think he’s genuinely remorseful for having propelled Trump into the public eye and genuinely worried that Trump is a danger, and he cites Trump’s pathological need to always fight back as an example of that very danger. Meanwhile, on Friday’s main show, Ana Marie Cox said more or less the same, that there is a finite, non-zero chance that as president Trump will do something completely and disastrously crazy. A Trump presidency (my own words here) invites particularly serious scrutiny of the checks and balances in the military chain of command against following the orders of a lunatic. How the hell can anyone vote for this idiot?
Sorry if this isn’t the right thread, but Rachel Maddow looks into another case of Trump’s ghosting: The Trump Institute. Much of the Trump Inst.'s study material was copied from magazines. The Institute itself was run by a couple who had been prosecuted for previous “seminar” scams.
It’s too late for regrets. This guy has helped create a persona that will only be erased for large segments of the population when they actually are on the receiving end of one of his great deals.
Americans voted for George W Bush at the end of two terms of relative prosperity under a democratic president. Gore was smart and all, but maybe too dad gum smart. Enter George W Bush, who was billed as the Bush who knew how to think and act like a businessman. Graduated Harvard MBA, so he had the same Ivy League credentials, yet sounded not particularly intellectual and hamstrung like his wonky Ivory Tower dad or his opponent. Even after he had obviously gotten the country into a fine mess in Iraq, the country’s heartland still opted for the neighborly, folksy guy over the geeky New Englander. It was only in 2008, when Americans themselves finally had to live in the shit that George W Bush’s administration (and his party) had created for everyone that Americans thought, “Hmmm, this guy has a funny name but he kinda sounds like he knows about foreign countries, economics, and stuff.”
Unfortunately, despite the fact that we’re much, much better off than we were 8 years ago, I have a bad feeling that this could be like 2000 all over again. Obama has been a decent president, but a lot of people aren’t convinced of that. We’re already 8 years into Obama and most people would see Hillary Clinton as a third Obama term. A lot of people inclined to support someone other than Hillary probably now ask themselves “Is this as good as it gets?” which is actually a rational question.
I get the feeling that in addition to feeling a bit let down by Obama’s promises of change (much of which was caused by absentee voters in 2010 and 2014), I sense that many American voters are falling into a timeless trap: they’re bored and want someone new and different. More than that, in 2016, they want someone who promises to shock the system. Enter Donald Trump. He’s definitely a departure from the old and he promises to shock the system. And unlike 2008, voters, despite their anxieties, probably feel like they can afford to take a chance on a novelty:
“What damage could someone like Donald Trump possibly cause?”
“Congress can stop him.”
“The Courts can stop him.”
“We can vote him out in 4 years if we don’t like him.”
People are not impressed with what Hillary knows. They’re not afraid of what Donald Trump doesn’t know. The people who will vote against Donald Trump the hardest will be those who feel threatened in some way by Donald Trump. White voters don’t feel threatened by the presence of Donald Trump. Conservatives certainly don’t feel threatened by Trump. But what’s worrisome is that those who are much less inclined to support the far right, starting with independents but also including some of the Bernie or Bust voters who say they’re going to vote for Jill Stein, don’t feel threatened by his existence either – and that’s the scary part. Those who don’t feel threatened by Trump, those who already have jobs in IT or as graphic designers or whatever else, won’t change their minds until his economic policies result in the loss of 800,000 jobs per month and their careers and economic futures become an endangered species.
It’s too late then.
Not since Richard Nixon has someone exercised such authoritarian tendencies – and Trump seems worse.