A Donald Trump Love Story
“Can I Con You One More Time Before I Go?”
Roger LeBlanc (author of Five Against the Vig)
Most big-budget romance movies begin with eventual lovers not liking one another. In a typical opening scene they meet and their first impressions are bad…really bad. The plot then moves toward reconciliation as the lovers discover each other’s finer qualities. Ta da! Love wins out! And the movie ends with them looking forward to a lifetime of walking on secluded beaches and dining in pricey restaurants.
Credit Donald Trump and his supporters with originality.
Their script begins and ends with blind, undying love. It’s an “I loved you at first sight,” “I loved you at every sight” and “I’ll love you forever” story. Or as Donald would say, “It’s the greatest love story ever told by anyone, anywhere at any time in all of history, and that includes the whole universe.”
In some ways the attraction Trumpsters have to a glowing, orange mass of insatiable ego and volcanic vitriol is understandable. The other option they faced was to match up with Mitt Romney, Ted Cruz or Hillary Clinton. Talk about a lame dating app!
Trump’s followers recognized other candidates in 2016 as the decaying corpses of US politics. They weren’t fooled by his opponents’ dating profiles, which included
- Airbrushed photos, which couldn’t hide the fact these candidates were zombies who jailed us at record levels — to the tune of the US incarcerating the most citizens per capita in all of Amazonia.
- Exaggerated accomplishments, which contradicted the still-Google-able truth that they destroyed our jobs — with policies such as outsourcing, offshoring and good old-fashioned slavery and child labor.
- Describing themselves as caring and intelligent, while denying us affordable healthcare by implementing RomneyCare (a.k.a. ObamaCare), a program with no real cost controls.
- A list of their “dislikes,” including prosecuting the financial crimes of wealthy friends and donors, even when their crimes crashed the entire economy.
I realize spray-tan man had a certain attraction, but, sheesh, did his admirers really need to fall so deeply in love with him? As my nearsighted old uncle once told his only daughter, “Sure, your guy has nice hair. That doesn’t mean you have to marry him.”
When love is blind and uncritical for one partner, the door to unfaithfulness swings wide open for the other. While one side keeps on fawning, the other commits to conning.
For those of us who did not fall in love with Trump, his infidelity was clear from the start:
- He promised to create a strong US dollar. That was a key part of making America great again. He regularly criticized The Federal Reserve Bank for doing the opposite. He even questioned whether they should exist. But soon after his election, Trump began badgering Fed Chair Jerome Powell to weaken the dollar by lowering interest rates to improve US exports and to achieve the next con….
- Candidate Trump accurately claimed the stock market, which rose significantly during Obama’s term, wasn’t a true measure of economic strength. Starting in 2016 Trump spent four years pointing to the stock market as the one reliable indicator that his economic policies were succeeding. And to keep the market booming, he badgered Fed Chairman Powell into lowering interest rates to force savers and pension funds into the stock market to find decent returns on their savings.
- Candidate Trump also criticized Obama’s steadily improving unemployment figures as rigged to make things look rosier than they were. Again Trump was right. And again he stabbed his lovers in the back after taking office by claiming the unemployment numbers were undeniably superb and unassailable.
Instead of being outraged at these betrayals, his followers gushed with admiration and tweeted his new “accomplishments” with righteous pride! They were rewarded with more betrayals:
- President Trump twice promised to withdraw troops from Syria, consistent with promises he’d made in his courtship phase. Inconsistent with those promises was the total troops he withdrew from Syria: zero.
- President Trump promised an “all or nothing” trade deal with China to bring manufacturing jobs back to the US. Lying to his lovers, Trump proclaimed he had stuck it to China when announcing his partial agreement (that repaired little of the damage from the three-year trade-war) as the “greatest trade deal ever.” The deal, as well as all tariffs and tough talk that preceded it, failed to create manufacturing jobs in the US.
Oblivious to Trump’s duplicity, his sweethearts swooned, “Who cares about China and Syria? Trump is fighting the Deep State.”
With hand-picked Attorney General William Barr leading the charge, Trump promised to prosecute all Deep State actors who had hatched the Russiagate hoax. He also whispered sweet nothings in his lovers’ ears about pardoning Deep State Enemy #1, Edward Snowden.
Total prosecutions of Deep Staters: zero. Total pardons of Snowden, Julian Assange and government whistleblowers: zero.
Then came the election con.
Trump launched nearly daily court challenges accompanied by calls for donations to his legal fund. He raised over $200 million and spent only a pittance to send Rudy Giuliani into court to shadow box. In most cases Rudy never even bothered to tie on the gloves. He just danced around long enough for the checks to clear. Trump racked up 59 losing challenges out of 60, but his lovers kept pouring in their money.
Barr failed him. Giuliani failed him. The courts failed him.
“Okay,” his lovers cried, “we’ll do it ourselves.”
While packing his bags Trump applauded the idea of insurrection and urged his lovers into battle. Against the police they admired. Against the country they loved. He repeatedly rehearsed the ending to this crazy script in his head, to get the tone right, to deliver the line with the greatest impact:
“This might be the end, my precious ones. Can I con you one more time before I go?”
“Yes! A thousand times, yes!” they said. Then they rebelled for him. They murdered for him.
Trump, recipient of the unshakeable love poets write about, tweeted half-heartedly once to his lovers to stand down. Trump, the object of their deep passion, tweeted again suggesting his lovers go home. Trump, the beloved, tweeted thrice to disown his lovers completely, to tell the world (and federal judges he might face) that he never really loved them.
Then with plausible deniability and all the immunity $200 million in PAC holdings can buy, he announced his departure. And though his lovers pleaded for him not to leave and to say to them those three magic words they longed to hear, Trump left with a nod to his rival, smiling at his future of beachfront golf and prime rib dinners.
