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You could call Trump a businessman or a soulless parasite who feeds off things that were thriving, until those things are dead, and then moving on. Potato—Potahto.
Throughout three presidential campaigns, people who’ve voted for Donald Trump have repeatedly said they’ve done so, in part, because he was a “successful businessman.” Well, they’re half right.
He was a businessman alright, but if you’d been paying attention even a little bit at any time over the last forty-years, there were plenty of better fitting adjectives describe the kind kind of businessman he was: unscrupulous, irresponsible, incompetent, crooked—and failed.
In 1990, Trump launched the Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, which cost over a billion dollars to construct. He called it the “eighth wonder of the world,” and as he opened its doors he made the kind of wild, grandiose, pie-in-the-sky, too-good-to-be-true promises that became commonplace during the Presidential campaigns and are now status quo in his second presidency (as evidenced by his recent lie-riddled address to Congress).
Back in New Jersey all those years ago, he may as well have stood there and said he was going to Make Atlantic City Great Again.
Trump actually filled for bankruptcy several times before becoming president the first time.
On nearly a half dozen occasions, he ran a billion-dollar endeavor into the ground, leaving in his wake thousands of devastated employees and unpaid creditors and then jumping ship without personal accountability of any kind. With each financial implosion, he’s shielded himself and his family, leaving everyone else to clean up his mess.
A Fortune.com story once recounted that despite the Taj Mahal’s abject financial failure, Trump personally profited during its demise, by doing things like selling Trump-branded water—making himself over eighty million dollars as the casino slowly collapsed, its vendors going unremunerated and its workers unceremoniously discarded.
Now, you might call all that being a successful businessman—or you might call it being a soulless parasite who feeds off things that were thriving, until those things are dead, and then moving on. Potato—Potahto.
Regardless of the semantics, the bottom line remains unchanged: Trump is and has never been about making money for, improving the future of, or the lifting up of anyone but himself. He didn’t give a damn about anyone associated with the Taj Mahal—and he doesn’t give a damn about you thirty-five years later.
And this is the terrible history repeating itself right now.
Donald Trump has neither the capacity nor the intelligence nor the aspiration to lead this nation, to honor its Constitution, to represent its citizens.
He is not the least bit interested in people’s healthcare or their educations or their golden years.
He couldn’t care less about morality or virtue or Christianity.
He doesn’t lose sleep over disabled veterans or unemployed factory workers or exhausted single mothers or suicidal gay teenagers.
He has no interest in dignity or decency or nobility befitting the Office—not because, as his supporters say he is a “straight-shooting Washington outsider” but because America is nothing but another host organism to him.
As always, he is here solely to slap his name on something and to suck it all dry—and if your eyes are open you can see that he is doing that right now with terrifying velocity.
That’s the sick irony here: a guy who couldn’t run a casino in Atlantic City is once again, somehow running the country. Unable to handle the complex responsibilities and manage the finances and solve the problems and do the work of overseeing a few hotels, he is now using this nation as a similar, doomed-to-fail vanity project; a way to build his brand and sell his tchotchkes and line his nest egg, without caring how he does it.
I’m really sad how many Americans did so little research, how uninterested they were in his actual resume, and how easily they were duped three times (and still seemed to be) by his spit-shined snake oil sales pitch, which peddles only fool’s gold that will prove worthless.
In just a few short weeks, Donald Trump is doing to America what he did to the Taj Mahal. He will leave the former like he did the latter: bankrupt and crumbling, without giving a damn about the people whose lives he ruined or the suffering left in his wake.
I’m not okay with that—not at all.
I don’t think this country should wait until it simply becomes another hopelessly failed and beyond-rescue business venture of a man who’s only allegiance is to himself.
Yes, Trump is running America like his businesses: right into the ground.
We should jettison him while we’re still able to recover.
We shouldn’t let him financially or morally bankrupt this nation.
With our strategic activism and through the courts and with our dollars and with our collective power, we need to stop this, now.
John Pavlovitz
John Pavlovitz is a writer, pastor, and activist from Wake Forest, North Carolina. A 25-year veteran in the trenches of local church ministry, John is committed to equality, diversity, and justice—both inside and outside faith communities. When not actively working for a more compassionate planet, John enjoys spending time with his family, exercising, cooking, and having time in nature. He is the author of A Bigger Table, Hope and Other Superpowers, Low, and Stuff That Needs to Be Said.
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