The Etiquette of Being a Trump Supporter

Conclusion, Part 1

I can't remember exactly when I first became aware of Donald Trump. It could have been when he got into financial trouble years ago and lost a lot of money. That made the papers internationally. He was never broke, but I think for a period he dropped below billionaire status and had to rebuild his empire financially. There was some amusement when his fortunes plunged, a feeling that air was being let out of a big gas bag in a very public way.

A lot of people who don't have a fraction of Mr. Trump's dynamic energy get satisfaction out of the flame out of somebody they see as a vulgar operator, but Trump had grit and worked his way back into the stratosphere of super wealth. To somebody like me a multi billionaire is super wealthy.

Then of course, he would be on the David Letterman (Miss you Dave! "Do you want fries with that?") program from time to time and he was interesting, always the promoter of his TV program and building projects. He seemed to talk sense. He was good humored about his hair style. He said some things on politics that were thought provoking. I always enjoyed his appearances. He was entertaining, commenting from a distance, outside the political arena.

I liked Ivana Trump. She was cute and glitzy, very glitzy, but I thought that there was something really charming about her. She referred to her husband as, "The Donald", which, in the context of a relationship between a wheeler dealer like Trump and a woman who gave every appearance of being concerned with nothing but appearances, was an almost sublime testimony to the mystery of what brings a man and a woman together.

When they split up, as far as I know, not a word of criticism of her passed through his lips and there seemed to be a satisfactory financial settlement and they remained on good terms. I have a lot of respect for that and applaud Mr. Trump for his self discipline.

Mr. Trump's current wife, Melania, has not been in the public spotlight the way that Ivana was. She is a dream boat, I must say, and the one time I heard her speak, in the media, I understood immediately how Mr. Trump could be attracted to her. She sounded very intelligent and classy.

A.J. Benza, a radio and television personality, was quite taken with her too, as I understand, from an episode of the Howard Stern radio show that I happened to hear one day. From what I could gather, Mr. Trump, according to Mr. Benza, "stole" Melania from him, thanks largely to Trump's out sized bankroll.

Mr. Benza, who did a stint as a regular on the Stern program, was quite bitter about it

One day Trump came into the Stern show to do an appearance and for the first time I got a glimpse of a side of Mr. Trump's personality that I wasn't aware of. He's a very tough guy, who showed that he could easily handle a tough young hot head like Benza. By the time their conversation was finished Benza was sputtering that he wished he had a baseball bat with him to deal with Trump.

It was an ugly scene that really gave me a window into the world that Mr. Trump inhabits in New York. I realized that it would not be possible for him to move around casually, the way most people do, without bodyguards. I believe that this scene was only the tip of the iceberg of a side of the life of Donald Trump that goes on in his business dealings, out of public view.

I looked at Trump differently after that.

I won't go into detail again about this, but in another thread I mentioned Donald Trump's involvement in a real estate development in Toronto, which fell through. There is a Trump property in this city now, but I am referring to an earlier attempt by Mr. Trump to partner with local interests to put up a condo/hotel development.

The Toronto Star (if I remember correctly) published details of the contract entered into between Trump and the local developers and the details were brutal. In a nutshell, Trump had drawn up the contract in such a way as to exempt himself from any risk or loss whatsoever, arising from any and every conceivable happenstance. His partners assumed all risk in the venture.

In his interview with Alex Jones, Mr. Trump said "We have trillions of dollars in Afghanistan and we get nothing out of it."

That is the same lie that floated George W. Bush and the galaxy of criminals around him through the war in Iraq. It is true that some of those dollars were shot into depleted uranium dust over the sands of Iraq and the rocks of Afghanistan, but the vast majority of that money never left the shores of the United States and the bank accounts of the military industrial complex that makes its home there and on top of that, American oil companies got sweetheart deals in the Iraqi oilfields, in the oil services industry, and in infrastructure rebuilding.

Wake up folks, Trump is giving you another snow job.

Trump says,"I'm the most militaristic person there is . . . "

I believe him. When Trump said that he would not raise the minimum wage in the United States, the handwriting was on the wall for me. I knew that he had no confidence in his economic plan, the plan he waved around in front of the public, bringing back industry, jobs, etc. He knows he can't do it.

I believe his real idea is the old tried and false notion put forward by Ronald Reagan, trickle down economics. I think Trump is going to try to create more easy profits for the "oners", believing that doing that will help the economy as a whole. It hasn't and it won't.

In fact Trump's real plan is to have the United States go back to robbery, to stick up more foreign countries. He wants to go back to Iraq and stick the place up.

He wants to "take the oil"

He says, " . . . to the victor go the spoils."

I think he is going to put troops back into Iraq and squeeze it even harder. I think if he gets into office, he will cite the situation with ISIS in Iraq as an 'obviously just' reason to reintroduce American ground troops into that country. ISIS is the American foreign policy gift that just keeps on giving.

Conclusion, Part 2

Trump and his ilk in the conservative establishment in the United States are not finished with Iran either.

Trump says, "We made one of the worst deals in the history of the world when we gave them (Iran) 150 billion dollars (in sanctions relief) and virtually gave them keys to nuclear weapons."

First of all, the United States did not give Iran anything.

I hate to repeat myself, but people have to get it through their heads that Trump is a huckster, you know, as in "there is a sucker born every minute", "never give a sucker an even break", "nobody ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the American people". Get it? That's the kind of guy he is.

The 150 billion dollars he is talking about is sanctions relief. It is not a pay out. It is the result of partial normalization of trade relations between parties to the agreement.

The deal he is describing in such disparaging terms is:

en.wikipedia.org...

a preliminary framework agreement reached between the Islamic Republic of Iran and a group of world powers: the P5+1 (the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council–the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, France, and China plus Germany), plus the European Union.

The deal does not give Iran the keys to nuclear weapons and is not considered dangerous, by the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States, and other relevant agencies.

Of course the deal does have its critics. You can read a detailed pro and con at the following link:

mediamatters.org...

In any case the parties that signed the deal, not just the Obama administration, but the Putin administration and the others are satisfied, even if Donald Trump is not, that this deal is the best deal doable.

Short of invading Iran and incarcerating all of its top tier people, the deal in place satisfies a lot of very picky people.



Does Mr. Trump want to invade Iran and incarcerate all of its top tier people? That's what I am afraid of.

As "The Donald" says, "I'm the most militaristic person there is . . ."

Trump hates the idea that America can't have its cake and eat it too. He wants to blow America's dough on a flashy military and have great business investments going in resource rich areas overseas too.

It burns him to see the Chinese with their emaciated military establishment putting their money into investments and developments in Iraq, or Africa, while America can't do that kind of thing because America has spent all its money on military hardware and speculation in useless financial instruments. He can't stand it.

He's an American exceptionalist. He thinks that America has the right to create a heavily armed band of thugs and use them to go around the world sticking up other countries. It's like the Bush family all over agian.

Trump is the evil cloud now hanging over the world. Along the Persian Gulf coast of Iran, ordinary people are picking up their lives again, hopeful of getting new enterprises started, now that the sanctions have been mostly lifted.

Take a couple of minutes to go to the following link and read about the hopes and efforts of people that the rise of Donald Trump threatens to crush, yet again.

Iran eyes Iraq trade decades after war

www.ft.com...

Of course people can vote for Donald Trump if they want to. That's democracy. My purpose in these posts is simply to attempt to make clear what Mr. Trump's likely policies will be, since I believe that, like a lot of sales people and promoters, Trump is doing his best to conceal what he is really up to.

I admire Mr. Trump to some degree, as I admired the Bush family. I don't think his likely policies will be good for the United States or for the World.

Note: All of the quotations from Donald Trump in this thread are things he said during his interview with Alex Jones. That interview can be seen below: