A man, filled with fear and insecurity, created a hatemongering character and followed it out the window. And a woman, filled with fear and insecurity, hunkered down and repeated bad patterns rather than reimagining herself in an open, bold way.
.. From Cohn, he learned about winning, without regard to right and wrong. And from Steinbrenner, he learned about indiscriminately grabbing the limelight.
.. “Donald was not a big night life person, except for Le Club,” said one former Steinbrenner staffer. “He was always very likable in those days. He had a big personality, but he was the youngest of the group. He was never arrogant or full of himself. He always was respectful and pleasant to everybody.”
.. Before he jumped into the presidential race, Trump was seen as bombastic, vulgar, a bit of a buffoon and a cave man, but there was also, as Tina Brown put it, “a cheeky brio.”
.. “he was set up as the Decider and a very discerning judge of character.”
.. If he had stuck with his judicious TV boss persona in a race that fused politics, social media and reality TV, who knows what would have happened?
.. But he created another character for the Republican primaries
.. “He saw the crowd’s adulation and it drove him. He started to get the biggest cheers for saying the most offensive things.
.. “He detached himself from himself. I don’t think he believes in the Muslim ban or half the things he’s saying. It was more, ‘If this gets applause, I do it,’ in a Pavlovian dog kind of way. He just got into this character.
.. And the irony of all this is, he didn’t have to. He could have run as an outsider with a populist message without all the evil and mean components.”
.. Hillary started as a young lawyer on the House Watergate committee, yet she never learned how paranoia can act as an acid on dreams. She couldn’t dismantle her wall of secrecy and defensiveness and level with the public and the press; instead, she built the wall higher and clung to attack dogs like David Brock and Sidney Blumenthal, needing to surround herself with people, no matter how dubious, who would walk the plank for her.
.. The Clintons have earned $230 million over the last 15 years, and if Hillary becomes the first woman president and Bill becomes the first first lad, they will reap many tens of millions more in book money and speeches afterward. So why buckrake on the eve of her campaign with Goldman Sachs speeches?
.. The problem with Donald Trump is: We don’t know which of the characters he has created he would bring to the Oval Office.
The trouble with Hillary Clinton is: We do know. Nobody gets less paranoid in the White House.
We already know what Donald Trump does when he loses: He acts like it never happened.
How he responded to business setbacks could predict what he’ll do if he isn’t the next president.
When Donald Trump loses, he lashes out, assigns blame and does whatever it takes to make a defeat look like a win. When that isn’t plausible, he pronounces the system rigged — victory wasn’t possible because someone put in the fix.
.. He has reacted to failure by exploding in anger and recrimination, then moving on to very different ventures, though always in arenas where he can vie for public admiration.
.. Psychologists who study how sports fans shield themselves from the pain of their favorite team’s defeats use the term “CORFing” — “cutting off reflected failure” — to describe a defense mechanism by which fans separate themselves from loss by reframing their relationship to the team. “We lost” becomes “they lost.”
.. even as he has contended that he will win — Trump has repeatedly said that a loss would be the fault of leaders of his party, the news media, pollsters, career politicians and federal investigators. At his final debate with Hillary Clinton, Trump refused to say he would accept the result of the election as legitimate. For more than a week after that, he added almost daily to the list of institutions he said were rigged against him: special interests, Clinton donors, big media companies, “global financial powers.”
.. Losing politicians rarely distance themselves from defeat this way. Traditionally, if they want to maintain their credibility so they can try again in another election, they eat crow, accept the wisdom of the voters and show a modicum of grace toward their victorious opponents. Trump’s approach is one psychologists say they see more often in sports, where defeated athletes sometimes immediately guarantee that they will demolish whomever just beat them, or in business, where executives with an unusually inflated sense of self-worth tend to blame failures on others.
.. How does a man whose image is based on being the ultimate winner cope with losing? His behavior in defeat has stayed remarkably consistent throughout his career: Either he didn’t really lose, or it was someone else’s fault. In other words, he acts like it didn’t happen... Trump is not given to deep analysis of his motives or behavior. But in a series of interviews this year, he did say, with some pride, that he hasn’t changed much since early childhood, when his father, a real estate developer, drilled into his son the directive that he needed to be “a killer,” that there was little in life worse than being “a nothing” and that, whatever he took on, Donald had to be sure to win. Trump’s classmates, neighbors, teachers and friends from New York in the 1950s are united in their recollections of a kid who had a powerful aversion to defeat — and a tendency to blast others when he lost... asked whether he feared the idea of losing and finding that no one was paying attention to him anymore,Trump told The Washington Post that failure represents a loss of control: “I’m not afraid of it, but I hate the concept of it. . . . I hate the fact that it’s a total unknown. . . . If there is a fear at all, it is a fear of the unknown.”.. Sometimes, he argues that he lost because he wasn’t really trying to win. In the most recent phase of his career before politics, Trump attached his name to products ranging fromsteaks and bottled water to mortgages and a university. When some of those ventures went under, Trump said he had only lent them his name and bore no responsibility for any mismanagement. “The mortgage business is not a business I particularly liked or wanted to be part of in a very big way,” he said after Trump Mortgage closed in 2007, leaving some bills unpaid.
.. Trump’s tendency to act against those he blames for his failures is often motivated not so much by the promise of recovering money as by the desire for revenge.
.. And when there is no one to blame for a defeat but himself, Trump has a history of arguing that victory was impossible because the playing field was not level. In high school, when his study partner got a better grade on a chemistry test, Trump questioned whether his classmate had cheated. Later in life, when his reality TV show lost out on an Emmy in 2013, Trump tweeted that “I should have many Emmys for The Apprentice if the process were fair.”
.. But Trump would never concede such a thing. It says so right on his family coat of arms. In 2008, when he was planning his golf course and club near Aberdeen, Scotland, Trump unveiled a family symbol featuring a lion, a knight’s helmet and a Latin phrase, “Numquam Concedere.” Translation: “Never concede.”
Donald Trump and the Death of American Exceptionalism
Goldwater is heralded as the father of modern conservatism, but he could occupy that niche only because successive generations of his heirs refined and streamlined his message, buffing away the elements that the public saw as extremist. The modern Republican Party staked its claim on conservatism, not on Goldwaterism.
.. The error was in thinking that this populace, mainlining Glenn Beck and Alex Jones theories and pondering how the Minutemen would have fought Sharia law, could be controlled. (For evidence to the contrary, the Party needed look no further than the premature political demise of Eric Cantor.) The old adage warns that one should beware of puppets that begin pulling their own strings.
.. Implicit within dog-whistling is enough respect for democratic norms and those outside one’s base to speak to that base in terms that the mass populace can’t readily decipher.
.. Trump is doing the opposite of this. He is an exhorter in a midsummer tent revival: direct, literal, and speaking at a decibel that makes it impossible to misunderstand his intentions. The end result of Trump’s evangelism is that a xenophobic, racist, misogynistic, serially mendacious narcissist is poised to pull in somewhere north of fifty million votes in the midst of the most bitterly contentious election in modern American history.
.. Trump is doing the opposite of this. He is an exhorter in a midsummer tent revival: direct, literal, and speaking at a decibel that makes it impossible to misunderstand his intentions. The end result of Trump’s evangelism is that a xenophobic, racist, misogynistic, serially mendacious narcissist is poised to pull in somewhere north of fifty million votes in the midst of the most bitterly contentious election in modern American history.
.. The old presumptions hold that some element of national humiliation and decline predisposes nations toward fascism, or at least the appeals of fascistic movements. But in the U.S. this movement sprang up on the contrails of the first black Presidency—a moment that was, perhaps naïvely at the time, thought to be one of national affirmation and triumph. The unsavory implication here, of course, is that, for the cornerstone elements of Trumpism, that triumph was a national humiliation, that the image of an African-American receiving the deference and regard that the Presidency entails invalidated these Americans’ understanding of what the U.S. is, or at least what it is supposed to be.
.. An exceptional nation would have better reflexes than this, would recognize the communicable nature of fear more quickly, would rally its immune defense more efficiently than the United States has in the past sixteen months.
.. The problem of Trump is not simply that his opinions far exceed his knowledge; it’s that what he does know is so hostile to democracy, not only in the Republican Party or the United States but in the world. Whatever happens on November 8th, we are at the outset of a much longer reckoning.
Closing Arguments: The Logic of Negative Campaigning
Still, some commentators say, by concentrating on taking down her opponent rather than marketing her own agenda to the voters, Clinton risks achieving a victory without earning a mandate.
That argument should be questioned, too, though. In the bitterly divided Washington of today, there may be no such thing as a mandate: Republicans in Congress will oppose a President Clinton no matter what she does. (We’ve already seen this in their pre-election vows to fight her nominees to the Supreme Court.)
.. which one of Trump’s grotesqueries and vulnerabilities to focus on.
- Con man and victimizer of the small guy?
- Chronic sexist and sexual predator?
- Race-baiting demagogue?
- Stunning lack of experience?
- Policy ignoramus?
- Serial tax dodger?
- Wannabe-authoritarian strong man who seems eager to trample on the Constitution?
- Thin-skinned narcissist and megalomaniac?