Don’t like Trump? Get over it.
Trump Curse writ large. Rosie O’Donnell still can’t get over the fact that Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016 by blowing off Megyn Kelly’s gotcha question about his mean tweets to women, using her as the completely understandable punchline.
Millions of men, and even some women, said to themselves, “I would do that too.”
She’s a sad case. But this latest outburst got me to thinking. Maybe I’ve been unfair to The Donald myself over the years.
With my wife and others, I’ve taken the position that I admire Trump as a President and would-be savior of the Republic. I’ve also said I wouldn’t have him in my house for dinner. Or, less pompously, that I have never had any desire to meet him in person. I have fought strenuously for his political life and fortunes. No one can deny that. But I also fought for George W and Mitt Romney when they were running. Didn’t want to meet them either. They were simply the best alternative to the pure disaster represented by their Democrat opponents. An Internet friend and onetime fan self-styled as Dirty Rotten Varmint denounced me as a hack during the Romney campaign for propping up an empty suit against Barack Obama. He was right as far as he went. I knew then that Barack Obama was the death of America every day he was in office. So I fought for Romney. Even though I lost a good friend before Romney was nominated, an excellent and upright man named Dean Barnett who died of a terminal disease before that election. He had been seduced by Hugh Hewitt into a full-throated advocacy for the Romney fantasy of integrity and morality. I gave him a very hard time and now regret that every day. I still mourn Dean and loathe Hewitt in equal measure.
Why did I withhold approval of Trump the man?
Why?
Lots of reasons. I had a consulting partner I had enormous respect for, but one of his first personal gestures to me was the gift of Trump’s book, “The Art of the Deal.” Didn’t read it. Put it on top of my chest of drawers and never opened it. A New York con man boasting about how he had flim-flammed the entire Manhattan real estate and banking community in that sorry-ass elite land of the Looking Glass? Don’t think so.
Why? Too many wives for one thing. Philanderer. You could see it all over him. Exotic women with accents, backstories that don’t sound like escort services, and tremendous divorce settlements. He was always in trouble but somehow rescued himself with the inevitable “art of the deal.” Debt piled on debt, bankruptcies slicked out of because he owed so much money the banks couldn’t afford to put him down, and then the endless, tireless self-promotion of gold toilets and his name on absolutely-fucking-everything he touched.
Played craps a couple of times at Resorts, his first Atlantic City casino. Not at all like Vegas, where I’ve been since. In AC, the gamblers were guys who had just cashed their paychecks and were frittering them away in pursuit of hard-eights on the crap table and betting on 19s at Blackjack. Enough to make you, er, me, sick.
When I wrote my kiss-off piece about America in the year 2000, I said this about him…
FTA <<Donald Trumph. A brilliant financier and real estate developer, Trumph became a one-man encyclopedia of all the 1980s ailments Presdent Clitton has been working so hard to cure. Through a combination of nerve, greed, ego, and more nerve, he managed to leverage the paltry millions left him by his old man into a vast real estate empire consisting of the Trumph Towers, the Trumph Plaza, the Trumph Castle, the Trumph Palace, the Trumph Throne of God, and then the Trumph Bankruptcy Court, the Trumph Renegotiated Loan Building, the Trumph Re-Renogotiated Loan Casino, and finally, the Trumph If-You-Take-Me-Down-I'll-Take-You-Down-With- Me House of Cards. Through it all, he entertained the nation by marrying a bunch of wurld-class whores° and pretending he had hair. He may have slowed down some since the early 1990s, but he's still chasing money- hungry hookers and he's still pretending to have hair. What next? He sounds like a natural for making a new fortune on the UnderNet°, where the ability to lose money and go into debt hand-over-fist seems to be all that's required to score a titantic equity bonanza on the NASDAQ°.>>
[The degree signs link to The Glossary (scroll to find it for 2000/2001) which demonstrates the destruction of language by the elites, of which Donald Trump was, as far as I knew, a charter member of.]
I never watched ‘The Apprentice’. Which came later. How pompous.
Now I have to admit that his presidential candidacy did not take me by surprise. I was even one of the first to predict (2014!) that he might enter the race and win the nomination. Not because he was a politician but because he was a remarkably successful con-man.
Then came everything that happened after the escalator entrance in 2015. I was impressed at how easily he disposed of everyone on the same stage as he was, and if there was ever anyone who could take down the she-devil Hillary I was all for him.
I was almost as pleased with his election as I was with Reagan’s surprise victory in 1980. But I confess I did not particularly like him. Mean tweets? Not necessary. Something about hitting down has never appealed to me. And then he kept all his campaign promises. Not even Reagan did that. He was the best President of my lifetime, bar none, maybe the best since Lincoln. NOT a con-man.
I could understand some of the antipathy to Trump we saw in the 2020 election. Women are what they are. I didn’t forgive them this time because I knew by then that we needed Trump as we had never needed any politician before. Liking isn’t part of the picture unless you’re a woman. For the record, I don’t think I would have liked Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses Grant (would have loved to shake hands with Sherman), Calvin Coolidge, or any of the Roosevelts or Kennedys or Bushes. I wouldn’t have let Harry Truman or LBJ or Clinton or Obama past my front door. I say this as someone who did get to see Reagan in person and actually shook hands with Barry Goldwater. Honored by both of those memories.
Now I find myself changing my mind. I would be honored to see Trump in person, shake his hand, and tell him I think he is the bravest patriot I have ever read or heard tell of.
He’s just so much bigger than his celebrity biography. Why they hate him so much. He’s a Man. A Big Man. And we haven’t had one of those in practically forever. He’s a fucking hero. I have had the privilege of living at the same time as he lived. Maybe part of why I was even born.
Who do I think of these days? Saul of Tarsus who became Paul. And Augustine, who loved the bloody shows in the coliseum and overcame his temptations to become a saint. Trump will never be a saint. But he is absolutely a defender of the faith. He may or may not believe in God, but he ACTS as if he does. Which for us, right now, is enough.
That okay with you?
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