Imagine an alternate history where Donald Trump finds out on his 18th birthday that his father so totally screwed up the family business that he doesn’t have a single penny to his name. Thus he doesn’t inherit anything, and has to pull himself up by own bootstraps.
What would Donald Trump be doing today? I contend there’s no chance at all he’d be President. Neither would be holding any public office. He’d be working some relatively menial job, like Used Car Salesman.
I hate Trump with a passion. But the man does have a talent for making money (albeit, in the most sleaziest of ways).
18 is old enough for him to have made some very powerful and influential friends.
My guess would be, not the President, but better than a salesman, and way richer than pretty much anybody on this board.
Oh please. He’d be a caddy at some golf course, living on tips. Not Mar-a-Lago. Probably bumping up his income by procuring women for his clients.
I’ve seen no evidence that he has a talent for making money. He’s not a talented, smart, innovative entrepreneur. He’s a wheeler-dealer. Without starter wheels, he wouldn’t have been able to deal. Without money at 18, he wouldn’t HAVE any friends, influential or otherwise. Even with money, he admits he has no friends to this day.
He might be a car salesman. Not the owner of the dealership, though, unless he married the daughter of the owner.
He’d be that guy at the end of the bar - a Cliff Claven.
Waxing that car for George McFly.
Used car salesman.
“I’d like to talk with you about Amway.”
[DEL]Pyramid scheme[/DEL] Multi-level Marketing would seem tailor-made for him.
In prison for some sort of investment fraud.
Probably in jail for swindling some people and doing a horribly bad job at covering his tracks.
This is my guess. Or whacked by the mafia after a failed attempt to become a “wise guy.”
Belay that. You know the used car salesman in True Lies? That’s Trump.
OTOH he wouldn’t have been able to get out of military service, would he? I would like to hope that that would have changed him for the better.
He would be Ron.
Would Trump have the same personality if he hadn’t been born with a silver spoon in his mouth? I doubt it. I think he’d probably be less narcissistic, less crass, and maybe a less of a bully. Still a jerk, but not as much as one.
I can imagine him being a used car salesman. Or maybe one of those guys who worked as a factory foreman before retiring to Florida with a nice pension at the age of 60. It makes me feel good to think he’d be living in the gutter somewhere, but life is rarely that pat. There are plenty of mediocre jerks of modest means who end up doing okay. And remember that Boomers (especially white males) in general lucked into a lot of good stuff. I have no reason to think that Trump wouldn’t have either.
or maybe dead in "Nam
”A flying Delorean…What the hell is going on here?”
Stranger
My first thought was car salesman. Or maybe over-priced home improvements getting leads from ValPac coupons.
I recently watched Death of a Salesman and realized the salesman guy is not completely unlike a poor version of Trump.
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Fragged by his own troops.
Admit it, the parallels to Niedermayer are uncanny.
Trump’s main talent seems to be salesmanship. He has the ability to convince other people to give him money (or votes). That’s certainly a marketable skill and plenty of people have made a good living off of it.
Trump’s main problem is his lack of responsibility. He’s always ignored the consequences of things he’s said or done and he’s been able to get away with it because of his wealth. If he acted that way as an employee, he’d inevitably get called out for it and fired; his assets as a salesman would not outweigh his liabilities outside of sales.
But if Trump had grown up in a normal environment, he would have experienced that throughout his life. By the time he was a working adult, it might have sunk in and he might have learned to be a little circumspect about his bad behavior.
Please, people. Donald Trump is just one of many, many, people who are just cookie-cutter archetypes in this country, almost as if there’s some factory churning them out. He’s a bullshit artist. Without his inheritance, he’d be a mid-level bullshit artist faux-entrepreneur, probably with some legit business education and experience, but perpetually trying to convince people to invest money in his schemes, whether it’s some kind of multi-level marketing (pyramid scam), timeshare, buying gold, pump-and-dump stocks like Jordan Belfort, the “wolf” (really more of a weasel) of Wall Street…he would make enough money to enrich himself and live a lifestyle of debauchery, but he’d still be a con man, not a real businessman. He’d still be over-leveraged, and forever engaged in a balancing act to stay above water.
Trump is not like other billionaires (we don’t even know if he actually has billions of dollars or not.) This isn’t Warren Buffett or Mark Cuban we’re talking about; he didn’t make his money through savvy businessmanship. He’s not Howard Hughes, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs; he didn’t invent something useful or build machines that revolutionized an industry. Trump is just a con man.