The following remark is from David Brooks, the NY Times columnist. I’m not a Brooks fan, but this January 2025 piece might be the most sensible thing I’ve ever read from him:
The history of the world since at least the French Revolution is that rapid disruption makes governments cataclysmically worse. Trump, the anti-institutionalist, is creating an electoral monarchy, a system in which all power is personalized and held in his hands. That’s a recipe for distorted information flows, corruption, instability and administrative impotence.
I’ll admit it upfront here: I suffer from severe TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome).
I can’t help it… I had an early onset of the disorder a long time ago, starting when I was first exposed to this oddly orange-hued businessman back in 1988, when I was working as a copywriter on Park Avenue.
The joke then was that when Trump looked at the Manhattan skyline, he said, “Got it, got it, need it, need it, need it, want it, got it, got it, got it…”
Yeah, it wasn’t particularly funny then, either.
Still, it shows how the brash developer was viewed at the time (generally positively, and maybe somewhat enviously) by people involved in the media in the media capital of the world.
Like all New Yorkers of the time, I was exposed to the idiosyncrasies of a supposedly super-rich, bigger-than-life, self-promoting, playboy real estate mogul who was busy building skyscrapers and buying casinos and then plastering his name in oversized letters (typically in rich-looking bronze or gold) on the side of them.
It was the first time I also heard him referred to as “Don the Con.”
It seemed he was developing as much of a reputation for stiffing working-class laborers, craftsmen, architectural archivists, and government inspectors as he was for developing his outlandish real estate projects.
Through the years, I remember him appearing on David Letterman’s late night show telling the host he could certainly be president, because he “knows how to act the part,” which he punctuated by trying to act civilized (to point this out, he did a mock little genuflecting move standing up from his guest chair), and otherwise doing all the “ceremonial crap” (he thought) being president involved.
To him, being president of the US was all about playing a role and not, you know, getting things done for the people who put him there.
I was recently alarmed by how few people knew a disturbing true story about Trump from the ’80s and ’90s. The “businessman Trump” — in his pre-“Apprentice” days — used to call magazine publishers, TV and radio talk shows, and newspaper publishers and editorialists using the fake name John Miller or John Barron (among others) to promote Trump-related businesses and hotels.
One particularly demented story involved him calling a Forbes reporter to argue about Trump’s true net worth (the role-playing spokesman on the phone arguing in third-person that the magazine had vastly undervalued his boss’s brand name). I don’t know if he was too cheap to hire a real publicist or what, but the cheeky real estate mogul was on the phone acting as his own PR spokesman under fabricated pseudonyms to broadcast his own bullsh… um, script.
What does that have to do with, well, anything?
In my mind, it has everything to do with the person’s credibility (Trump would say it’s his genius), authenticity (he would say it shows he’s smart), and believability (he would say that he’s the “best ever” at anything [in his mind, at least]).
Trump is not a complete buffoon (probably? Sorry, that’s as close to a compliment as I can get), but he is deeply flawed (ethically, if not legally). He’s a larger-than-life bully who is also selfish, money-obsessed, and alarmingly thin-skinned. That’s a catastrophic combination given the weighty responsibilities he has been elected to assume on behalf of our nation.
Flash forward to Thanksgiving 2016, and my teenage daughters were laughing at all of the labels I was attributing to our newly elected (but yet to take office) chief executive. It started with me trying to define for them what a “con man” was, and then trying to think out loud every variation of the term that came to mind:
Flim-flam man… grifter… scam artist… swindler… hoodlum… fraudster… charlatan… rapscallion… reprobate… scalawag… phony… hustler… rogue… cheater…
In my kids’ eyes, those terms didn’t make anything clearer, since every new term introduced another characteristic that required definition.
So you see, my TDS is well set and a long-standing condition!
I was hoping the two impeachments and then the 2020 Biden win would bring everlasting relief from the syndrome that I wanted for myself and the country. Alas…
We watched in horror as this latest version of Don the Con (only this time, Con is short for “convict,” btw) had his spat with Elon Musk, the wealthiest man in the world (a naturalized American who himself includes dubious “achievements“), who was razing government institutions in the name of rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse, but now appears to have just been consolidating control over his companies’ government contracts while making federal investigations against his companies disappear into thin air.
Today I am mostly concerned about what this chaotic, disruptive, institution-smashing approach is doing to the “others” the orange menace targeted in his recent reelection campaign and the many people who are much less fortunate than my family and I have been.
Thomas Friedman just wrote this in the NY Times:
In sum, what you are seeing from this Trump II administration, and its bended-knee Congress, is a dangerous, undisciplined, intellectually inconsistent farce that we will pay dearly for in the future. Major geoeconomic moves are being made by one man who has done no homework, modeling, or stress-testing and has fostered little apparent interagency process, with no congressional oversight or apparent reference to history.
If you think this is not dangerous, just keep in mind that the Trump Organization Inc. over the years filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for six different businesses. There was a reason for that: the operating style and values of its boss.
Hmmm, what kind of operating style and values do you think Mr. Friedman was talking about?