RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://atimes.com/author/david-p-goldman/

Dear Donald Trump:

You are a great deal-maker. By your own account you’re the greatest dealmaker of the 20th century, and almost certainly the greatest dealmaker of the 21st century, even though it isn’t quite over yet. The Art of the Deal is your campaign playbook, as CBS News reported April 1. You have promised great trade deals with China, a great deal with Mexico to build a wall on the border, and other great deals on theSupreme Court, peace in the Middle East, healthcare and everything else that anyone has asked you about.

How would you like to the greatest dealmaker of all time?

You can go to Cleveland on July 18 and make the most stupendous deal in all of human history. Lots of people get to be president of the United States, but there can only be one all-time greatest dealmaker, and that could be you.

It’s clear that you won’t win the Republican nomination on the first ballot. Your delegates will have no obligation to vote for you on the second ballot, and a lot of them will vote for Sen. Ted Cruz on the second ballot. They probably will be joined by Marco Rubio’s 170 delegates and others.

There’s a digital outcome here.You can be the Greatest of Dealmakers, or G.o.D. — not the God, but a god, as Bill Murray said inGroundhog Day — or you can be the diametric opposite of the Greatest of Dealmakers, namely a Sore Loser, or to be precise, the Sorest Loser in the known universe. For Donald Trump to be a Loser would be tragic; for Donald Trump to be the Sorest Loser would introduce a disturbance into the space-time continuum. That can’t be allowed to happen.

No-one is saying you are a Sore Loser — yet. The risk is out there. Republican officials in a number of states complain that your organization has threatened them personally over delegate allocation. Your advisor Roger Stone warned earlier this month, “We will disclose the hotels and the room numbers of those [Republican convention] delegates who are directly involved in the steal [that is, not supporting Trump]. We’ll tell you who the culprits are. We urge you to visit their hotel and find them.”

The Washington Post reported April 13 :

In Colorado, Republicans are planning a rally Friday to call attention to threats made against GOP chairman Steve House. He said his office received 3,000 phone calls “with many being the trashiest you can imagine” after a state party convention last weekend awarded all 34 delegates to Cruz. “Shame on the people who think somehow that it is right to threaten me and my family over not liking the outcome of an election,” he wrote on Facebook.

Those aren’t good optics. They blink “Loser!” in neon letters. That isn’t who you want to be.

There’s a simple way to come out of this a winner. Make the deal yourself. There’s going to be deal at Cleveland. The only question is: Whose? If it’s their deal, you’re the also-ran, the might-have-been, the coulda-woulda-shoulda presidential candidate who fizzled out before the finish line. You’ll get no respect, not ever again. You can complain all you want about at stolen convention, but you know better than anyone else that a great gulf is fixed between those who own 49.9% of the shares and those who own 50.1% of the shares. There’s no foul in ganging up against a minority shareholder.

If Donald Trump makes the deal at Cleveland, it will be a great deal, the greatest deal ever, the deal to end all deals, the seal on the greatest deal-making career in history, and a source of everlasting reknown to the greatest dealmaker ever to set pen to paper. Let someone else be president. You could be Everything Else. The next edition of The Art of the Deal will top the bestseller list for years. The Trump brand would be on fire. Folks would steal “Trump” logo bath towels from Trump franchise hotels to sell on E-Bay.

If you were to preempt the deals now in the first stages of concoction for Cleveland, you could negotiate anything you want–any position in the Cabinet. You could be the chief of a new government agency custom-made exclusively for you: The Department of Deal-Making. You could give the keynote speech at the convention. You could hold your own Inaugural Ball next January. You could run a reality show about your Cabinet department.

With you as deal-maker-in-chief, the Republican Party would cruise, er, march to victory in November, and you could take all the credit.

Be a winner, Donald Trump. Make the deal.