Donald Trump, Bullying & the Very Very Rich

by Gaius Publius

This is a tale of three videos.

As you know, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar wrote an op-ed recently in which he discussed Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Here's part of what he said (my occasional emphasis):

Ernest Hemingway once said that courage was “grace under pressure.” Two presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, have recently tested this proposition. And how each man responded revealed the type of person he is and the type of president he would make: Trump authored his own doom, and Sanders opened immense new possibilities as a compassionate person and serious candidate for president.

Here’s where it went fatally wrong for Trump. During the GOP debate on Fox, when Megyn Kelly famously queried him about his attitude toward women (whom he has called “fat pigs,” “dogs,” “slobs” and “animals”) he hit back by threatening the questioner: “I’ve been very nice to you, although I could probably maybe not be, based on the way you have treated me. But I wouldn’t do that.”

Bad enough to alienate women in this way, but there’s even more insidious political crime here: attacking the First Amendment’s protection of a free press by menacing journalists. “I wouldn’t do that,” he said coyly. If you wouldn’t do it, why bring up that you could? For no other reason than to stifle other journalists who might want to ask tough but reasonable questions. If Americans learned that a leader in another country was threatening reporters, we would be outraged. Yet here it is. Right here. Right now.

Later, after Trump had blamed her attitude on her menstrual cycle, Kelly went on what Fox says was a planned vacation. Nevertheless, Trump suggested he may have been the cause. What kind of candidate takes credit for bullying the media? And last week, Trump allowed Univision reporter Jorge Ramos to be ejected from a press conference for asking questions about immigration without being called upon. Ramos was later readmitted and permitted to ask about immigration, during which he said Trump could still deport immigrants compassionately. “I have a bigger heart than you do,” Trump replied. Trump’s non-specific answer to the question ended with a personal insult directed at the reporter.

And:

Trump’s vendetta against the press extended to the Des Moines Register. When the paper issued an editorial calling for Trump to withdraw from the campaign, he refused to give the paper’s reporters credentials to attend his campaign event in Iowa in July. He also called the paper “failing” and “very dishonest.” Other journalists he thinks have treated him harshly he refers to as “losers” or unintelligent, as if the definition of lack of intelligence is to not agree with him.

Attempting to bully the press to silence criticism of him is anti-American.

Unlike Howie, who discussed this op-ed earlier, the part I want to focus on isn't the First Amendment, nor the press, nor Bernie Sanders, nor even Donald Trump as a person. It's the bullying.

Bullying in the World of the Wealthy

Play the clip at the top again (it's just over 40 seconds), and notice the sneering, the arrogance, the presumption of power. Notice also, at the 0:17 mark, how he uses just his lips to signal his — what, bodyguard? — to act like a goon squad and physically force Ramos out of the room. Trump sneers, smacks his lips to summon the goon, and the goon lays hands on the reporter.

This is exercise of power, presumption of power, and comfort with the presumption of power — all three — on Trump's part. It's a way of saying and showing, "I'm at the top, I deserve to be at the top, and I'm going to use all of the power that being at the top provides me."

At the tip of the pyramid, the very top of the U.S. (and international) food chain, this kind of sneering, bullying, and presumption of the right to bully, is almost the norm. This is really the way a surprising number of people in that position regularly act. The fact that we rarely see it, and therefore rarely associate them with this extreme arrogance, isn't a function of their not doing it. It's a function of their invisibility. Until Donald Trump.

The Hidden World of "Our Betters" ...

I wrote elsewhere, in a piece on Deep State and how the U.S. is controlled, that "You can vote for the puppets, but not the puppeteers."

That's obviously true, once you think about it. You can't vote for David Koch, just Scott Walker. You can't vote for Sheldon Adelson, just Marco Rubio. And so on.

It's also true that we almost never see the puppeteers, or their world. We don't see their homes (their gold, crystal and mahogany palaces really), their jets, their yachts, their servants, their private schools, their privileges. We imagine that they have estates. We don't imagine that they have dozens of them, each.

For example, Jeff Greene is a New York billionaire — literally billionaire — who made his money in real estate. This is how he lives, via New York magazine:

It’s incredible, right?” shouts Jeff Greene over the roar of the two-seater dune buggy’s motor. “It’s 55 acres!” Still in his whites from this morning’s tennis match, he’s giving a personal tour of his Sag Harbor estate, barreling at 30 miles per hour through the vast forest of scrubby pines and soft moss of its gated grounds. “Beautiful nature here!” A blur of deer goes by, and the trees break to reveal the summer sun glinting off a grassy lagoon. Greene slows by its shore. “This is our swan pond, and this is our private beach,” he says, gesturing toward a slip of white sand encircling the edge of the North Haven Peninsula. “It goes all the way to the ferry. Three thousand feet of beach,” he adds, a smile spreading across his tanned face.

The punch line?

[2009 is] when he picked up this property for around $40 million (half the 2007 listing price), which he and his wife have christened “Greene Haven.” “I wish we could spend more time here,” he says. “Honestly, we have so many great homes.”

When you imagine great wealth, do you imagine it on that scale? Likely not, because that world is invisible. Until Donald Trump.

... Is Being Revealed by Donald Trump

What's different about Donald Trump? He's not just the puppet, meaning the candidate — he's his own puppeteer. This means that for the second time in modern electoral history, a puppeteer has put himself on center stage. The first was Mitt Romney, he of the "47%" speech. Before him we've had just puppets, financed solely by others.

If it's true that you can't vote for Sheldon Adelson, say, only his puppet Mario Rubio, it's even more true that you can't even see Sheldon Adelson most of the time, or David Koch, or Jamie Dimon. (Do you know what any of their voices sound like, for example?  Do you know if Jamie Dimon is tall or short?)

But occasionally one of them makes an unwanted public appearance, and then we see who they are. This is Sheldon Adelson, courtesy of a must-read 2012 piece by Rick Perlstein in Rolling Stone:

Why GOP Mega-Donor Sheldon Adelson Is Mad, Bad and a Danger to the Republic

... Adelson's company Las Vegas Sands (LVS) spends more on security for him and his family than any other publicly held corporation, $2.5 million – two and a half times more than Dell, Oracle, and Amazon spend on their CEOs. He usually ambles around with an armed former agent of the Mossad, Israel's spy agency – for instance, into a deposition for a lawsuit filed by employees (including security guards!) claiming they hadn't been paid overtime. It was quite a scene – and one that you can see for yourself, because once Adelson tried to have the plaintiffs' lawyers cited for contempt after a TV station received and aired a videotape of the deposition, the publication Vegas Inc. ran the video as part of their coverage of this latest Adelson legal action. It reveals a creepy sourpuss who is a blatant liar: Adelson said he brought in the muscle because he felt threatened when the plaintiff lawyer "attempted to throw books at" him. See for yourself (at 2:40) if such a thing ever happened, then his astonishing petulance when a lawyer objects to continuing a legal proceeding with an armed janissary staring him down.

And here's that video. Feel free to focus on the fact that Adelson brought "muscle," armed muscle, into a deposition. But also focus just on his manner. How like Donald Trump is Sheldon Adelson?

If the above video does not appear or play in your browser, go here, or play this link in a media player. But please do watch; it's a doozy. It's also the second video in this three-video piece.

My point? Donald Trump is peeling the mask off the world of the mega-rich, the very very rich. And far too many of them are like what you see here. Bullies and proud of it.

Conan the Politician

It's almost like they've taken lessons from this man, isn't it?

And that's your third video. If you want the single reason your descendants may be hunter-gatherers, to take one consequence, you're looking at it.

GP
 

GOP Front-Runner Donald Trump Defines The Republican Party's "Deep Bench": "Bunch Of Clowns, Bunch Of Real Clowns"

Ronald Reagan's 11th Commandment was, at least superficially, sacrosanct among Republicans... until Trump took over the party. Reagan, from his 1990 book An American Life:

The personal attacks against me during the primary finally became so heavy that the state Republican chairman, Gaylord Parkinson, postulated what he called the Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican. It's a rule I followed during that campaign and have ever since.

In the video compilation above, Trump is shown doing the kind of takedown of his party's presidential field that Hillary Clinton would never dare. "We have losers, we have losers. We have people who don't have it," the TV reality-show star said of the party's "deep bench." Trump is busy rendering Jeb Bush unelectable, emphasizing a series of ugly, off-putting personality traits that voters will flee from. He has no energy; he's "an unhappy person," as well as being "weak" and "a puppet to his donors." In sum: "How the hell can you vote for this guy?"

Trump has already obliterated Rick Perry, who was governor of the biggest Republican state in America for 15 years. After he famously declared that Perry should "have to have an IQ test before getting on the debate stage," Perry's campaign fizzled out entirely. He never went beyond 1 or 2% in the polls again. 

Then there's this: "This guy Lindsey Graham-- a total lightweight. He doesn't seem like a very bright guy. He actually, probably, seems to me, not as bright, honestly, as Rick Perry." Lindsey is lucky he doesn't have to run for his Senate seat again for five years. (And Trump hasn't even outed him yet!)

And anyone who didn't know that John Kasich was a Lehman Bros managing director when the company went belly up and nearly upended the entire U.S. economy... well, Trump reminded them. As for Carly Fiorina: "She ran Hewlett Packard into the ground; then her stock value tanked. She laid off tens of thousands of people. And she got viciously fired." Many Republicans didn't know that about Carly Fiorina. Now they do.

Nor has he been gentle with the candidate the Koch brothers had originally settled on: Scott Walker. "Wisconsin's doing terribly; the roads are a distaster, the hospitals and education are a disaster." He skewers Rand Paul ("weak on the military... weak on immigration-- he's weak on everything") and Marco Rubio, and then he's back to how much of an unqualified moron Jeb Bush is. Jeb's responses-- his pathetic attempts to "hit back" at the bully-- only underline what a terrible leader he would make. It never pays to roll around in the mud with a pig, unless you plan to use a butcher knife.

Bush does not seem to be radiating much joy these days.

He said last year that he would run for president only if he could do so with a sunny spirit, but Mr. Trump, the unlikely front-runner who gleefully ignores the traditional rules of political engagement, has turned this summer into a miserable one for Mr. Bush.

There is the personal ridicule-- constantly questioning Mr. Bush’s vigor, invoking a since-retracted statement by his mother, Barbara Bush, that “we’ve had enough Bushes” in the White House, and even alluding to his wife’s Mexican heritage in discussing immigration.

But the torment goes deeper than that. Emphasizing bluster over ideas, Mr. Trump has turned the campaign into a tabloid-style clash of personalities, heavy on provocation and insults. What little policy that has been discussed mostly revolves around Mr. Trump’s appeals to anxious white conservatives: stoking fears about immigrants, gang members and foreign countries that, in his telling, are eclipsing America.

It is a race, in other words, that embodies what Mr. Bush likes least about politics.

Mr. Bush is at his most animated discussing policy. And the only thing he may be more passionate about than issues is his conviction that the Republicans must become an inclusive, big-hearted party that appeals to people’s hopes rather than their resentments.

“It’s got to be difficult,” said John McKager Stipanovich, a veteran Florida lobbyist who has known Mr. Bush for over 30 years. “Donald Trump epitomizes everything that Jeb has spent his political career trying to prevent the Republican Party from becoming.”

...“He attacks me every day with nonsense, with things that aren’t true,” Mr. Bush said in Spanish, before saying much the same in English: “He tries to personalize everything. If you are not totally in agreement with him, you’re an idiot, or stupid, or you have no energy, or blah, blah, blah. That’s what he does.”

...More than annoyance is at stake. Mr. Bush’s advisers say they believe that the relentless mockery by Mr. Trump is contributing to their candidate’s slide in the polls. In a new Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics poll, more Iowa Republicans view Mr. Bush unfavorably than favorably. Mr. Bush has also slipped in some national surveys, falling into single digits and well back in the Republican pack.

The campaign does not want donors and up-for-grab Republican voters to see Mr. Bush as meekly absorbing Mr. Trump’s blows, so Mr. Bush, the former Florida governor, has begun to criticize Mr. Trump aggressively on the campaign trail. This week, he released a video highlighting the developer’s previous liberal views.



Still, seemingly powerless to pull Mr. Trump down, Mr. Bush and his advisers are expressing anger over what they see as the news media’s enabling of Mr. Trump by not scrutinizing his far-fetched plans, such as making Mexico pay for a wall along the United States’ southern border.

“Look, this guy’s the front-runner,” Mr. Bush said last week at a town-hall-style meeting in Norfolk, Va. “He should be treated like a front-runner, not like some kind of alternative universe to the political system.”

At a private fund-raiser the night before in Richmond, Va., Mr. Bush was even more direct when asked by a contributor what he would do about Mr. Trump. Mr. Bush said with a touch of wonder that Mr. Trump’s rise reminded him of reality TV, adding that he was the only candidate taking on the bombastic front-runner and that he hoped the news media would begin aggressively vetting Mr. Trump, according to an attendee.

UPDATE: From Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

In yesterday's Washington Post Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, author, all-time leading NBA scorer and former cultural ambassador for the United States, opined about how Trump and Bernie Sanders differ.

Ernest Hemingway once said that courage was “grace under pressure.” Two presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, have recently tested this proposition. And how each man responded revealed the type of person he is and the type of president he would make: Trump authored his own doom, and Sanders opened immense new possibilities as a compassionate person and serious candidate for president.

...Americans may flirt with the preppy life of the frathouse partier because he’s poked sacred cows, said stuff we all wish we could say (except that reason keeps us from doing it), and acted buffoonishly entertaining. But when you wake up the next morning and he’s saying you’re now in a four-year relationship, reason comes rushing in, and it is time for the “it’s me, not you” speech. With over a year until the elections, there are too many Republican hopefuls that dilute the polls. Once the herd thins out (Rick Perry seems out of money; Bobby Jindal out of breath; Huckabee out of touch), other candidates with more substance will have their voices heard. And when it comes down to just three or four candidates, Trump’s blustering inarticulation and dodging of questions will seem untrustworthy.

Although each absurd, uninformed or just plain incorrect statement seems to give Trump a bump in the polls, there are only so many times supporters can defend his outrageous assault on decency, truth and civility. Yes, a few will remain no matter what. (One 63-year-old woman told CNN that the Republicans were out to discredit Trump: “They twisted what the words were, because they’re trying to destroy him.” No one has to twist his words because what he says is twisted enough. He speaks fluent pretzel.) But voters will eventually see the light.

Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders faced his own challenge at a political event last month, when two African American women pushed in front of him to use the microphone to demand four and a half minutes of silence to honor the death of Michael Brown. Sanders left the stage and mingled with the crowd. Later, Trump criticized Sanders as being “weak” for allowing them to speak, but truly he showed grace under pressure by acknowledging their frustration and anger. Instead of bullying their voices into silence or ridiculing them as losers, pigs or bimbos, Sanders left. After all, it was not his event; he was a guest. Besides, his voice was not silenced, but came back booming even louder: The next day, Sanders posted a sweeping policy of reform to fight racial inequality. (The timing coincided with Michael Brown’s death and had nothing to do with the two women.)

The two approaches reveal the difference between a mature, thoughtful and intelligent man, and a man whose money has made him arrogant to criticism and impervious to feeling the need to have any actual policies. Trump threatens to run an independent campaign (he won’t; that’s a negotiating ploy). Trump is a last-call candidate who looks good in the boozy dark of political inebriation.

...Two roads diverged in a political wood, and one man took the road of assaulting the Constitution and soon will be lost forever. The other will be a viable candidate who, regardless of whether he wins the nomination, will elevate the political process into something our Founding Fathers would be proud of.

Trump, of course, responded in typical classy Trumpian fashion: