RUTHFULLY YOURS

Billionaire businessman, Donald Trump, a sudden convert to the Republican Party, is experiencing a meteoric rise in his battle to capture the party’s nomination for presidency of the United States, a truly bewildering accomplishment for him.

People wonder what is going on. How is this possible?

Some say that in this age of substantial anger, anxiety, and fear, the ‘Donald’ has become everybody’s inkblot where each person sees what he wants to see and not what is really there. That’s why, they say, a cross section of American society, including the most unlikely, are pushing the Trump button in the voting booth. They are, really voting for their illusion.

You may disagree with this assessment and you have every right to your opinion. But, take for a moment, your eyes off the inkblot and check the following facts.

When we take off our illusion glasses, we see numerous sobering and even disturbing facts.

Here are some examples:

• This man is bereft of any traditional political convictions. He is 100% Trumpist and nothing else. If he claims he is Republican, he says so because being Republican at this time presents him with the best opportunity to advance Trumpism.
• This man has spent all his life being a Trumpist: a person whose only and ultimate goal in life is to do whatever it takes to serve himself. It is precisely for this reason that he has hired cheap labor, legal and illegal, to construct his buildings; he has for decades donated funds to politicians of both parties who would facilitate his predatory ventures.
• A Trumpist, per force, must be populist appearing in the sense of saying and doing anything that would promote him, without regard to ideology. It is in this spirit that he advocates a vague healthcare system that is both supposedly based on marketplace forces as well as socialized mandated medicine where he promises that he is not going to let anyone die on a sidewalk. He also insists that insurance companies must insure people without respect to preconditions, while everyone knows that type of system can only be mandated. And, he is against the mandate, at the same time. And some believing souls listen to him talk from both sides of his mouth in the same breath; they still go ahead and applaud him.
• Is he a conman? Well, let the facts speak for themselves. He says he borrowed one million dollars from his father and parlayed it to ten billion dollars. How? Did he invent a miracle gadget, build an automatic space age manufacturing plant, or did he develop a magic wand? No. He did it all in real estate deals, gambling houses, show business, and the like where he could and did grease the wheels to get his way and exploit tens of thousands of hardworking laborers and artisans, legal immigrants or not, to amass his ill-gotten fortune. His wealth is from the sweat and life effort of tens of thousands who did not get their fair share. How else he could end up with 10 billion dollars?
• No matter where he is, he keeps saying, “I love the people…” Be it Arkansas, New Hampshire, Texas, or wherever. “they are great people,” he says that ad infinitum, and ad nauseam. Sure, he loves all those good-hearted simpletons — and there is no shortage of them — people who hitch themselves to his wagon in the hope of some free ride, but will end up with pulling his wagon as have tens of thousands before them.
• The man may not be a conman in the strictest sense of the word. But he certainly qualifies as an operator that would do and say anything that would get him what he wants. If an old widow’s home, for example, is in the way of expanding his gambling house, she should be steamrolled out of the way, by hook or crook.
• People, vulnerable people, legions of them are indispensable to this scheming man. He preys on hard-working desperate laborers to build buildings; he attracts young men and women struggling to learn skills by attending his university. Why not? You want success? Learn it from the man who has done it himself. But first, pay through the nose and good luck to you. But if you end up with no slick tricks to get rich quick while you are accumulating debt with student loans, don’t go to uncle Trump for help or a job. He has no use for failure, other than stepping on them on his way up.
• Trump touts himself as brilliant, endlessly. More than you and I care to hear. He keeps repeating that he went to the Wharton School of Business,” he has noted several times. “I’m, like, a really smart person.” He tells us, “the nobodies,” that he went to Wharton and he got good grades. Apparently teaching spelling was not part of the Wharton curriculum. Despite Trump’s repeated mention of Wharton, his own classmates barely remember him, and he even portrays the school’s high-flung reputation as overwrought in his 1986 book, Trump: The Art of the Deal.

Okay, fine, do you believe him? No, you still don’t believe him? He will tell you more. He hails from a line of very smart people, he says. How so, you ask? His uncle, he tells you, was a professor at MIT, and he has a sister who is a judge.

Here is something else you don’t know about him. He is humble. He only uses the first person pronoun in every sentence I, only for economy of words. After all he is a genius economist. Why use two letters, as in “we” when you can use only one letter, as in “I.”

Now that he has tasted success in getting his way in the financial world, he wants the ultimate prize: the presidency of the greatest country in the world. He is brash enough to see it just as another deal-making venture. Hence, he is using the same old strategy that has made him a financial juggernaut to attain his goal: say and do anything. And it is working.

And as for you, my long deceived frustrated compatriot. Throw away the rosy inkblot and look at the stark reality, as bad as it may be. This trumpeting Trumpist is an illusion.