Sunday Stew: Trump
I was reading Trump: How to Get Rich today and started thinking about why and how this man has become such a cultural icon. He's what literary critic Harold Bloom said of Shakespeare's troubled hero Hamlet -- he is larger than life itself.Donald Trump--the great New York City business tycoon--got to the top through good decison making and gut instinct. He's prudent at what he does, so when he hits, it's either a big strike or a monstruous home run. That is his business savvy. Today, fans of The Apprentice know that Trump's sense of humor is an integral part of what makes him succeed -- He won’t give out investing advice for one good reason. If the advice turns out bad, he is the first person to be blamed. However, if the advice earns an investor millions, he or she is quick to forget where that great advice came from. For this reason, when someone asks him when or where to invest their money, he simply replies, "Good Luck."
When Catablast! first launched, we did a story on Trump, in which Joe argued that Trump was a "quintessentially postmodern hero." That is to say that Trump's persona carries and represents a bevy of ideas, intuitions, and ideologies that could only be characterized as postmodern. Here's an excerpt:
At a recent appearance at NYU Stern, the Donald advised master's candidates to "be paranoid," "get even," "always have a prenuptial agreement," and, of course, "think big," which in Trump-speak really means "figure out how to get your name in the newspaper...his real power stems from his faithful commitment to the timeless morality of the profit motive...Trump's primary aim is self-promotion. That's why, unlike many developers, he relentlessly plasters his moniker on all of his properties. He keeps his comb over in the belief that the idea of himself, not his actual person, is his greatest asset...He's an actor more than anything else, making billions by being authentically inauthentic.It is precisely Trump's ego and clever self-marketing prowess that we idolize. Trump is the white P. Diddy, not the Carnegie and JD Rockefeller type you thought he was--and I have no problem with that.
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