The Dearth of a Salesman

It sickens me to hear Donald Trump speak.  Given free reign, he has become increasingly shrill and incoherent.  His invective is even more filled with lies and cruel attacks.  His face, when he speaks, is ugly, twisted, full of rage and hate.

So it took me a few days to get to the point where I had heard enough snippets of his rant at the Boy Scout Jamboree to wonder how Boy Scouts of America, a group rooted in building moral and ethical behavior, not to mention patriotism, in boys, was reacting to this ugly display.

There has been a great deal of blowback since his performance.  Facebook and Twitter have been filled with angry comments by past scouts and parents of scouts.  But of course, there has also been praise by the base that feeds off his tantrum-like attacks, and this is what keeps him going, his presidency a four-year continuation of his campaign, when each performance proved his popularity.  His red-faced envy of President Barack Obama, and his rage at Hillary Clinton's three million vote win, not only will never end in his warped paranoid mind, it continues to grow, his obsession becoming ever more dangerous.

Fed by Steve Bannon's fascistic rhetoric, surrounded only by those who fawn and flatter, Trump's lack of boundaries and poor judgment appear to be unstoppable.  In Warsaw, he was greeted by cheering fans, encouraged by Poland's right-wing government to come together to show enthusiastic support; his anti-democracy speech in turn showered praise on the government that is dismantling its democratic institutions, much as Trump is working to do here.

These days, Trump opens his mouth, and CNN airs the foul and stinking words that come out, often in their entirety.

When Trump performs at rallies that fuel his need for approval, they are not called rallies, they are presidential visits, like at the Boy Scout Jamboree.  When he gives interviews, they are rare and mostly with Fox News and like-minded devotees like Pat Robertson, where he can for a few moments control the public narrative once again.

As we have let Trump devour our lives, we have come to know him well.  And yet, it occurs to me, we are missing completely his defining trait.  Donald Trump has gone to great lengths all his life to build a persona.  The American people, much of his loyal base, got to know him as the successful entrepreneur of The Apprentice, charming but knowledgeable and firm.  This is not Donald Trump at all.

He is a lousy businessman.  He is terrible at making deals.  He has used his name and his inherited wealth to create a brand that falsely describes the person.

The brand was the creation of a first-rate salesman.  He has the instinct that comes from his own insecurities, that allows him to divine his target's needs and desires from his own.  To be a good salesman does not require honesty or integrity; in fact, he might have more appropriately entitled his best-seller, The Art of the Con.  Because that is what he does best.

However, success in sales requires control over one's audience.  Trump has always surrounded himself by people of power, like lawyer Roy Cohn, people who could teach him how to project an image of power.  And he has surrounded himself with devotees.

From the time he staged his entrance down the escalator to announce his war against Mexicans, Donald Trump was selling himself to a base that he knew well, people who had been responding to his politics for decades, people who were angry and insecure and looking for someone to focus their rage.  They were looking for a savior, and that is exactly what the bombastic and narcissistic Donald Trump planned on giving them.

And in the long con that was the 2016 election season, he succeeded in getting people from all walks of life to believe in him.  They thought they knew him from his role in The Apprentice, and from his absolutely adamant extremist claims, about Muslims, about "the wall."  He fed people's fears:  about violence, about loss of work, about unaffordable health care.  And then he made them promises:  he promised jobs, and that they would be safe on the streets.  He promised the best of everything, and that it would be easy, because he would be the one who would do it.

A con.

The problem with a con, though, is when the con artist loses control.  Suddenly, Trump as president had other people with power questioning him, contradicting him, saying no to him.

What happened next was inevitable, the dictator's path to maintaining control.  He berated the media because they were the ones confronting him with questions he couldn't answer.  He began firing people.  He became more isolated, surrounding himself with his entourage, those from whom he expected complete loyalty.  He began to publicly criticize not just enemies, but those who had supported him.

And he became angrier and more unstable.

The president we have is one whose powers a responsible congress would be checking, rather than cowering out of fear of losing their comfortable government jobs.  Mitch McConnell -- the real dealmaker -- with his lack of ethics and sleight of hand gave us a Supreme Court that will be very guarded in cases that involve presidential powers, as they did by allowing parts of the travel ban to go into effect while they waited to hear the case.

Donald Trump is no longer that great salesman.  He is a very poor con artist these days.  But because of the power he wields, those who have already signed on to ride his coattails continue to allow him to threaten them publicly.  They allow him transgression after transgression, cowed by his threats and their own insecurities.  He has been allowed to flaunt national security regulations, to profit from his position as president, to bring unsavory people into the most powerful corridors of government.  He has met secretly with our most dangerous opponent, flattered dictators and trashed our allies.  He has curbed media access, which is public access, to the presidency.

And he speaks to boy scouts as though they are having a bitch session in a bar.

No, he is no longer a great salesman.  Most all of us know the emperor is naked.  And that just makes him angrier, and crazier.  But with the power he has, and which he has usurped, he doesn't need to sell anybody anything anymore.

The Ironic Cherry Reads...

The Sack of Rome

by Alexander Stille

Hitler, Trump,... Berlusconi?  I didn't believe it either.  Italy is such a small place, I hardly pay attention to it, except for the food.  But when we weren't looking, Silvio Berlusconi took over and ran a country already corrupted into the ground.  And when I read about the parallels between Italy's prime minister and our own clown president in the New York Times in December, I decided to learn more.

The Sack of Rome was written in 2006, but rather than feel outdated, it is prescient.  When the author compares Berlusconi's manipulations to those of George W. Bush, the impression is that W. was just a prequel to the Trump reality show.  And that Trump is more Berlusconi than W., albeit even a bit stupider.

From odd bits like both being germophobes and referring to themselves in the third person, there are the more significant details of personal history, like the origination of their wealth in real estate development.  In fact, the lies and obfuscations, the hidden deals behind the schemes, are eerily similar.  Both bolster arguments with false quotes and statistics.  Neither read much.  And both garnered fame and power with the people of their country by virtue of media empire -- Berlusconi's ownership and control over television in Italy and Trump's fame and popularity beginning with Miss Universe pageants and culminating with the image of the successful entrepreneur and business mogul on the reality show, The Apprentice.

We mostly assume Trump is an idiot, because his poor impulse control and anger have led to some really dumb moves.  His attacks on people who might be supporters tend to prove he is not as smart as he thinks.  Or it might just be that the crazy has overridden the smart.

But Berlusconi seems to have a shrewd intellect wherein he has planned his successes with a philosophy that Trump can merely mimic.  As owner of the first private television station in the country, Berlusconi imported popular American TV shows that had been unavailable through the government owned station.  Then he built up commercial advertising in a way that multiplied both power and profit.

Berlusconi was hands on with both programming and personnel of his media empire.  As Stille writes:

"Berlusconi went unabashedly after the lowest common denominator and made the silent majority the protagonist of his television.  'Remember that the audience of our listeners, as they say in America, have an eighth-grade education and were not at the top of their class,' he told his sales force in the late 1980's."

And then there is his involvement with the Mafia, the shady characters that aided and abetted his ambitious plan for power and wealth.  Much as Trump and Russia, it was a mutually beneficial dirty deal.  And supporters of both merely shrugged off the complicity as something that was necessary to bring change.  Both assumed that it would take someone who knew how to deal and had the great wealth to prove it in order to bring order to their lives.

There needs to be a certain level of distrust and cynicism for the people of a nation to hand the reigns of power over to a leader who is known to be corrupt.  And in our country we have grown accustomed to lies, deceits and deals from our politicians.  We have a media that no longer is required to hold to standards of ethics or even pretend to fairness, in spite of claims to the contrary.  Our political leaders spend more time courting the wealthy and powerful and holding meetings to plan how they will control the electorate than actually listening to voters, which has been proved dramatically during the past several months of town hall evasions by legislators.

And after years of lies and innuendo, buttressed by a media that went after the most outrageous news rather than the most credible, we saw our election sabotaged to the point where people who should have known better said they couldn't vote for Hillary because they just couldn't trust her.  Day after day of Chuck Todd inserting in every story that these were the two most unpopular candidates ever, as though he had nothing to do with the perception.

The pressure on the media for ratings and ad dollars wakened and gave life to the hibernating Trump, but it took Russia to know what strings to pull to unravel our democracy.  And the corruption seeped through the system.  The cynicism that had been growing in the American people for decades allowed supporters to cheer when Trump said "crooked Hillary" even though they knew he had scammed Trump University enrollees; it is the kind of cynicism that has Michael Flynn yelling "lock her up" even as his is conspiring with the Russian government.

In fact, in the New Yorker article by John Cassidy cited above, he says,

"It is also worth recalling that, in Italy, Silvio Berlusconi, another populist businessman, served as Prime Minister four times despite a list of allegations against him that included bribery, tax evasion, sexual misconduct, and having ties to the mafia."

For an American who isn't much interested in the world outside my own walls, this book was a page turner.  I would like to recommend it, but I realize we all could use a diversion in these dark days.  So let me suggest a drinking game to go along with the book.  Take a shot every time you can substitute "Trump" for "Berlusconi."  And don't plan on driving anywhere for awhile.