“I’m just finishing up that second coat now!”
Trump can’t find a doctor that creates a bogus case about bone spurs in his feet.
Trump has a profound cowardly streak; in this scenario he’d absolutely try to make any claim he could about not being able to serve. Trump is, however, not a particularly adept liar, and I could see him either being forced to serve or winding up with some kind of criminal infraction over Vietnam.
If Trump serves in Vietnam, the statistics are about a 5% shot of him dying, 8% chance of being severely disabled, and 13% of being injured. By the numbers, Trump probably makes it out mentally scarred but physically intact.
If Trump doesn’t serve in Vietnam, I’m not sure he goes to college. There’s no real money to pay for it from family, and Trump really doesn’t believe in the value of education anyhow.
Either Vietnam or no Vietnam, Trump probably realizes his abilities are best suited to salesmanship, and I could see a serious problem when an ethical company discovers his lack of ethics. What Trump definitely does learn is salesmanship, and arguably because he’s the man making the pitches, not the man managing them, he probably becomes more capable.
Trump is a womanizer, plain and simple. He never meets Ivana Zelnickova, Marla Marples or Melania Knavs, but probably has a similar pattern of divorces, affairs and children by different women. The wildcard in this is that Trump can potentially go from being reasonably successful to a busted fraud on a dime.
Trump is fired multiple times for integrity issues, and probably serves time for fraud. His relationships potentially break because of it, but Trump is only marginally more honest, and only because he knows he can get caught. Like in our reality, Trump at helps his children, and as he grows older, they’ll make sure he’s not utterly impoverished.
Trump today would be a retiree with a mail order bride from Russia, living in a rent controlled apartment, and indulging in golf and McDonalds. Since he’s never made it above perhaps an assistant sales manager, he’s never considered any political maneuvers, much less being President. In addition to not emailing, he doesn’t tweet either. He probably hates the police about as much as he hates the FBI today, but he’s served his time.
Ultimately, Trump is somewhat successful and lives a lower class life. He lacks ethics and intelligence to advance socially.
The OP said he didn’t learn that his father was broke until he was 18. That means he was still born with the silver spoon in his mouth but it was taken away just when he was becoming an adult. He would have all the personality defects that come with his privileged upbringing but none of the resources to back it up.
I think he would have taken a job in property management and/or sales for one of his father’s real estate developer friends. He would be renting out properties and selling condos in buildings other people built. This is pretty much what he does now except his name wouldn’t be on the buildings. He might make enough for his employers to climb the ladder a bit. On the side, he’d be sleeping with single moms who couldn’t make their rent that month. He would also always be angling for more and lying about his money. Eventually, his lying and scheming would get him fired and sued. He wouldn’t have managed his real money well enough to have any capital to fall back on.
He built a fortune that he claims was a billion dollars by starting with approximately 1/4 of 200 million in 1974. If he were actually worth a billion, this would be impressive. The only thing we know is that when he claimed to be worth $5 billion in 2009, it was not libel to say he was worth only $150 to $250 million. Millions, billions: Judge tosses Trump's lawsuit over his worth - ABC News
Increasing his net worth from circa $50 million to just $250 million in 35 years is terrible performance. If you adjust his returns for the risk he took, it’s even worse.
That ignores any inter-vivos transfers his father made to Trump before he died. It also ignores the number of times his father had to commit capital and reduce his own net worth to bail Little Donnie out. He was a celebrity when his father died but there are a lot of broke celebrities in the world.
I don’t know that there were thousands of heirs expecting and inheritance of $50 million in 1974. I also don’t know how much many of them are worth now since most of them probably have the decency and judgment to not brag about their money.
This is true. The man can undoubtedly spend money. This isn’t really a virtue.
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Your numbers are based on his statements about his net worth. We know what he says it was but he is an unreliable witness about his net worth and finances. He has never offered any evidence. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-election/trump-lies/?utm_term=.9ef0cf55dc64
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You can do that easily with remarkable leverage. For example, if you give me $20 billion in assets and a $21 billion loan, I have a negative net worth of $1 billion. If I just manage to service my debt and my assets appreciate at roughly the rate of inflation (say 3% per year), then I can turn a negative $1 billion net worth into a positive $2 billion in just about 5 years. The result is trivially easy. The hard part is convincing people to give you the loans to begin with. Getting the loans is easier if you started out with all of your father’s connections, you benefit from his backup capital, and you are willing to lie shamelessly when you apply for the loans. Who does that sound like to you?
How much was Fred Sr.'s net worth reduced by the capital he had committed to bailing out Little Donnie?
Here is one example:
This only became public because casinos have to file financial reports with the state. Most of his other ventures are private and avoid such scrutiny, so we don’t know how often Little Donnie got bailed out by his dad.
I despise him but I am perfectly willing to acknowledge his accomplishments. Please point to one that is credible.
He did manage to get elected President and he passed a tax bill that is almost tailor made to benefit him and his wealthy cabinet members tremendously while helping most Americans as little as possible. Consider these accomplishments acknowledged.
Are there any businesses that Trump started himself that didn’t fail? Isn’t that an indication of his own business acumen?
He’d have worked his way up to VP Sales of a timeshare condo project in Florida.
Sounds like he would have voted for Trump! 
He would be an immensely rich real estate tycoon.
This.
Come on - if he weren’t a brilliant salesman, he wouldn’t be rich - and he is - and he wouldn’t be President. And he is.
Right, right - everything he does, fails. Apart from making a shit ton of money, getting his own TV show, and getting elected President, he’s a complete failure. :rolleyes:
Regards,
Shodan
We don’t know that he’s immensely rich even now, do we?
Donald Trump’s claims about how successful he’s been in his career should be viewed with the same credibility as Bill Clinton’s claims about how faithful he’s been in his marriage.
I was thinking Fargo, but yes, car sales.
All of which have one thing in common; they’re based on Trump convincing other people they should give him something.
Like I said, I give Trump full credit as a salesman. The question is once he’s been given something, how good is he at managing it? It’s already been established he lost a lot of the money that people invested with him. His television show got mediocre ratings. And while he hasn’t completed his career as President, there’s ample evidence he won’t be regarded as a success in that.
Considering that with inherited money he ended up poorer (even taking him at his word concerning his net worth) than he would have been just investing the money in index funds and not trying to manage it himself, I expect that the answer to the OP question would leave the phrase “Would you like fries with that?” firmly imprinted onto his Broca’s convolution.
You cannot get any lower-class than the life he’s living right now.
How would this have happened? Without daddy’s backing he doesn’t get the capital or the inherited properties. If he managed to make it as far as his casino bankruptcies, no bank would have lent him a cent. After the bankruptcies he got the inheritance, which saved his fat ass.
Do you really believe Trump becomes a real estate tycoon starting with nothing? LOL.
Time to invoke a variation of Shodan’s Law: If they refuse to acknowledge or believe it the first two dozen times, they won’t acknowledge or believe it the 25th time either.
Interesting to contrast Trump with Alan (now Lord) Sugar, the star of the UK version of The Apprentice. He truly is a self-made billionaire who started his business empire after leaving school age 16, selling car radio antennas from the back of a van he bought with his meagre life savings. From what I hear, Trump and Sugar don’t really get on too well.
I’m sure there are people who still believe they’ll be getting their check from Bernie Madoff any day now. Some people will keep believing forever in the face of overwhelming evidence rather than admit they were suckered.
As Trump himself bragged “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” He knows his base is made up of eternal suckers who will always believe him no matter how many times he lies to them.
Name a business that he started that succeeded. Is it Trump airlines, Trump steaks, Trump University, Trump vodka, Trump Magazine, Trump mortgages, GoTrump.com?
That “Trump” on all those gaudy buildings is from the Trump Organization, started by Fred Trump, not Donald Trump; it’s not Donald’s name on those buildings. He just happens to share a name with the guy whose name is on those buildings.
An easy way to be a “rich real estate tycoon” is to be born to a rich real estate tycoon. That’s not an actual skill. Or is it just a wild coincidence that his one and only successful enterprise just so happens to be the one that he was handed on the day he was born?
Repeating it 25 times doesn’t make it true. that’s what we call an informal fallacy, and its name is Proof by assertion.
I prefer to call it “proof by gesticulation”.