Great

Fancy a Kerala houseboat as a vacation home?

Ever coasted down the backwaters of Kerala and lived the good life and wondered if you could own one of those beautiful houseboats as your...

Thursday, August 20, 2020

Trump is a self-made failure & not a success story

The book 'Too Much and Never Enough' was greatly anticipated and since the Trump family was hoping it would never be published, it stoked people's expectations about what Mary Trump was revealing about her dysfunctional family, even more. She's certainly revealed the President's parents (non)parenting techniques. Her grandfather's business ethics weren't any better but it certainly made them extremely wealthy. I loved how she explains that her grandfather built a debt-free realty business with taxpayer's money. Donald used that money, his father's contacts and none of that business acumen and went ahead and built casinos or hotels and was forever being bailed out by his bankers and/or his father. So far from being a self-made successful business tycoon, Donald Trump is neither self made or really successful. Not after five bankruptcies!

She has court documents and numbers to prove her case and no wonder, Trump has already tweeted and called her "a mess". Really, what is he then anyway? After, reading this book, you realise that the only one who was the diamond-in-the-rough and who could have been groomed to take over the Trump empire, which no longer exists because Donald Trump sold it for $705.6 million, was her father Fred Trump Jr. He was really badly treated and as a daughter, I can understand she wants the world to know about his lost potential. What is laughable is for a family that is this greedy that they left her and her brother out of the family wealth is that the $700 million property was valued by banks to be worth a billion dollars! So the man with the 'killer' non-existent business acumen left 300 million on the table. But he and his three siblings still got around $170 million, and even that was not enough to pay off Donald's debts.


The fact that his properties have not been making money has been exposed by even the Washington Post, which is why he takes visiting heads of other countries there and bills taxpayers for it. If American taxpayers think, enriching your own pocket constantly through tax evasion and at their expense is having good business sense, then they definitely need Mary to write another book about how business is really done, if it's done in the right way. By people with brains, ethics, inspiration, and vision. Her grandfather had the brains and possibly some vision but no ethics whatsoever. Donald Trump was just that - a showy inspiration and smooth-talker that his father wasn't, so he projected his unfulfilled dreams on to this son. But Donald turned out to be a just that - a trumped up businessman - who beyond glad-handing and schmoozing, had no understanding of numbers and the complexity of business deals. Why would he? After all, his father used to do the math, while he did the showmanship.

I felt the loss of her father keenly, as if he was my dad. He was bound to be lost in a family with no sensitivity to anything apart from money, and no appreciation for genuine talent even if it's staring in their face. He was given no encouragement when he proved he was a good pilot. They broke him in so many ways, that his spirit stopped soaring out of the mundane existence his father had planned for him - managing his 40+ properties and collecting rent. How well Donald did that is the meat of this book. The US president is a spectacular failure as a businessman but he made huge amounts of money even while failing. Is that the concept of bankruptcy in America? No wonder so many of your banks failed too. Well, they keep promoting failures!

The Trump family may be the story of many other families in some way, but in this case, a high functioning but severely sociopathic and narcissistic member of that family, has made it to the White House. He's making a mockery of the Presidency and he's failing there too. Mary is right - he stood by and watched while she and her brother got nothing of their father's share of the vast Trump fortune. This is also the man who tried to stab his own father in the back by taking away all his money for himself, and leaving the other three siblings with nothing. He was caught at the right time, or today, they would all have been in Mary and her brother's situation. Donald Trump will just not stop taking from everyone, and she's warning everyone in this book. Pay heed.

No comments: