I was flipping channels last night and kept scrolling by Anderson Cooper interviewing him. How can any journalist have a conversation with him and keep a straight face?
Some people like clowns.
Jounalist? What journalist? I think it was Bill Moyer who had a conversation about news media. Their thesis was that main source of income in news media is election advertising. So much money raised in elction campaigns is poued into advertising in news media. Big media companies buying up obscure local papers for that purpose only. Between elections they are twiddling their thumbs, pretending to cover stories.
America’s “id.” He says what many are thinking. I think he’s high in the polls right now because it’s a way for the base to poke a finger in the eye of the “establishment.”
The hilarious thing here in my hometown is that someone has a life-sized Trump in their vegetable garden on their farm by a road serving as a scarecrow. It was on the news and in the paper. It’s spectacular. The farmer said depending on how the Democratic race goes, he might add a Hillary.
Andersen Cooper is another clown. I was not surprised when CNN rating went down. He always milks some stories long past the date when nobody was interested in it anymore. Maybe CNN was a joke too.
He has weird hair, I think he’s out-of-touch, he may be fine (or not) at investing, but I don’t see how he can have any appeal beyond that.
The problem with people like him is that he’s used to saying whatever the heck he wants. He’s not used to having people whispering in his ear, “hey, don’t say that.”
He’s icky.
Donald Trump is a thing because he wants to be a thing, because he knows really well how to be a thing, and the media wants him to be a thing. It’s a shame Bernie Sanders isn’t also a thing because he’s a pretty clownish guy, as well.
Years ago either the Trump Taj Mahal hotel or one of his other hotels in Atlantic City was a customer of my company. I arrived around the time of it’s bankruptcy. I could only speak to one person who was never there. They were a mystery account with a sizable past due balance yet they would keep on ordering from us. We had given Trump’s hotel rock bottom deals to use our amenities in the suites. We handled them with kids gloves compared to other customers.
As far as I know he never had to pay off his balance and we lost big money because of it. It seems to me his strength is negotiating deals that benefit him and keep him one step ahead of his bill collectors. His Atlantic City properties struggle for the most part from what I have read.
I totally get it. People are sick of career politcians, illegal immigration, feeling like our leaders are weak and corrupt and that our Constitution is being trampled on and that we’re encouraging a nanny state. But seems on this site the only views allowed are liberal so I’ll leave it at that.
I saw him speak last week at an event and got an up close look at the hairstyle. It is weirder in person.
The reason Donald Trump is “running” is because it gives himself another way to promote himself. Everything with him is his ego, he is about as diametrically opposed to his father, Fred, as you could imagine. He basically is of the Oscar Wilde school of thought, where he said 'the only thing worse than people talking about you is people not talking about you", and that is Trump.
I find it amusing that when asked why they support Trump , and they say they are tired of the government being run the way it is, they want it run like a business, where the books balance, and so forth, and they say that Trump has the business experience to get the government running right. I guess these people watch “the Apprentice” and so forth and think that Trump must be this business genius, but if they ever bothered to read about his past, they would realize that Trump the business man is run more like today’s government than they think. The man has a track record of bankruptcies and hosing investors that goes back almost 40 years. The west side Trump Plaza in the west 60’s had real problems, and he ended up getting bondholders (many of them from Hong Kong) to agree basically to forgive hundreds of millions in debt, and similar things happened with other big Trump projects, like Trump Tower and the Trump project in Columbus Circle, he routinely gets into financial trouble, then ends up hosing the original investors, yet time and again, mostly because of his PR and the guilded image the media gave him, people are dumb enough to invest with him, it is amazing. His father was a lot smaller scale than Donald, but he also operated on a lot of good faith, contractors who worked for him knew they would be paid, and a lot of the stuff they did was handshake deals, and he was one of the few landlords in NYC whom tenants actually liked.
Basically I think a lot of people are supporting an image rather than a reality. The fact that he is anti immigrant, anti government, is ‘rich’ (how wealthy he is is kind of an interesting thing), a ‘guy who gets things done’, "is into family values’ (the guy has been married what, three times?), and so forth.
I think I kind of understand the appeal. He has the chutzpah to actually say things that some Americans believe to be true – eg, Mexico is killing us, China is taking advantage of us, our leaders are stupid, blah blah blah. A real politician (and I don’t mean that word pejoratively, at least in this context) knows better than to annoy certain constituencies and knows that he will be asked to demonstrate his assumptions with facts. From what I’ve seen, no one asks Trump for facts to support his opinions.
ETA: He states a lot of opinions as if they are facts. I think that’s why stupid people like him.
First and foremost, Donald Trump is a master of self promotion. He is also a very shrewd and successful businessman. He has declared corporate bankruptcy several times, but never personal bankruptcy. Even if you believe he overstates his wealth when he claims to be worth $9 billion, you have to admit being worth $4 billion still qualifies as being “very very rich.” Over time I have grown very tired of his act. I remember watching every episode of the very entertaining first season of The Apprentice. I haven’t watched it in years and can’t believe it is still on the air. Try to imagine PT Barnum running for president. It’s the same “thing”.
I think The Onion summed up Trump’s campaign best.
I’ve listened to quite a few people who love him and think he’d make a great president. And he’s number 1 or 2 in a number of polls of Republican candidates, so obviously the “nobody supports him” isn’t accurate.
My personal theory is that he is the Republican version of the Democrats’ Bernie Sanders, and that they’re both a kind of Occupy Wall Street. By that I mean they’re both supported by people who are fed up with the status quo and are turning against the “political establishment”.
I wish the news media would stop covering him so heavily. I suppose they have to cover him to a certain extent, but his most outrageous comments are replayed constantly with an every-changing cast of commentators who talk about how outraged they are. It would be best to cover him minimally, as required because he is now in 2nd place, but not to give him the 24-hour coverage he wants. Without it, he’ll go away.
I’m surprised that he isn’t concerned about the business deals he’s losing. (But why did anyone ever want to buy Trump-labeled clothes?)
About his marriages, on the famous descending-the-escalator-to-announce-for-president scene, he’s accompanied by a very young, beautiful woman. Is she his wife? Or maybe his daughter?
It’s interesting to me to see the coverage of Trump versus Sanders, although props to the New York Times (really) for covering the ovarian cancer thing.
I think it’s also interesting that he was a democrat until 2009 and a republican for a while before that, and has changed all sorts of positions outspokenly on all sorts of things.
There were many beautiful young women with him at that announcement, all of them flipping their hair and none of them knowing anything about politics.
Article in today’s NYT mentions that prominent Republicans are afraid to criticize him too strongly for fear he’ll become a third-party Presidential candidate and take votes away from the Republican candidate.
Trump is a big TV personality now. Unfortunately, TV and TV political ads influence most American voters.