A Loud Knock on the Door
Things are closing in, at last, on our friend Donald Trump, and it’s about time. Trump has gotten away with “murder” for over thirty years. His impunity knows no bounds. But sooner or later even The Great Houdini tried one trick too many and found his burst appendix did him in on Halloween. I, like many, have been amazed at how much one arrogant and egocentric man could get away with. It is inconceivable that the Universe allows such aberrations. Benito Mussolini was the father of Fascism, aspiring to and attaining power in Italy for almost thirty years. Adolf Hitler spent twenty-five years serving in the German army (despite being Austrian-born) and then building the Nazi Party from the German Worker’s Party before taking over as the world’s most infamous dictator for a dozen years. Emperor Hirohito of Japan was the world’s last Emperor for 63 years and presided over the rise and fall of Japan by virtue of signing the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy, forming the evil Axis that required a World War of five years to dismantle on three continents. None of these three evil genius leaders just stumbled into their positions. They all worked over years to ply their insidious and ethnocentric plans for world domination. Not so Donald Trump.
By now we have all heard the trump story. Strong-willed and probably racist father. Demure and seemingly uninvolved mother. Siblings who were either more diligent and accomplished, alcoholic or more fundamentally kind. Ne’er-do-well spoiled and undisciplined middle child that got shipped off to military school and then did everything his father dreaded he might do….twice. He cheated and stole birthright from his siblings and manipulated his father into bailing out his excesses over and over again while pretending to be successful. He grew up to be a textbook loser who feared losing more than anything else, to the pointless of learning that denial was always his best friend.
If a cat has nine lives, Donald found a way to buy three cats and strip them of all 27 lives to keep himself and his fictional life stumbling forward. The bank I rose to the Management Committee ranks of, Bankers Trust, was Donald’s lead bank for some strange reason. In those days I ran the Global Private Bank at Bankers Trust and we would not do business with him (that changed after Deutsche Bank acquired us in 1999 and I left for greener pastures). His business was handled out of the Real Estate Department, not surprisingly because his personal wealth was never the basis of his financial resources, but rather his father’s and then his real estate holdings. People sometimes don’t realize that often banks will do business with less than perfect creditors on the basis of the underlying real estate assets alone, assuming away that all important element of respectable lending, personal character. After Trump’s first of six bankruptcies in 1991 (his latest was in 2009), under the banner of sensible business, when we should have spanked him and sent him home without his ball, we made the world changing mistake of thinking that his brand was worth saving, so we put him on a “modest” $400,000/month allowance to maintain his lifestyle. We could have spared the United States and the world the embarrassment of producing such a bad example of a human being and an even worse example of a national leader had we just let nature take its course of leaving his to wallow in the streets of New York. He might have found a path to financial recovery, as many bankrupts in real estate do, but he would not have done so with such panache and certainty that he could get away with anything.
Trump was almost certainly not making a serious run at presidential politics in 2015 when he announced his candidacy. Some might suggest that the narcissist in him might have actually thought everyone loved him and that he could turn that into a national candidacy, but the odds-on betting line was likely that his shrewdness taught him that “any and all publicity is a good thing” and with a waning brand that needed polishing, he might be able to get a few more laps out of the Trump name if he acquired a national, even if controversial, stage. Just five years before that I met with him, Ivanka and even Don Jr. on several occasions at their Fifth Avenue offices and at Trump Soho to discuss his brand. I was running Africa Israel USA and had 22 distressed trophy real estate properties from Manhattan to Panama that needed rehabilitation and selling. Trump’s name came up often as we pondered the best way to polish our batch of somewhat mealy apples. At that time the Apprentice had been on for six of its ultimate fifteen seasons and The Trump Organization was not even a development company anymore. Trump had morphed into a marketing machine focused on reality TV (perhaps the one successful business he ever created and ran) and a branding company that was still hawking the Trump gold-gilded name. We quickly determined that with a dozen or more seemingly identical Trump buildings going up along the West Side Highway of Manhattan named Trump Place, the dilution of the brand was beyond simple tarnish, it was dead.
At this point not only have the buildings renamed themselves, viewing the Trump name as a liability, but the City removed all name and affiliation with Trump from everywhere it could. Even Donald’s last wannabe erection, Trump Soho, has been renamed the Dominick Hotel, showing us that even a pedestrian and non-celebrity name like Dominick is better than the Trump name.
With his financial empire under attack by New York State and New York City, his political empire is under even greater attack in Fulton County, Georgia and in the Congressional hearing rooms where the January 6th Commission does business. All of these chickens are coming to roost (I did, indeed, predict this timing last year) right now and the indictment grand juries are positioned to start writing the carefully worded claims against perhaps the most powerful (that powered by fear of the emboldened base that is just crazy enough to do just about anything under the banner of Trump) politician since Adolf Hitler. If you can smell fear from a cornered animal, even Trump’s numerous cosmetic and fragrance applications will not disguise the odor coming from his corner on Palm Beach.
The world’s debt collector has a way of coming calling sooner or later to collect the remnants of Fred Trump’s finally depleted fortune and our collective misfortune of Donald Trump on the national stage. I always know that my commentary on Trump either seems too pessimistic or too optimistic to many, but this is how I see the world and the one thing I know for sure now is that there is a loud knock on the door at Mar-a-Lago in the offing. You have been served you self-righteous, lying, narcissist.