By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, June 16, 2015
Donald Trump may be the man America needs. Having been
through four bankruptcies, the ridiculous buffoon with the worst taste since
Caligula is uniquely positioned to lead the most indebted organization in the
history of the human race.
The Trump conglomerate is the Argentina of
limited-liability companies, having been in bankruptcy as recently as 2009. To
be sure, a lot of companies went bankrupt around then. The Trump gang went
bankrupt in 2004, too, and in 2001. Before that, Trump was in bankruptcy court
back in 1991 when his Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City — the nation’s first
casino-cum-strip-club, an aesthetic crime against humanity that is tacky by the
standards of Atlantic City — turned out to be such a loser that Trump could not
make his debt payments.
The closing of that casino has been announced at least
twice — it was supposed to shut its doors in December, but it limps on.
Donald Trump, being Donald Trump, announced his candidacy
at Trump Plaza, making a weird grand entrance via escalator — going down, of
course, the symbolism of which is lost on that witless ape. But who could
witness that scene — the self-made man who started with nothing but a modest
portfolio of 27,000 New York City properties acquired by his millionaire
slumlord father, barely out of his latest bankruptcy and possibly headed for
another one as the casino/jiggle-joint bearing his name sinks into the filthy
mire of the one U.S. city that makes Las Vegas look respectable, a
reality-television grotesque with his plastic-surgery-disaster wife, grunting
like a baboon about our country’s “brand” and his own vast wealth — and not see
the peerless sign of our times?
On the substance, Trump is — how to put it gently? Oh,
why bother! — an ass. Not just an ass, but an ass of exceptionally intense
asininity. China? “China’s leaders are like Tom Brady, and the U.S. is like a
high-school football team,” Trump says. And so, we should do what?
“ . . . ”
Trump’s is a fill-in-the-blanks agenda: He claims to have
a plan for defeating ISIS, but he cannot say what it is for reasons of
operational security for the mission that exists only in his mind. He assures
us the plan is “foolproof,” but whoever coined that word had never met a fool
like Donald Trump. Immigration? Build a wall and force the Mexicans to pay for
it.
How to do that?
“ . . . ”
The one thing worse than Trump’s vague horsepucky is his
specific horsepucky, i.e., his 1999 plan to impose a one-time tax — everybody
knows how good Washington is about “one time” uses of power — on the wealth of
all high-net-worth individuals and institutions. A 14.25 percent tax, he
calculated, would retire the national debt. And what about institutions that
don’t have 14.25 percent of their net worth in ready cash — to take a totally
random example, let’s say a poorly run real-estate concern with a lot of
illiquid assets and unmanageable debt payments eating up all its ready cash?
“ . . . ”
Trump says that he cannot discuss the details of his
agenda because of — his word — “enemies.” Who are these enemies?
“ . . . ”
Perspective? Trump predicted that we may be heading
toward a stock-market crash worse than the one in 1929, but: “I remain
extremely optimistic about Atlantic City.”
We’ve been to this corner of Crazytown before. If we’re
going to have a billionaire dope running for the presidency, I prefer Ross
Perot and his cracked tales of Vietnamese hit squads dispatched to take him out
while Lee Atwater plotted to crash his daughter’s wedding with phonied-up
lesbian sex pictures.
I have a theory about Trump and his delusions, based,
I’ll admit, on pure superstition. There’s an ancient belief, one that persists
into our own time, that our names exert occult influence on our lives. And
Trump’s name, while potentially comical — “Don-John” — doesn’t offer much in
the way of scrying. But his father’s middle name was — true fact — Christ. Fred
Christ. Obama’s arrival was announced by a man called Emanuel, but The Donald
was brought into this world by Christ himself — Fred Christ. How could a man
like that not have a messiah complex?
Of course, when Trump sings “How Great Thou Art,” he
sings it in a mirror.
The problem with messiah complexes is that there’s no way
to know whether you are going to rise on the third day unless somebody crucifies
you. Trump has announced, and I say we get started on that.
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