The Rise and Fall of Donald Trump

I was very shocked by the outcome of the most recent U.S. presidential election.  And clearly I was not the only one.  I happened to be attending a conference in downtown Washington, D.C. the morning after the election, and, when it ended in the early afternoon, decided to walk back from the site of the conference, near Farragut Square, to my own office, which is across the street from the National Archives building: a distance of just a little over a mile.  The walk allowed me to pass through the heart of downtown D.C., and as I did so, it was with the eerie sense that I was walking through some science fiction movie.  The faces of the people that I passed were dazed and expressionless, and they all seemed to be walking in an uncharacteristically unhurried pace, as if they had no actual place to be.  I suspect that many of them were in this state because, like me, they had not had much sleep the night before, as they followed the election returns with a growing sense of disbelief, and angst.  I overheard a few people talking on their cell phones, and the common topic of conversation was speculation over how things would change around here – and in the country overall – in the months and years ahead.

As I described in my last blog entry (“The Folly of the Crowd”), this most recent election was unlike any that I have experienced in my entire life, due to the extreme revulsion felt by much of the electorate toward at least one – and in some cases, both – of the presidential candidates.  Candidate Trump, in particular, was excoriated in the popular media: as a cheat, huckster, incompetent businessman, narcissist, pathological liar, bigot, boor, and sexual predator of women.  Anyone following the major newspapers and other media outlets (with the exception of the ones with markedly conservative slants) might have been led to believe that Donald Trump would have found himself in a penitentiary next January, instead of the Oval Office.  (And of course, Trump and his supporters would have been inclined to say the same thing about his opponent, Hillary Clinton.)  I was not a supporter of Donald Trump in this election, and, like so many others in this country, am dismayed by his victory.  But it was not always the case with me.  There was a time when I was actually one of his admirers, and so in the following paragraphs I would like to chronicle the rise and fall of Donald Trump – that is, his rise and fall in my own personal estimation.

I became a fan of Donald Trump when his television show, The Apprentice, first aired in 2004.  I of course had known of him before then – known that several large hotels and casinos bore his last name, and that he had written a book called The Art of the Deal.  I knew, as well, that he had his detractors even then, but in spite of these he seemed to be the epitome of the consummate successful business mogul.

And this was really the allure of the The Apprentice to me:  Here was a program in which contestants would have to compete by demonstrating their business acumen to someone who had reached the pinnacle of business success, and in the process, learn from the master some of the critical attributes and strategies that contribute to that success. 

I knew that it was a “reality show”, made by the same producer, Mark Burnett, who had introduced Survivor to American audiences four years earlier, and that it would follow the same format:  The season would begin with multiple contestants who would need to successfully collaborate with each other in teams, but the catch, of course, was that there was ultimately only one winner, so that any collaborations or partnerships would eventually have to come to an end.  As a consequence, the successful contestant had to exercise a delicate balance between collaboration and competition, between trust and betrayal.  This game show format was most starkly illustrated in another popular program at that time, The Weakest Link, in which a circle of contestants had to answer quiz questions sequentially, and a “bank” of cash money was accumulated in proportion to the consecutive questions that were answered correctly.  If the circle was “broken” by an incorrect answer before a contestant shouted “bank”, then the accumulated money in that round was lost.  After each round the contestants voted on which among them should be eliminated.  The general strategy of the game entailed eliminating genuinely weak players early in the game, so that larger “banks” could be accumulated, but since there was only one winner at the end of the game, the focus eventually shifted to eliminating powerful rivals.  The winning player, then, was the one who had most successfully maneuvered that transition from casting out inferior teammates to backstabbing potentially superior ones.

Nevertheless, I trusted that The Apprentice would succeed in spite of this format, and in the earliest seasons, it did.  Each season would begin with two teams being formed, and the members of the team were assigned a competitive project on each episode that tested their relative business acumen.  Each team voted on a leader to shepherd them through the particular project of the week, and if that team lost, the project leader would have to provide an explanation for the failure of his or her team, and would be called upon to identify a specific number of teammates (usually two) who, in that leader’s opinion, had been particularly responsible for their failure.  Sitting in judgment of the team leader and the designated scapegoats was Donald Trump himself, straddled on either side by two fellow executives.  In the earliest seasons this was Carolyn Kepcher, a former Chief Operating Officer and General Manager for the Trump National Golf Club, and George H. Ross, Executive Vice President and Senior Counsel: both seasoned and talented executives.  After consulting with his fellow judges, Trump would make the final determination of who was most to blame for the team’s failure, say that person’s name, and follow it with his trademark phrase, “You’re fired.”

The Apprentice succeeded, at first, because it seemed to genuinely extol the virtues of business acumen, including creativity, boldness, teamwork, and careful planning followed by disciplined execution.  In every episode, Donald Trump (or “the Donald”, as promotional advertisements for the show referred to him) would share some pearl of wisdom about what it takes to excel in the business world.  And unlike many of the other reality television shows (such as The Weakest Link), the competition did not simply continue in the same manner until there was one man or woman left standing, but instead, when a final handful of contestants remained, their relative merits were assessed in a more conventional fashion – through interviews with executives – and the two finalists that were judged to be most qualified would each lead a team in a final competition.  I still remember the winner of the very first season – Bill Rancic, an internet entrepreneur – and exulting in what I felt was a hard fought and well-deserved victory on his part.

But after the first few seasons, the show – and Donald Trump himself – began to lose its luster for me.  The “pearls of wisdom” on how to succeed in business which Trump continued to share in each episode began to sound more and more clichéd: the kind of stuff that one would find in any of the myriad run-of-the-mill books on success that populate airport bookstores.  (And even the players themselves, when discussing their individual strategies, sounded more and more clichéd.  I grew very tired of hearing, for example, the oft-repeated phrases: “thinking outside of the box” and “stepping up to the plate”.)  I remember one of Trump’s platitudes in particular, on the value of loyalty, which went something like this: “One of the most important traits that you can exhibit to your employer is loyalty – if you’re not completely loyal, then you’re worthless.”  It is ironic, as will be seen, that this is the only “Trumpism” that I remembered, because it was loyalty that played a role in the critical event on the show that resulted in my eventual abandonment of it.

Other factors also contributed to the loss of luster of The Apprentice.  One of the regular judges, Carolyn, disappeared from the tribunal, and the other, George Ross, began to make only sporadic appearances.  But what was more disturbing is that they were replaced by Donald Trump’s children.  It seemed hardly fitting to have the work of aspiring young executives judged by persons who themselves had just recently gotten out of business school.  And worse, what once appeared to be a meritocracy now had all of the trappings of a blatant aristocracy, or at least a subtle endorsement of nepotism: it seemed that blood was thicker than talent and experience when it came to holding important positions in the Trump hierarchy.

But the final turning point came for me in an episode in which two teams were competing in the composition of an advertising “jingle” to promote a particular product.  The final musical commercials produced by each team were both quite good and, at least in my opinion, very comparable in quality.  It took a genuine judgment call to decide which was superior to the other.  (And, if I recall, I might have actually disagreed with the final choice of the better musical composition.)  The leader of the “losing” team had to face Trump and his two judges in the boardroom, and, as was customary, Trump demanded that he recommend two scapegoats to be considered for elimination. 

What played out next, however, was a boardroom scene unlike any I had witnessed before on the series.  Rather than cravenly engage in finger-pointing to save himself, the team leader refused to name any scapegoats.  But he did more than this.  He said that regardless of what the judges had determined to be the superior commercial, he was proud of what his team had produced, and stood by it.  He refused to assign blame to anyone, he said, because there was no blame to assign.  They had collectively performed in an exemplary manner.  Donald Trump seemed to be genuinely taken aback by this behavior – by a leader showing at least as much loyalty to his team as he had received from them – and was clearly not pleased by it.  He continued pressuring the team leader to assign blame to somebody, and grew increasingly irritated as the team leader refused to acquiesce to his demands.  Finally, in exasperation, he said to the young man, “You’re fired.”  As I sat there, watching this play out on my television screen, I had the sickening sense that this was no demonstration of how business was supposed to work.  The superior leader, in my opinion, was not the one who was sitting in judgment, but the one who had stood up to him, and stood by his own teammates.  Were I looking to hire someone who would inspire my confidence in him and his work, it would have been that team leader, not Trump.

Here ended my interest in and loyalty to The Apprentice.  I would occasionally tune in afterwards, particularly when a new variant of the program called The Celebrity Apprentice aired, but only to take in the spectacle of it all.  I never really took it seriously after witnessing that team leader getting fired, and certainly never again regarded the program as providing illustrative examples of successful business practices.

 My disillusion with Donald Trump took another pronounced downward turn in late 2006 when he entered into a very public feud with comedian Rosie O’Donnell.  It began when Rosie O’Donnell publicly criticized him on a television talk show, The View (where she was currently one of the regular panelists), because he did not fire the winner of the Miss USA pageant (a franchise which he owned) after it was revealed that the winner had a checkered past, involving underage drinking, drug use, and illicit sexual activities.  Trump responded by saying that he believed “in second chances”, which was fair enough, but O’Donnell would not let the matter rest there.  She then attacked him in a very unprofessional manner on her program, calling him a “snake-oil salesman”, alluding to his multiple marriages, and adding, for good measure, that he had committed marital infidelity.  None of this had anything to do with the issue at hand, of course, and if anything, it only served to reveal an ugly side to O’Donnell’s own character.  Here is where Donald Trump could have taken the high road: calling her out on her own bad behavior, while refusing to dignify it with a reply, and in so doing demonstrating that he was the more mature and honorable of the disputants.  It would have certainly been a more fitting response for somebody who is now our President.  But instead he resorted to a behavior that later became all too common in the presidential primary debates: he demonstrated that he could be even more crass and undignified than she had been – calling her “a real loser”, “a woman out of control”, and “my nice fat little Rosie”.  When he went on to claim that her fellow panelist, and his friend, Barbara Walters, had confided to him that he “should never get in the mud with pigs”, Walters was finally compelled to show her solidarity with O’Donnell on the air, calling Trump “that poor, pathetic man.”  The feud didn’t end there, as more public skirmishes between Trump and O’Donnell occurred, for example when he called her a “true loser” in December 2011 (she immediately responded by calling him “an ass”), and “an average talent who is out of touch with reality” in May 2012.  The net result of this whole ugly affair, of course, is that both Trump and O’Donnell looked foolish and immature.

And as if this was not enough to tarnish his public image, Trump took another plunge into absurdity when he joined the gaggle of kooks who insisted that Barack Obama was not born in the U.S.  The controversy had begun in 2008, when Obama was still just a candidate, and was seemingly put to rest that same year when he produced a birth certificate, but Trump entered the fray three years later, claiming that investigators he had hired were finding things that supported doubts about Obama’s birth in the U.S., and he even went so far as to suggest that Obama was hiding the fact that he was a Muslim.  President Obama now produced a long-form birth certificate which established beyond all doubt that he was born in the U.S.   And while Trump tried to tout this as a personal victory, President Obama held him up to well-deserved ridicule, when he said of Trump, at the White House Correspondents’ dinner that they both attended later that year, “Now he can get back to focusing on the things that matter.  Like, did we fake the moon landing?  What really happened at Roswell?  And where are Biggie and Tupac?”  Trump still would not let the controversy rest, however, resurrecting it during President Obama’s reelection campaign, when he declared that the birth certificate which had been produced by President Obama was a fraud.  Only during his own campaign, earlier this year, did Trump finally concede – and without apology – that Barack Obama had been born in the United States.

I will not even bother to recount the train of bad behaviors engaged in by Donald Trump during the Republican primaries, or the string of revelations that came to light during that time about his past unsavory business practices and behaviors with women.  I had lost all respect for him long before he ever declared himself a candidate.  I only took some consolation in believing that the rest of the country – if not the world – would arrive at the same judgment I had, if they had not done so already, perhaps even long before I had.

And so we come back to the shocking election result.  Clearly the Democrats have to shoulder much of the blame for this – because if nothing else, Hillary Clinton’s defeat illustrated that the Democratic Party has developed an incredible tin ear when it comes to hearing and respecting the cares and concerns of much of working and middle class America.  To label many of these – which Hillary did during the campaign – as “deplorables” only highlights her fundamental lack of understanding of what is behind much of the anger and frustration of mainstream America.  In spite of the repeated promises of the Democrats – including Hillary – to focus on programs that will benefit the middle class at the expense of the upper class, there was always an air of cronyism and elitism that seemed to hover about them, like a sickening aura.  Their liberalism was the sort of vapid, arm’s length variety that smacked of somebody who loves the human race but can’t stand people – especially the very sort of people for whom they professed their greatest concern and empathy: the type of people that they generally avoid socializing with in their personal lives and in their workplaces, if they can manage it.

Consequently, we have Trump as our next President, though all of his shortcomings and past improprieties have been brought into sharp and universal focus.  If this were a Hollywood mystery or action movie, we would be at that part in the film where the bad guy is exposed and his complicity in all of the film’s earlier crimes is fully explained: the “Big Reveal”.  But as anyone who has seen more than one or two of these movies knows, this is never the actual ending.  At this point, the bad guy produces a gun, or a bomb, or a secret weapon, and declares, “If I’m going down, then I’m taking him (or her, or them, or us) with me”.  What follows is at least another half an hour of drama as the heroes in the film engage in a desperate chase and/or struggle to finally bring the bad guy to justice.  And, in most of these films, this final denouement does not occur without sacrifice: there are a lot of car crashes, explosions, and mass destruction of property.  Generally, too, one or more beloved characters lose their lives – often in order to make the final capture of the bad guy possible.

Trump has been fully exposed, but his secret weapon was that mass of the American populace disenchanted with the hollow, recurring promises made by the liberal establishment which seemed unwilling or incapable of connecting with them at a meaningful and fundamental level.  That they actually voted for Donald Trump, in spite of all of his blatant shortcomings, merely shows how extreme their level of disenchantment was.  But now we move into the final act of the drama – the one involving destruction and sacrifice – which must play itself out before things are finally set aright.  Let us hope and pray that this final act is not too long, and not too catastrophic.  And – Heaven forbid! – let us hope that there will not be a sequel.