They seem awfully similar. Both are arrogant, self-confidant con men with outrageous coloring with cult followings. They lie outrageously and get themselves out of apparent traps with ad hoc explanations. They’re never wrong, because that would be a sign of weakness. And they do as much as possible to increase their own wealth while lying about any of it going to them. after all, look at all the time they spend working for the improvement of those in their charge.
Hubbard was able to escape prosecution by taking to his own private navy, and in his later years sneaking back into the US into Florida and, later, California. “When you move off a Point of Power,” he wrote. “Pay all your obligations cash on the nail and go live in Belgravia and buy off the police.”
Trump can’t do that. In the first place, I don’t think he ever paid off anyone fully, i cash or otherwise. He hasn’t got a private navy*. And which country would take him in? I doubt even Russia would be interested. So it might be difficult to extract him from his suite in the White House.
*He sold off the Trump Princess in 1991, having owned it less than three years. It’s now the Kingdom 5KR – Kingdom 5KR - Wikipedia
He had “flaming red hair”, but it was supposed to be natural. His skin wasn’t orange. He apparently had a deep baritone and was said (by people not in his cult) to be a good singer in his youth, so it’s probably true.
I think Hubbard was probably a lot more self-aware than Trump. He was certainly a better businessman than Trump. Hubbard was PT Barnum compared to Trump’s Jim Jones.
Interesting. I went to look for pictures of Hubbard. I had seen his picture before but I never noticed the red hair. I happened to find this article from 2016 - Donald Trump and L. Ron Hubbard, two of a kind. The first paragraph ends with
Unlike Trump, L. Ron Hubbard was clearly literate. He may not write particularly well but he can certainly turn out lots and lots of words. Given the choice between Hubbard and Trump for president, I’d probably start getting my thetans checked.
Huh. So, the current President of the United States–whose opponents accuse him of having collaborated with sinister foreign powers to subvert American democracy–once owned a superyacht that, among other things, was used in a Bond film (Never Say Never Again), where it “played” the yacht of a Bond villain (a billionaire businessman who’s secretly an agent of the sinister international criminal organization SPECTRE).
OK, Real Life, this whole episode is poorly written. I mean, geez, a little subtlety here? You can quite beating us over the head with this stuff! What’s next, the Evil President’s son and namesake exchanging e-mails about “Russia and its government’s support for [your father]”…“if it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer”?!?
Yeah but he bought a yacht that was made for $100 million just a decade before for 29 million. Not a bad deal. Then he apparently spent money to upgrade it, then sold it for 20 million.
He got a yacht for 1/3 its original price and still found a way to lose money.
Trump resembles Kaiser Wilhelm II far more than L. Ron Hubbard. Looking up articles on the Kaiser, you come across phrases like “operetta character suffering from megalomania”, “verbal outbursts”, “ill-advised interviews” plus “(quick) temper and an impulsive, high-strung personality.”
Sounds familiar. Though the Kaiser was probably more intelligent than Trump, and due to his obsession with military power and world domination, more dangerous.
When you buy any vehicle, you’re fighting entropy. A car loses value as soon as you drive it off the lot, and then loses more value every year. That nine million drop could have been the expected depreciation.
You don’t buy a yacht expecting it to be an investment. It’s going to be a money sink. It’s just a question of how much you’re gong to lose.
What fascinates me about Hubbard is he convinced the US Navy to give him command at sea. Twice. Every assignment he had, except maybe his very last in which they finally recognized he needed to be watched closely by a more senior officer, he bungled spectacularly, and yet they kept on giving him sweeter and sweeter gigs until he finally shelled Mexico.
Come to think of it, if Trump had been President at the time, I could see him intervening on Hubbard’s behalf after the shelling incident. Maybe even putting him in command of a bigger ship.
I don’t see it as getting “sweeter and sweeter” gigs. Hubbard embarrassed himself by claiming to engage a Japanese sub off the Pacific Northwest that was almost certainly a magnetic anomaly before he went down and shelled that Mexican island (uninhabited, fortunately). at best he had lateral transfers after he got his first boat.
The one thing I feel genuinely sorry about for Hubbard – the only thing, because he was a terrible, abusive human being, but it’s there – was that he wrote up his action reports the same way he wrote his pulp stories, and the Navy chastised him for it. They wanted crisp, no-nonsense succinct factual reports, and he gave them what he was used to writing. It was probably the first time ever he was criticized for the quality of his writing, and it must have burned.
Kind of like the way Trump must have felt after addressing the UN, come to think of it. What worked for your usual audience might bomb when it’s exposed to the World At Large.
Shortly after the outbreak of WWII, he ended up getting a cush job as a naval attaché in Brisbane, Australia. He made a nuisance of himself, pretending to have greater authority than he really had, and so was sent away as a troublemaker.
Then, rather than ship him off to some god forsaken island in the Pacific or a ship aiming to retake one of the same, they sent him home instead, and put him in command of a converted yacht. And rest assured, command of any sort for a junior officer can be considered “a pretty sweet gig,” and keep in mind how at this time the remnants of the asiatic fleet were fighting (largely unsuccessfully) for their lives, and the last organized defenders of the Philippines were being marched to death on the way to captivity. And what did Hubbard do? He fouled up so bad that he managed to get a letter written to the Vice Chief of Naval Operations stating he was “not temperamentally fitted for independent command.”
But was that the end of it? No. He got sent to a few months of training in Miami, and was rewarded with yet another command—this time a bona fide purpose built warship that would ultimately go overseas, albeit without him—and so would go on to shell Mexico.
Those are three pretty choice assignments, but his poor performance during the first alone should have been enough to show that he needed to be watched closely, and yet somehow the Navy saw fit to give him independent command twice, until the very end of the war when the Navy finally wisened up and figured he’d do better as a department head working beneath a more seasoned commanding officer.
He avoided the most arduous duty, though perhaps not intentionally, in spite of serving in the Navy throughout the course of the war, and yet got just far enough from home on both coasts to earn a couple of campaign ribbons and start developing a much more fantastic claim to being some kind of hero.
It’s genuinely fascinating to me that he managed to do that, and I wonder how much of it was through sheer force of will on his part, and how much of it was just due to luck and inattentiveness on the part of the Navy. It’s the kind of absurdist tale that makes me think there’s hope for any of us. Just a little luck and a little apathy from the right people along the way is all we need.
[ol]
[li]Presumably he had high charisma - you certainly couldn’t be a dweeb and build Scientology - and that led to the Navy over-estimating his abilities.[/li][li]More importantly, the Navy needed lots of officers to command ships (there was a war on, after all). So I’m guessing anyone who appeared at all competent got a couple of bites at the apple. After the third time (Australia and the two ships) combined with his health problems, they gave up.[/li][/ol]
Hubbard hadn’t even thought of Scientology when he was in the Navy – that came after the war was over. When he joined the Navy he was a Pulp Fiction Author who had also written some screenplays. So they couldn’t have had any estimate of his abilities based on his founding a mental abilities movement (Dianetics came first, and had no religious trappings at first)
He certainly did have High Charisma, though, according to people who knew him.