We Cannot Afford “Indifference” to Trump
A friend of mine, a very successful author and marketer, a deep student of the human psyche, asked on Facebook, “Why do you love/hate Trump? (Disclaimer: I’m indifferent.)”
It was the disclaimer that got me worried. This is part of my response to him:
I have enormous respect for your analytical skills, M.______, but I question deeply your indifference…
M.______, I hope you’re pulling our legs. You of all people understand human motivations and psychology. Trump is a master marketer and manipulator. I don’t know if he’s studied NLP [Neurolinguistic Programming] (or maybe you) or if he’s actually a natural.
I do know that if he wins, I will be looking seriously at what other country I might live in for the next 4 to 8 years. I have family who died in Nazi concentration camps. I don’t want to be part of an America where ordinary citizens are rounded up because they’re Muslim or Mexican, just as my parents’ cousins were for being Jewish.
I don’t say this lightly. I consider him extremely dangerous, and it scares me that enough people in the US take him seriously enough that he’s doing well in the polls (we’ll see if this translates to actual votes).
- Trump has successfully created an image of himself as a self-made man. But this is blatantly untrue. He was born into a family made wealthy by buying political favors (cheaply), and capitalizing on government largesse for their development projects. Trump presents himself as the man who can’t be bought, but he sure has a long history of buying others (for his family’s financial gain). That’s corruption, in my opinion. In the 1970s, he even tried to bribe an investigative journalist with an offer of finding him a better place to live.
- The pattern of favors exchanges continues to the present. Does anyone really think it was in any way a coincidence that within hours of receiving Sarah Palin’s endorsement, he named her as his running mate?
- This man has a “teflon coating” so powerful it makes Reagan’s look vulnerable. He’s not only attacked whole classes of people, he attacked John McCain for being captured, and by proxy insulted every veteran and all those who respect their service—and then he turns around and repeats the biggest mistake of McCain’s career: running with Palin (I think he might have won in 2008 if he had a running mate people trusted). How is it that the mainstream media hasn’t torn him to ribbons? Howard Dean was forced out of the race for a yell of enthusiasm at a gathering of his supporters (and watching it again, I still don’t see anything inappropriate). In 1972, Edmund Muskie was forced to drop out after shedding a few tears in the wake of an attack on his wife—what’s wrong with showing emotion, pray tell? (We seem to have moved past that, finally. We’ve seen establishment political figures from John Boehner to Barack Obama crying in public recently, and appropriately, it’s no big deal). Yet here we have a demagogue who attacks entire ethnic groups, who makes blatantly false statements, who has even been attacked during the Republican response to the State of the Union, and he’s still out there attracting support. What is up with that?
- Unfortunately, Trump is merely the most blatant face of a party mired in better-disguised racism, sexism, etc. To name one among many examples, is “moderate” Jeb Bush’s assertion that he would only let in refugees from Syria who can prove that they’re Christian really less despicable?
A lifelong activist, profitability and marketing specialist Shel Horowitz’s mission is to fix crises like hunger, poverty, racism, war, and catastrophic climate change—by showing the business world how fixing them can make a profit. An author, international speaker, and TEDx Talker, his award-winning 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, lays out a blueprint for creating and MARKETING those profitable change-making products and services. He is happy to help you craft your messaging and develop profit strategies. Learn more (and download excerpts from the book) at http://goingbeyondsustainability.com
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Thank you Shel for articulating what concerns so many of us with examples and citations and context. Keep up your good hard work. Those who will vote (or caucus) for celebrity, however, and aren’t thinking how our country would be lead may not want to hear this.
I do wonder sometimes if the whole thing is a put-on. He does, after all, have some history of friendship with Hillary. And getting cozy with Miss-I-Made-It-Too-Scary-For-Moderates-To-Vote-For-McCain, in spite of the very good point Ron Kaye makes (and in spite of common sense), does raise an eyebrow, or 20,000,000. (Thanks, Felicia Slattery for the clarification on her status). But when I read about the sordid dealings he and his father engaged in some decades ago, I wouldn’t get complacent. James H. Byrd I agree that his candidacy has diagnostic purposes, but unfortunately, the bigotry is far too easy to spot. You have to wonder if the level of vitriol and acute noncooperation showered on Obama by the Republicans (including the so-called mainstream like McConnell and Boehner) would have been so fierce against a white male. They never treated Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter this badly, though they certainly did what they could to trash Hillary when she was First Lady (and no doubt will again if she wins this election–but I think she’s tough enough to make them regret it). Carrie White-Parrish yeah, you’re probably right. We saw how well THAT worked out during the GWB years with Shadow President Cheney running amok while George made a pubic video joking about not finding any WMDs under the White House furniture. I don’t know which prospect is worse: a figurehead President Trump delegating power to some unknown, or a ruthless Trump attempting to exercise his power.
In the interest of full disclosure, the person who began the discussion referenced in the OP asked me not to post while he was on vacation and away from Facebook for the most part. Out of “respect” for his wishes, I quit following his discussions at all. Never was particularly motivated to be a cheerleader, and he is not fond of disagreement…
Excellent post, Shel. However, Trump’s candidacy is actually doing something useful. It is exposing how much racism, sexism, and intolerance has been bubbling just below the surface of our society. It makes me feel like the progress we’ve made in the past fifty years was all a sham. My only hope for the future of our country is that most Americans do not agree with Mr. Trump. All that has been painstakingly gained can easily be lost.
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I doubt that he would nominate anyone who is as desperate an attention whore as he is. He’s not big on sharing the limelight.
One point of fact: Trump has not chosen a running mate. When asked on Jan 20, he said he didn’t rule out the possibility, but nor did he choose Palin or anyone else. That usually doesn’t happen until the nomination is in hand and just before or closer to the national conventions. But then again nothing about Trump’s campaign is “usual.”
I am grateful to Trump for the calculated take down of the GOP that he is orchestrating. He does not want to be President imho.
I agree. I do think he wants the validation of BEING elected, however. Doing the actual job would quickly overwhelm and bore him.
Ron Kaye this is exactly what i said to my husband the other day–he would get tired of it as soon as there wasn’t daily drama, and try to bring in an assistant to run the joint for him. which is dangerous in and of itself.
It has become trendy to stir the pot, and the extremes to which some public figures (and lesser public figures who dream of being more relevant) have been willing to go in order to jump on the bandwagon has exceeded the level of absurdity once reserved for comedians; common sense and decency be damned. Ironically, part of the trend is their defensiveness when challenged in any manner on the absurdity of some of their words and actions. This actually serves to reveal how thin is the veneer of an inflated ego, and how genuinely needy the underbelly of arrogance really is. I’ve made it a habit to avoid such people, though it sometimes takes me a bit too long to disengage from them. Perhaps it’s my naive hope that at some point, that long-abandoned common sense and decency will prevail.
As to the absurd notion that Trump cannot be bought, one needs to realize that despite his wealth, he is probably as readily purchased as the worst of our corrupt politicians. The only thing that delineates Trump (and many of the hustledorks) from the overtly corrupted is that their coin of the realm is adulation and ego-strokes, rather than (or in addition to) dollars, pounds sterling, or yuan.
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Good commentary Shel.
Shel, excellent commentary. I was in on that exchange too. I rather suspect that our mutual friend is not totally indifferent to Trump but at some level actually admires him. I do know that our pal loves to stir discussion and then sit back in amusement watching the rest of us argue and fight over the issues. But where Trump is concerned I wonder if it is possible that our friend is indifferent to — or rather detached from — the outcome here, i.e., the actual effects a Trump presidency would have on the US. And I wonder if that could be because our friend does not live in this country full time. I may be completely off base here but it did cross my mind.
Those of us who do not quite have the freedom to just up and move halfway across the world any time we want to arguably have more skin in the game and more reason to find Trump disturbing. But a Trump-led US could easily wreak havoc in other parts of the world too, so nobody is really immune.
Connie Schmidt I think he may admire Trump’s marketing skills and use of hidden persuaders, but not his politics. He doesn’t advertise this, but I’ve found him to be quietly progressive but not very willing to go public (afraid, I think, of turning off the many right-wingers in his audience. And yes, he loves to stir the pot. I know that this person was living abroad for about ten years, then moved back to the US. Not sure where he’s currently based but as recently as a year ago, it was in a southeastern state shaped like a thumb.
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