Trump, as in chump

By Max J. Castro

My dictionary defines chump as a silly or stupid person, a blockhead. Donald Trump, the real estate magnate and star of the television series “The Apprentice,” has been going hither and yonder, appearing on all the major networks, and making a royal fool of himself.

Or maybe he is making a fool of the media, which is giving him enormous opportunities to expound his obnoxious drivel, and the public, especially that part of the public, the Tea Party, of whom it has been written that it has adopted “The Donald” as its darling.

Among other endearing character traits, Trump is nothing if not an egomaniac, and he is thoroughly enjoying the tremendous attention he is receiving. Indeed, the buzz about a possible Trump candidacy – and the conservatives’ take on that prospect – was the topic that dominated last Sunday’s political talk shows. Not the still-festering sore of Iraq, the diminishing prospects for a decent end in Afghanistan, the twenty-five million Americans who still have not been able to find work in an economy teetering on the edge; it was Trump that was topic “a.”

Among those consulted, Senator John McCain hit the nail on the head when he said that Trump “is having the time of his life.” For it seems highly probable that Trump’s talk of a potential presidential race is less of a trial run and more of a circus show, which if true would burst all the Tea Party’s balloons. It would be safe to ignore Trump, except for two factors, the sheer irresponsibility and divisiveness of his pronouncements and the fact that the most recent polls show him leading or tying the frontrunners in the race for the GOP presidential nomination.

Like in many of his other endeavors, Trump’s newfound political stardom has been gained by playing a dirty and (dangerous) game. In order to top the efforts of the coterie of Obama-bashers which monolithically make up the lineup for next year’s Republican nomination race, Trump has chosen to resort to the basest, most dishonest and most demagogic argument in the arsenal of the vilest of the Obama haters—the “birther” conspiracy.

This benighted collection of folks – the “birthers – fervently believe that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, ergo: He is not constitutionally qualified to be president of the country! He is a usurper, a fraud, like the character in the film “The Manchurian Candidate,” only this time it’s the Kenyan candidate. Or is it the Indonesian candidate? It’s hard to keep up with the silliness of the utterly false and ridiculous claims made mainly by those in the United States who – let’s face it squarely and say it clearly –were never going to accept a black man, and one named Barack Obama to add insult to injury, as president of this nation.

Even if he has produced a birth certificate showing that he was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. Even if in 1961 a Honolulu newspaper ran an announcement of the future president’s birth. It doesn’t matter. Please don’t confuse me with facts. This is “there never was a moon landing” territory, the stuff of end-of-the world cults, of the lunatic fringe.

The attempt to delegitimize Barack Obama, the first black U.S president, by questioning his birthright—to my knowledge an unprecedented move in more than two centuries of American politics—makes it plain that there is a racial, racist subtext (not that far under the surface either) to this specific line of attack. Nearly every black person in America knows it too, and they sorely resent it. Playing loose with race in a country that fought its bloodiest war over slavery is detestable. But then again Trump is just that kind of a guy.

The only explanation for Trump’s championing the “birther” theory, one that even the other nut cases in the Republican Party have shied away from, is that it affords him plenty of notoriety and a ready-made constituency, albeit a highly disreputable one, which is no obstacle to Trump, who is utterly shameless. What is very hard to swallow is that Donald Trump really believes in the nonsense that he is peddling. Trump has many qualities – few of them admirable – but sheer irrationality is not one of them. Cynicism is, though.

Trump is very unlikely to run for president, and his chances of ever taking over in the White House are less than one in a trillion. Still, it is useful to ask about the nature and views of a man who a not insignificant number of Americans would want as president.

Above everything else – the arrogance, the self-aggrandizement, the sense that he can buy anything, whether a woman’s affection, a colossal building, or maybe even the presidency – what comes through with Trump is that he is a bully. This is true in his business dealings as well as his policy positions.

According to an in-depth story about Wall Street analysts, published in Vanity Fair in August 2001 (James Woolcott, “Letter from Wall Street), in 1990 Trump became enraged when Marvin Roffman, an analyst at Janney Montgomery, one of the lesser-known Wall Street firms, wrote in a report that Trump’s new Atlantic City Taj Mahal Casino “wouldn’t make enough money to cover the interest payments on the junk bonds.” Trump went ballistic. He threatened a “major lawsuit.”

The analyst wrote a letter of apology to Trump, possibly under pressure from his company. The next day, perhaps suffering from pangs of conscience, Roffman retracted the letter, upon which his firm fired him. A few months later, Trump boasted to a reporter that “they [Roffman’s employer] got lucky. They got rid of a bad analyst.”

In 1991, Roffman was vindicated when, true to his prediction, the Taj Mahal Casino defaulted on its junk bond payments. In the settlement of the ensuing lawsuit, Roffman got $750,000 from his employer and an undisclosed amount from Trump.

This is the same approach Trump envisions for his unlikely presidency. In a column in The Washington Post, journalist Dan Balz analyzes the policies Trump has been espousing in his numerous public appearances, which Balz characterizes as “a head-turning agenda to go with his swaggering presidential style.”

Balz paints a picture of Trump as simplistic and militaristic. A dangerous combination, as George W. Bush proved. The way Trump talks, though, Bush is a pacifist compared to him. His solution for Irak and Lybia: take their oil and use it to “reimburse” the United States and its allies for the military costs incurred: “When you have a war and you win, that nation’s yours.”

Trump would also threaten the Chinese with a 25 percent tariff on all their imports unless they agreed to his demand for a “level playing field,” whatever that means in Trump’s world. As for the price of oil, Trump says the problem is “that we don’t have anyone in Washington that calls OPEC and says, ‘Fellows, it’s time. It’s over. You’re not going to do it anymore.’

In sum, if George W. Bush’s eight years was a tragic repetition of the Reagan presidency, a Trump presidency would be a second repetition, this time as farce.

Trust me: Trump is not going to be president. He will back out or the bubble of his instant popularity will burst just as quickly as it inflated. But the mere fact that a substantial number of Republicans support him, and that allegedly serious journalists invite him on their top-rated programs, shows how so much of American politics and journalism has become “a tale told by a fool, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”