Trump Is Throwing the Election
Since his unexpected election almost four years ago, a political cataclysm that shocked Democrats to their core, the animated liberal discussion about President Donald J. Trump has divided into two distinct camps: he’s evil versus he’s crazy. The “evil” advocates imagine Trump as a master politician with a cult-like following of millions of red-hatted rubes who stand ready to do his quite possibly violent bidding. This Trump is cunning and demonic, capable of anything in the furtherance of his fascistic aims. It should be noted that “evil” theorists paint our forty-fifth president as a genius who frequently executes 37-dimensional chess moves that defy political gravity – which, oddly, is exactly how Trump’s ardent fanbase imagines him, minus the evil, naturally.
On the other side, the “Trump be crazy” advocates see the current Oval Office resident as a literal madman, unable to control his emotions or any part of himself, as witnessed by his nonstop unhinged tweets, the bizarre outbursts on camera, his cavorting with porn stars, plus his regular rant-interviews – ranterviews, if you like – with his FoxNews buddy Sean Hannity. Some in the “crazy” camp suspect that Trump’s manic ways are amplified by drugs: Adderall is frequently mentioned. It’s impossible to say which of these theories comes closer to the truth about Trump, but what we can establish with confidence is that they cannot both be true at the same time.
That said, given Trump’s recent shenanigans, as the election approaches with celerity, it’s appropriate to ask just what the commander-in-chief’s mental state actually is. Just over the last ten days we’ve witnessed an astonishing display of political mania. First, we had Trump’s bizarre-even-for-him debate performance against Joe Biden, where his aggressive, personal beef style of shouty political discussion turned off everyone not already on Team MAGA. Then came the president’s brush with Coronavirus, which he seems to have survived thanks to the best medical treatment in the world, but Trump then decided to revert to his “just the flu” mantras from last spring. You don’t have to personally blame Trump for the deaths of 210,000 Americans at the hands of the virus, as many Democrats do, to ask where this guy’s moral compass got waylaid.
Perhaps most importantly, Trump this week announced – via Twitter, of course – that he was throwing in the towel on any stimulus package to assist the tens of millions of Americans who are facing dire poverty thanks to the terrible economic impacts of Coronavirus. Simply put, as Eddy Elfenbein did today in his must-read newsletter: “The U.S. economy lost 22 million jobs in two months. In the five months since then, the economy has recovered 11 million jobs. Yes, it’s an impressive recovery, but it’s only about halfway back to the status quo ante.” Winter is coming and millions of unemployed Americans, many of whom are supporters of the president, are confronting personal disaster. Trump’s turning his back on them right before the election meets the definition of political insanity.
What the hell is going on here? In his usual fashion, Trump has walked the cat back a bit after his screw-the-stimulus tweet tanked the stock market, and the White House is now hinting that a compromise stimulus bill remains possible before the election – surely an optimistic take, given the state of our deeply divided Congress. Why did Trump do it in the first place? The idea that Trump wants to lose needs to be seriously considered.
He never wanted the job in the first place. The plan was never to actually win the presidency: even the Kremlin never intended for Trump to emerge victorious, their desire was to damage the coming Clinton presidency, motivated mainly by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s hatred of Hillary. On election night, November 9, 2016, Trump had no prepared victory speech. It seems likely that Trump wanted to up his brand to make more money, and running for the White House was, in a sense, the ultimate reality TV endeavor.
Shortly after the election, Trump’s longtime friend Howard Stern explained this odd situation concisely: “I think it started out as like a kinda cool, fun thing to do in order to get a couple more bucks out of NBC for The Apprentice,” adding, “He just wanted a couple more bucks out of NBC…He's pissed he won.” Presciently, Stern noted that being president when he didn’t even want the job was not going to be good for Don’s mental wellbeing: “This is something that is gonna be detrimental to his mental health too, because, he wants to be liked, he wants to be loved…He wants people to cheer for him…I don't think it's going to be a healthy experience.”
Four years later, here we are. The notion that Trump wants out of The Apprentice: White House, which was never the plan anyway, ought to be placed in the discussion. Certainly, that Trump wants to lose subconsciously seems plausible. This is a 74-year-old man who’s recently gotten seriously ill with a life-threatening virus, plus the onerous daily schedule of the president cannot appeal to the addicted-to-TV-watching Trump even on his healthiest day. To say nothing of the personal stresses evidenced by his regular tweetstorm rants in caps-lock. This guy hates his job.
Then there’s the matter of the president’s parlous personal finances. As was recently revealed, Trump is, not to put to fine a point on it, broke. He’s something like a billion dollars in the hole, of which over $400 million is coming due rather soon. To say nothing of potential tax bills inbound, which seem inevitable since our alleged billionaire president has been paying essentially no Federal taxes in this century. None of these debts can get paid down on the president’s salary of $400,000 annually, which represents about one percent of what Trump needs to come up with pronto. Not to mention that his hotels and related properties have taken a big hit as Trump’s personal brand has gone downhill with his presidency.
Trump will never admit how broke he is, but the truth has been hiding in plain sight for years. To cite one of his dodgier deals, witness Trump Tower Baku, which began construction in 2008 but, like so many Trump projects, it’s never been completed. Typically for Trump’s deals, this was licensing only, selling the Trump name as a stand-alone. The grandiose project never made much business sense, since the demand for an “ultra-luxury property” in Trumpian style in Azerbaijan’s capital was never large. Worse, the project put Trump in bed with the notorious Mammadov family, the most corrupt clan in the country (its patriarch Ziya Mammadov was memorably described in a State Department cable as “notoriously corrupt even for Azerbaijan”). Worse yet, the Mammadov clan is known to have cultivated commercial ties with Iran’s notorious Revolutionary Guards Corps, the murderous Pasdaran.
Extensive investigation concluded that Trump was paid a little over $5 million for his licensing deal with Trump Tower Baku. Let’s be frank: that amount, for a billionaire, represents pocket change. No billionaire with any sense would enter such a stingy deal – a deal that puts Trump in bed not just with unpleasant Eastern oligarchs but indirectly with an organization which Trump’s own administration has branded a Foreign Terrorist Organization – unless that “billionaire” really needed the money.
After making much noise in 2016 about funding his own presidential campaign, Trump has never done any such thing. Indeed, his financial condition now appears so dire that, as of a few weeks ago, Trump this year had moved $2.3 million from campaign donors to his personal businesses. As Forbes summed it up: “The richest president in American history, who has yet to donate to his 2020 campaign, has now moved $2.3 million of contributions from other people into his private companies.” Since entering the White House, Trump has shifted a total of almost $7 million from campaign donors and his campaign to himself. Which is a strange thing for a “billionaire” to do.
Maybe Trump is throwing his reelection, acting crazier by the day, simply because he hates being president. The only thing he ever ran before our Executive branch was the Trump Organization, which is in reality a smallish family firm, not a big, publicly traded corporation, and he hardly ran it well, based on the massive losses Don declared on his tax returns, year after year. Being president, the fullest full-time job imaginable, has got to be a massive hassle for a 74-year-old guy who’s not in the best of health.
Trump’s best course of action may be to throw the election so he can get back to making money, which he needs lots of, fast. It’s time to accept that this has never been about politics, it was always about brand-building, not presidenting. Donald J. Trump is creating a lifestyle brand, perhaps with a cable TV network attached, to appeal to his millions of superfans who will remain ardent admirers even after he leaves the White House. They can adore all things Trump, ignoring mask-wearing and social distancing, perhaps while boating. They can savor Don’s endless tweet-rants while purchasing Trump hats, t-shirts, steaks, what have you. This seems like the only way our president can get himself out of the deep financial hole he’s dug for himself and his family. It’s Trump’s best bet, so long as the New York Attorney General doesn’t keep asking awkward questions about the Trump Organization and its murky finances, as they were just this week.