Donald Trump Is No P.T. Barnum

Donald Trump Is No P.T. Barnum
November 5, 2016 by Nick Yaekle
Donald Trump loves to portray himself as a great businessman and someone who is very smart, but everything about him and his entire life and empire is built with cheap steel and gilded facades.
A pride and joy is his book, The Art of the Deal. We now know the book was written entirely by someone else and that writer has explained the contents of the book and the presented ‘deals’ changed many times, often daily, depending on what new idea Donald came up with during the time they spent together.
Nearly everyone that has done business with him, worked for him, known him, from lawyers to accountants, builders to personal friends, universally speaks of the deceit, lies, and outright revision of actual events that Donald likes to pass off as fact.
During this campaign, it has become evident that Donald doesn’t have a tenuous relationship with the truth, but he has no relationship whatsoever. Granted, the Republican Party, no friends of the truth themselves, handed him, yes, they did not Hillary Clinton, a fabricated conspiracy of the email scandal (personal business was mostly handled on it, and according to State Department manual unauthorized electronics for State business was not forbidden in all circumstances) but Donald has managed to allow right wing nuts jobs like Steve Bannon and Roger Stone and Alex Jones (I mean, these guys make Rush Limbaugh seem rational, sane and insightful) not only have his ear, but influence him and his campaign message.
As far as the Republican Party goes, Trump has done nothing to further them in future pursuits. He hasn’t expanded the tent of supporters, he’s actually lost a good deal of the actual establishment vote, and those he has attracted, many of the same the tea-party wing brought in, are leftover racists and uneducated that would have voted establishment anyhow. And much like Lyndon Johnson’s famous quote when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed regarding losing the South for Democrats for generations to come, I am fairly certain Trump has finally lifted a hammer and actually drove a nail home; the nail in the coffin for any Republican hope of capturing the growing Latino, women, and immigrant minority vote.
Trump seems to subscribe to a theory of “the truth is what I tell you the truth is.” He has attempted, and has been successful in some circles, of redefining what the actual truth is.
Sure, there is corruption in politics. But I believe it’s safe to say that the corruption is Washington is nowhere near what Donald has been a part of since inheriting his fortune and empire from his father, who inherited it from his mother.
His self-touted intelligence seems to be publicly missing in action. He claims how smart he is and in some cases, despite having no military experience (he got multiple deferments for Vietnam for alleged heel spurs, which he ‘can’t remember’ which foot was affected) other than a private military school in upstate New York for high school, yet says he knows more about ISIS than the generals. And let’s assume that is marginally correct, where did that knowledge come from? My guess is with his pal, Vladimir Putin.
And I’ve often thought that Donald is truly a master of marketing. But after more thought, I’m not sure that is true either. Yes, he has had some success parlaying the image of being a successful businessman (despite four major bankruptcies totaling nearly $4 billion USD) into other ventures lasting a few years each, but long-term. But it’s truly a lesson in trying anything until you make it. Really what he has done is throw his self-created name and image onto products created by others and relies on the naiveté of the public to blindly support it, based on the image he began creating in the 1980s of a wealthy and successful businessman. It’s worth nothing, that with a few exceptions, even the buildings and hotels bearing the Trump name have been solely marketing schemes, buildings owned by others and that bought into the image he made and thought it would help their buildings. I imagine that will soon change as we start to see more and more businesses with the Trump name begin to eliminate it.
This run for the presidency is nothing more than a giant stroke to the ego for an aging man, with no real legacy to leave behind. Nearly all successful titans of business and industry leave a lasting legacy and a wealth of public works behind. Warren Buffet and Bill Gates have twice donated their entire fortunes to foundations for the betterment of mankind. They’ve also managed, each time, to climb back to the same value of wealth as before. Rockefeller, Getty, Carnegie, Ford, Edison, Morgan, they all used their wealth in some manner for the good of mankind and to help others to achieve a better life for themselves and their families.
Trump is ending his career by championing hatred and bigotry and by further dividing our nation. He fancies himself a cornerstone of successful American businessmen, but the truth, the REAL truth, continues to rear its head, unaffected by Trump’s phony claims and over-the-top self-acclamations. Instead of erasing any wrongdoing in his career and justifying it through career-end good deeds, his insecurity leads him to continue to judge those he sees as ‘competition’ or contemporaries based on their net worth (even though the only true look at his net worth we have is leaked tax returns that essentially put his worth under one billion, generously). If you notice, he isn’t confident in verbally or even ‘Twitterly’ attacking those who he KNOWS has a higher net worth than him, like Michael Bloomberg or Mark Cuban, and especially Gates and Buffet.
What Trump has managed to do successfully in this campaign is create a new audience for what is sure to become a media empire bearing his name (although I’m willing to bet with little of his own money) that will cater to the conspiratorial musings of those like-minded uneducated and ignorant right wingers who cite Fox News, Brietbart, and Drudge as credible sources of news and information, despite an absolute universal knowledge outside the deep South, backwoods, end of dayers, that most anything reported in those venues is baseless, factless, and most times, completely fabricated from a table of anger-hucksters.
P.T. Barnum famously quipped, “Every crowd has a silver lining.”
Trump’s may be gold, but make no mistake, his intention was never to be president. It was to create a mindless audience to sell his and his fraudulent friends in the info-tainment world of cable ‘news’ ridiculous ideas and that new venture, Trump TV or whatever self-thinking, self-aggrandizing name they decide to give it, will be wildly successful for a few years, like all of Trump’s ventures, and thankfully, like the man himself, will fade away into comical oblivion.
It’s just a shame the stupidest among us have allowed him to divide a nation that was on the brink of new found greatness as we embraced our unique differences and headed back into the top of all things the world over!