I’m not even sure about that. He’s good at being willing to violate standards of behavior so blatantly that people just accept his lies, and he’s willing to do whatever it takes to make money. This seems to have been his modus operandi for his entire career, not just the political part. He spent his business career lying blatantly about his wealth (essentially saying he had some, when he didn’t), to the point where he became synonymous with “success” at which point people were willing to give him money to be associated with him. His actual businesses had uniformly been failures, so he learned he needed to make money off businesses that weren’t his. In recent years his business is mostly money laundering for organized crime and those under sanctions, and now he’s selling access to the presidency. (Now he’s worth, most likely, not too much more than his inheritance.) Reading about his career, I don’t really see any signs of genius - he was just willing to be so outrageous in his behavior that no one called him on it because they couldn’t believe what he was doing. The key to his success, such as it is, was showing up on the Forbes “Wealthiest” list. They expected him to exaggerate - they were unprepared for him to layer lie upon lie to get on there when he didn’t have any money. That just took chutzpah. He maintained the illusion by doing things like falsely associating himself with charities - i.e. showing up at a charity event, sitting in a major donor’s seat of honor to have his picture taken, and not giving any money - which he got away with because no one knew how to deal with it (so they didn’t). That just took a willingness to violate norms of behavior for his own gain. I see no sign of genius anywhere.
He’s an attention-seeking sociopath from a prominent family - if all those things weren’t true, we wouldn’t have even heard of him.
He has walked into a bank, basically bankrupt and everyone in the bank aware of it, and walked out with millions of investor dollars.
Add to that, Trump is well understood to loot his businesses leaving nothing for the legal investors - he can build an unprofitable casino, which is almost inconceivable - and yet he has no trouble getting more people to believe in him. To believe in him so much, they’ll give him their money.
I’d certainly call it genius, or perhaps, as you put it earlier a “feral cunning”. We don’t have to respect it or admire it to acknowledge that it isn’t a common trait! Who else operates confidence games at that level, repeatedly and successfully*?
Since I’m a fan of the multiple intelligences theory, it doesn’t seem inconsistent to me that a person can be simultaneously a fool and a genius.
* seriously, I want to know.
Except they weren’t, exactly - the Forbes list gave him an illusion of success that people bought into. That got him loans that otherwise wouldn’t have been available. I’m also unclear on how much of his ability to leverage his failures like the casino into personal successes was down to the work of those around him. Given that Trump apparently can’t even read a balance sheet, I’m not sure that any successful business decision is down to him.
Yeah, that was my thinking about Trump. I think this is the key to his success - he’s good at social engineering. But the degree of his success seems to be a result of coming from a prominent family and people not expecting the outrageous behavior from him, not from him being that good at it. His behavior was so weird and unexpected that people couldn’t see through it - until they did. And once that happened, he couldn’t con those people anymore. People in New York at least became aware of his cons and he had to look further afield for marks, because his cons relied on sheer disbelief in others and he wasn’t “smart” enough to overcome the loss of it.
Meanwhile, I’ll gamble that most people have never heard of Trammell Crow – who was measurably very successful in real estate – nor would they care what he thought.
I’m reminded of an article I read from a few years ago, where Warren Buffet says, “When you owe $100, they come and take the TV set. When you owe $1 Billion, they say, ‘Hang in there, Donald’.” It shouldn’t be that hard to find the article, if anyone’s interested. I don’t feel like looking it up.
I’ve heard a variation on that quote attributed to J. Paul Getty: “If you owe the bank $100, that’s your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that’s the bank’s problem.”
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