![]() He’s said to favor the Italian fashion house Brioni whose suits sell for the mid-thousand and whose shirts run to almost $600. Trump sells schlocky books and schlocky suits but he doesn’t read books and he certainly doesn’t wear Trump Suits or Trump Shirts. His son-in-law Jared Kushner certainly didn’t need a college degree to go make a living, but his father bought him a spot at Harvard for $2.5 million ("His GPA did not warrant it," an official at Kushner’s prep school told Dan Golden, "his SAT scores did not warrant it.") so he could be fancy. He didn’t develop suburban tract housing in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. He didn’t move to a mansion in the suburbs of Nashville. He was sent to a prep school where tuition now tops out at $36,000 and his dream was to move from the expensive-but-obscure neighborhood of Jamaica Estates in Queens to the famously expensive neighborhood of the Upper East Side in Manhattan. Trump was born and raised as a spoiled rich kid in New York City. Support for Trump is driven in part by resentment over political and social changes that have enhanced the position of nonwhites in America, and in part by a not-entirely-false sense that the hardworking people of middle America are being laughed at by cosseted elites in major coastal cities.īut Trump is one of the laughing elites, not one of the hard-pressed heartlanders. Politics is mostly about group identity, not policy or ideology. He opened his first Scottish course amid great fanfare and many broken promises.Īccording to Alex Salmond who was first minister of Scotland at the time the development was under way, Trump "didn’t deliver on his commitments to Scotland," and if he were elected president "he wouldn’t deliver on his commitments to America either." Trump is laughing at his supporters He also runs golf courses and they seem to be a scam too. Alongside the Trump University scam he had a second scam called the Trump Institute where the lessons were plagiarized. Steaks, wine, water, a fake university - even th e food at the Trump Caf é is bad. So he started licensing the brand hither and yon. But one of the quirks of his old failed businesses was his habit of slapping the name TRUMP on everything, so he had a much stronger brand nationally and globally than other objectively more successful New York real estate guys. He emerged from bankruptcy insufficiently creditworthy to get the kind of bank loans he would need to keep doing major real estate projects. ![]() Then he launched an airline, launched some casinos, turns out to have mismanaged his interest rate risk, and ended up losing nearly all of it. Once upon a time, Donald Trump was a real estate developer. Just ask his wife who stood up on a nationally broadcast primetime telecast to vouch for his integrity and decency, and turns out to have been set up for humiliation because Trump couldn’t be bothered to build the kind of professional presidential campaign that would equip Melania Trump with a decent speech. ![]() He refuses to put in the work, and if he becomes president the consequences are likely to be disastrous and unpredictable. Plagiarism offers a window into a different aspect of Trump, one that isn’t integral to his appeal. Harping on the fact that this is what Trump is doing - that his campaign is about fear of the other, not "economic anxiety" - is true and important, but it simply reiterates the point that campaigns are in part clashes of incommensurable values. Most white people think antiwhite discrimination has become a bigger problem than bias against blacks, and Trump’s pitch is that he’ll shatter the bonds of political correctness that are oppressing America. To Trump supporters, the fact that he says and does offensive stuff is what’s appealing about him. But it genuinely is one of the most important things that happened at the Republican National Convention so far. That Melania Trump’s speech Monday night at the Republican National Convention contained material plagiarized from Michelle Obama’s speech at the 2008 Democratic National Convention is not the most significant issue in the world.
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