The Great Donald mocked cripples, women who are 10’s, women who are not 10’s, employees, game show contestants, menstruating newscasters, blacks, Mexicans, Muslims, dip-shit GOP Senators and Governors, and the President who lied on their birth certificate.
So now you libtards want to reciprocate by mocking the savant who knows more than the Generals, who will MAGA, who has the largest penis on Earth, who is really really smart.
Perhaps our new Commander-in-Chief is a little thin-skinned, but maybe you would be too if you had to fight your way out of poverty as he did. While you libtards were vacationing on the Riviera, Donald had to attend prep schools and be jeered by billionaires’ sons. You’d get a little sensitive too if your daddy was only a multi-millionaire.
You left out his illustrious active-duty military career where he got a Purple Heart (that someone gave him) and wore himself out on the front lines chasing women.
Doesn’t that just make you want to jump to your feet and salute him?
As a conservationist, I would call draining a swamp “destroying a wetland, in the hopes of replacing prime bird and amphibian habitat with substandard human housing–which will flood when it rains.”
It’s an apt metaphor for a career land developer taking on a misguided project, not knowing what he’s doing.
According to Forbes magazine, Trump recently suffered an $800 million dollar setback due to the softening New York real estate market, bringing his total net worth down from $4.5 billion to $3.7 billion. So the evidence would indicate you’re wrong, both about his business acumen and his net worth.
And while people love to throw around the claim that the million dollar loan he started his business with would now equal his net worth if invested and kept in an index fund, I’d be very surprised if any index fund over a 50 year period would grow a million into four-and-a-half billion. But even if it did, this utterly fails to account for the fact that Trump has twice built a multi-billion empire during that time, once from a million dollar loan from his father, and the second time from almost a billion in the whole. (Let me reiterate that: he had to earn almost a billion just to get out of debt! And from there went on to build the multi-billion fortune he has now.)
Another thing the index fund meme fails to take into account is the amount of money Trump has spent just living over the last 50 years, which would amount to many, many millions if not a billion or more over that amount of time…
So no, a million put in an index fund at the beginning of his career would not have generated the money he’s generated in the meantime. Nor would it have put to work the tens of thousands of people Trump has employed directly, nor provided the jobs his projects have created for the architects, engineers, financiers and bankers, and construction workers and suppliers who’ve participated in their creation.
No, you’re not. You’re peppering your responses to me with insults toward and interpretations of Trump and claiming that it was me who made the assertions. I say something along the line of “Trump couldn’t care less about the insults he gets and reacts to them only for an effect he wants to accomplish”, and you come back with something like, “So you’re saying the only thing this crooked, lying, philandering, misogynistic, thin-skinned asshole cares about is manipulating people despite the fact that 68 million people in this country despise him?”
Clearly the one is nothing like the other. Which of course is the intent in the first place, otherwise why the need to rephrase what I’d already made quite clear.
No, I haven’t misunderstood it at all. People love to throw around the phrase that “The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer” because it implies that the rich are getting richer at the expense of the poor, when nothing could be further from the truth, as your example below re J.K. Rowling and Ted Nugent illustrate.
In the first place, tax cuts are not “paid for” as though the expenditures they would otherwise fund are created by divine right and cannot be cut back. What they do is create the need for less spending, spending that has been undertaken by human beings (Democrats usually, seeking to buy votes with other people’s money) and which can be reduced by human beings.
In the second place, your argument boils down to what this discussion always boils down to, which is that the wealth of the rich harms the poor because the rich seek ways to keep the government from taking money from them to spend on the poor.
In the view of many, the poor are poor because they lack employment that sufficiently finances their needs…assuming they are employed at all. This lack of employment-generated income is why they’re poor. Naturally if you provide them with goods and services through government spending, they can in one sense be said to be poorer as a result, but that isn’t a loss of the money they’re able to make for themselves, it’s merely a reduction in freebies coming from someone else.
I doubt one person in a hundred who hears the phrase “The rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer” thinks it means that the poor are getting poorer because they’re getting less rich people’s tax money. What they almost certainly think is that the poor are being deprived of income because the rich are soaking up a disproportionate share of the country’s available money. This is objectionable not only because it’s completely untrue and based on ignorance, but because it also feeds class warfare and meritless resentment toward those with high incomes.
The way most people inherit money - his father died. In 1999. Eleven or twelve years after The Art of the Deal, the creation of Trump Tower, and creation of Donald’s first multi-billion dollar fortune. Further, he’d crashed, found himself almost a billion in debt, and had not only worked his way out of that but back into billionaire status by the time his father died and he inherited whatever it was he inherited (most estimates say it was $100 million, a veritable drop in the bucket when compared to the billions he’d earned, lost, and then rebuilt by then.
But if you want to keep believing that Trump is only rich because of daddy’s money, go right ahead. It’ll probably help facilitate your wonder and exasperation at how Trump became president and allow you to keep thinking Trump voters are a bunch of dumbasses, when the fact is they know the truth about Trump’s achievements and laugh at the self-serving bias and ignorance of those who refuse to acknowledge them.
To paraphrase Dorothy Parker, what fresh bullshit is this?
In the first place, the article you linked to makes no mention of ‘daddy’s loan’. It said that if he’d invested all his money in 1987 he’d be worth $13 billion by now. But by 1987 he’d already become a multi-billionaire, built Trump Tower and had built or bought any number of other office buildings and hotels, owned Adnan Kashoggi’s yacht, and published The Art of the Deal.
The ‘Daddy’s loan’ that people like you love to claim would be more than his net worth now if invested in index funds was a million dollars and lent to him at the start of his career in 1975. It was from this initial investment that he had grown the multi-billion dollar net worth he had in 1987 which your Fortune article chooses to use as the jumping off point for starting his alleged would-be index fund fortune. And as I pointed out already, the index fund scenario totally ignores the vast amount Trump has spent just living over the last 40 or so years.
How much he inherited from his father’s death is irrelevant. Any success he can claim was thanks completely to the loans, credit, and connections given to him by his father while he was still alive.
It’s pretty safe to say that had it not been for his daddy’s help he would have risen no higher than middle-management in the business world. His ambition and stamina would have allowed him to climb that high despite his limited intellect but not likely much higher.
Please. Most businessmen who deal in speculative investments suffer reversals. Real estate in particular is subject to flux, with the same property sometimes varying wildly in value over relatively short periods of time. If Trump had no business acumen he’d never have been able to rebound from the almost billion dollar hole he found himself in after things had gone south in the early 90s.
How come I never hear you people talk about what lousy businessmen the people at SONY or Warner Bros are when they finance a movie that loses hundreds of millions of dollars?
Oh wait, I know! It’s because you realize that business investments sometimes pay off and sometimes lose money, but because you aren’t politically opposed to them with every fiber of your being, you take a much more realistic view of the marketplace vagaries they’re subject to. SONY loses tens or hundreds of millions and it’s meh, Trump loses hundreds of millions and gets not one iota of credit for having developed the fortune he lost in the first place, nor for digging out of a billion dollar hole and building his fortune back up to the multiple billions. Nope, all the focus is on that brief period in his career when things went south and you pretend that people are supposed to regard it as the sole determinant of his business ability. It is to laugh. The real determinant of his business ability is that he was able to rebound so quickly and well.
If making two fortunes is somehow proof of his acumen, does losing one of them (so far) tell us that he’s not an unqualified success? If you give him points for digging out of a billion dollar (w)hole, do you take any points away for digging himself into that hole in the first place?
Seems like you want to give him credit for every dollar he’s made, but the dollars he’s lost don’t count for some reason. Why is that?
Another blatant hit piece with no credibility. So what if Fred chose from time to time to hitch a ride on Donald’s wagon and enter into a venture with him? Nothing in that article attributes more than an occasional investment by Fred Trump in Donald’s projects. To me, this speaks to Fred Trump’s confidence in his son’s abilities, as the amounts he was going in for on just that one project represented a significant chunk of his own net worth, an amount he’d worked his whole life for. Further evidence of confidence in Donald’s business ability lies in the fact that the Hyatt Hotel chain went in 50/50 with Fred on the financing.
Plus there are a couple of little bits of bullshit that give away the intent of the article on its face. First there’s this line:
What, pray tell, would be Fred Trump’s motivation to stand silently in the background to avoid drawing attention to himself? And how could that even be possible when everyone in the world of New York finance would know about the investment he and the Hyatt chain were making? And again, why would Fred and the Hyatt chain go in on the project were they not convinced of Donald’s ability?
Another bit of manipulative and biased bullshit lies in their referring to Fred as being “one of the richest men in America” when by all accounts he was worth only $200 - $300 million upon his death in 1999!!! Hell, there are countless movie stars and rock musicians worth more than that!
In a nutshell, Fred’s periodic investment in his son’s projects means nothing in terms of Donald’s entrepreneurial ability or whether he built his fortune himself. Every project Trump has been involved in has required financing from someone other than himself. Sometimes that financing came from his father (undoubtedly for an eventual payoff, like any other investor) and sometimes it came from other sources. None of this means Trump didn’t build his fortune himself. He merely utilized his father’s money in the same way he utilized funds raised elsewhere. Nowhere is it ever said that Fred just gave Donald money with no intent of return. The likelihood is that Fred would have died with considerably less wealth had it not been for the enterprise and abilities of his son.
And now I’m out for the night. Maybe more tomorrow if I’m still het up about all this nonsense.
One more thing before I go. Warren Buffet’s company lost over $11 billion in a market selloff last year, including a $2.6 billion loss on IBM stock alone. Oddly enough, however, I don’t hear anyone proclaiming him to be a lousy and incompetent businessman.
And the reason is the same as I explained above - he deals in speculative investments, and is therefore subject to the vagaries of the economy and the marketplace just like Trump was and is. The reason Trump is coming in for condemnation over his business reversals is political and nothing else.