A Nation of Immigrants
America is – factually and historically – a nation of immigrants. That’s what it is. The Native American population is extremely small compared to the population who are immigrants or descendants of immigrants.
Trump would have you believe that America has always existed as is and has never been subject to such enormous immigration as it is today. The truth of the matter doesn’t agree. Trump wants you to think of immigrants (especially illegal ones) as invaders, poisoning the blood of the country, taking all its jobs, and promoting crime. In fact, they are the foundation of the whole country.
This all, of course, comes back to “America First“, a tagline once ardently supported by the KKK that implicitly promotes extreme nationalism, racism, and xenophobia. The phrase has always been associated with these things. Either Donald Trump is so stupid he doesn’t realize this, or he knows perfectly well what he’s doing and doesn’t care.
The American Dream
Donald Trump is proof that the American dream only applies to a certain few people. He boasts about being self-made, yet he’s anything but. He received millions of dollars from his father through a shell corporation, thus avoiding tax, and has repeatedly lied about how much he received in total. He used to claim it was $1M, but when it was discovered – surprise, surprise – he’d been lying, he now says it’s “much less” than the reported figure, but is not forthcoming with the details.
The bottom line is that Trump was only able to make it as a businessman after significant investment from a family member. What about all those people who don’t have rich parents to give them money? You never hear about them because the vast majority are doomed to remain tiny and never grow.
Who would Trump be without his daddy?? A nobody. And that’s the worst violation of the American dream you can possibly conceive. The American dream is about making it on your own terms, not because your daddy is rich. In fact, it’s the promise that, with enough work, anybody can make it! That’s clearly not the case in America, and that’s because of dynasties and rich, hereditary families like Trump’s.
Democracy
Donald Trump is perfectly okay with democracy when it goes his way, but when it doesn’t, he rejects the result as fraudulent with absolutely no evidence. He attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election and to this day refuses to acknowledge that he lost. He has proven that he cannot accept the result of a democracy that doesn’t favor him. No other former president has done what Trump has, and there’s a good reason for that – because it undermines democracy in the most serious way imaginable.
Trump’s personal, pathological need to win at everything1 renders him incapable of acknowledging defeat. He is therefore unfit to be a democratic candidate or a president.
Trumpism of the Day
Let’s continue reading Trump’s interview for Playboy in 1990.
Every building casts a shadow, for God’s sake! I want this job to be dramatic. I strive for that. I don’t want it to be contextual, blending into everything else.
This is so reflective of Trump himself! Being normal would be a death sentence for him. He hates being “contextual”; he has to stand out.
I did want to prove to my father and other people that I had the ability to be successful on my own.
Well, you did a bang up job of that! You received – what was it? – only, uh, $413 MILLION in total from your daddy!2 And they did that while avoiding tax!!! Wow, you really proved you could make it on your own terms, huh?
I liked to work during summers. I don’t understand these teenagers who sit home watching television all day. Where’s their appetite for competition?
Trump was never content to just do his own thing for a while. He had to compete, fight, and “win“. He’s like that even now. He can’t just relax.
I saw people really taking advantage of Fred and the lesson I learned was always to keep up my guard one hundred percent, whereas he didn’t. He didn’t feel that there was really reason for that, which is a fatal mistake in life. I’m a very untrusting guy. I study people all the time, automatically; it’s my way of life, for better or worse. … I am very skeptical about people; that’s self-preservation at work. I believe that, unfortunately, people are out for themselves. … Everything in life to me is a psychological game, a series of challenges you either meet or don’t.
This squares well with what Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter for Trump’s first book, wrote: “To survive, I concluded from our conversations, Trump felt compelled to go to war with the world. It was a binary, zero-sum choice for him: You either dominated or you submitted. You either created and exploited fear, or you succumbed to it—as he thought his older brother had. … In countless
conversations, he made clear to me that he treated every encounter as a contest he had to win,
because the only other option from his perspective was to lose, and that was the equivalent of
obliteration.”
So, Donald Trump’s lesson from the death of his older brother was that everyone’s out for themselves and everything’s a war, a challenge. If you don’t win, you’ll be exploited. Isn’t that rather telling.
And it’s worth noting that, as president, this is exactly how Trump wants America to operate. There are no amicable relations, no cooperation. Everything is a deal in which America must come out on top.
Every successful person has a very large ego. … Far greater egos than you will ever understand. … Nothing wrong with ego.
It’s easy to see why a narcissist who succeeded in business only because he received money from his father would have a huge ego, despite having done very little of actual worth. Ego is not every successful person’s priority. It is possible to succeed whilst not having an overly inflated sense of self-worth. That’s just not a very popular move, as Trump shows.
When a man or woman cold-bloodedly murders, he or she should pay. It sets an example. Nobody can make the argument that the death penalty isn’t a deterrent.
Yes they can. Easily.
The thing about “deterrents” like prison or the death penalty is that, to a person committing a murder, that punishment is abstract. It’s just an idea. Just like the crime itself, it doesn’t become real until it happens to them. Add to that the fact that many murders and violent crimes are crimes of passion – i.e. not coldly calculated and planned but committed in the heat of the moment – and the fact that many violent criminals suffer from mental health issues or socioeconomic difficulties (and therefore suffer impaired judgment), and you’ll see that a far more effective method of preventing crime is dealing with the circumstances that give rise to them, not threatening people with death.
Why do people commit crimes? Because they have a particular motivation to. Take that motivation away and they won’t commit the crime.
Here, again, we see Trump’s total stupidity when it comes to anything slightly intellectual. He’s a terrible philosopher, a terrible logician, a terrible psychologist.
When asked what a hypothetical President Trump’s position on crime would be, he said:
I see the values of this country in the way crime is tolerated, where people are virtually afraid to say “I want the death penalty.” Well, I want it. Where has this country gone when you’re not supposed to put in a grave the son of a bitch who robbed, beat, murdered, and threw a ninety-year-old woman off the building? Where has this country gone?
Well, we can see the values of Trump in how he proposes dealing with crime – and the answer is perfectly reflective of his personal ethos: namely, that everything is a fight, a war.
I think power sometimes corrupts—“sometimes” has to be added.
Oh, gimme a break! We’re supposed to accept that Donald Trump is an example of the incorruptible?!?! Fuck off!!!
When asked how his marriage was, Trump started describing how his wife, Ivana, was a good manager(!):
Just fine. Ivana is a very kind and good woman. I also think she has the instincts and drive of a good manager. She’s focused and she’s a perfectionist.
Talk about obsessed!
I never speak about my wife—which is one of the advantages of not being a politician.
Wonder why. #TrumpIsAnAndroid
In fact, TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald says: “I was bored when she [Marla, his second wife] was walking down the aisle. I kept thinking: What the hell am I doing here? I was so deep into my business stuff. I couldn’t think of anything else.”
Wives are trophies for Trump. He has them so he can say he has them. His real love is business.
Ten years ago, bad publicity was much harder for me to take than it is now. It is almost irrelevant.
Looks like he’s regressed! He can’t take any bad publicity these days!
I’m never self-satisfied.
Coulda fooled me! Here are just a few quotes from a self-satisfied Trump:
“I’m intelligent. Some people would say I’m very, very, very intelligent.”
“I’m a very stable genius.”
“Sorry losers and haters, but my I.Q. is one of the highest -and you all know it! Please don’t feel so stupid or insecure,it’s not your fault”
“I really believe I have the greatest temperament there is.”
“Everything I’ve done virtually has been a tremendous success.”
“I understand business better than anybody that’s ever run, in my opinion, for office.”
“I don’t have to brag. I don’t have to, believe it or not.”
And a bonus:
I study people and in every negotiation, I weigh how tough I should appear. I can be a killer and a nice guy. You have to be everything. You have to be strong. You have to be sweet. You have to be ruthless. And I don’t think any of it can be learned. Either you have it or you don’t. And that is why most kids can get straight A’s in school but fail in life.
In other words, Trump is always exerting a pretend toughness. Honest is the last thing he wants to be.
That’s it for the interview. That’s OK, though – Trump can’t go 24 hours without saying something completely stupid, so we’ll have one ready tomorrow.