Donald Trump's Leaky Gut
Because there is something deeply wrong with me, I volunteered to write up Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal for my Silly Little Show Biz Book Club column at The A.V. Club.
Reading Trump’s book wasn’t just one of the worst literary experiences of my life; it was one of the worst things I’ve ever endured.
Of course, Donald Trump did not write The Art of the Deal. Though the best-seller made the real estate developer a household name, it is possible that Trump didn’t even bother to read “his” book.
The Art of the Deal was written by a ghostwriter named Tony Schwartz who, like all intelligent people, absolutely despises Donald Trump and profoundly regrets having contributed a crucial element of Trump’s mythology.
Donald Trump is not the hero of The Art of the Deal any more than Tyler Durden is the hero of Fight Club, Patrick Bateman is the hero of American Psycho, or Walter White is the hero of Breaking Bad.
Trump isn’t even an anti-hero. He’s closer to a villain. Schwartz wrote The Art of the Deal in a way that was supposed to make Trump look the asshole he is. The tone is “Get a load of this narcissistic prick,” but the American people, being very stupid, got the opposite impression.
Throughout The Art of the Deal, Trump boasts that he makes decisions not based on research or the advice of trusted advisors or relevant information but rather on his gut.
Trump holds his gut in very high esteem. In his mind, at least, it’s almost never wrong. For example, Trump’s gut told him there was no way a loser like Joe Biden could have beaten a winner like himself. It similarly said to him that those horrible black teenagers in the newspapers must have committed a horrific gang rape and should be executed publicly.
It didn’t matter to Trump that the evidence overwhelmingly conveyed that Biden won fair and square or that the Central Park 5 were vindicated in the eyes of everyone other than Donald Trump.
Trump trusted his gut, which told him he won the 2020 election and that those awful black thugs raped that white lady, to the extent that he continues to hold those beliefs to this day, and has never conceded that he was wrong in any way.
The Art of the Deal was very successfully marketed as the work of a uniquely brilliant businessman willing to share the secrets to his success in business and life.
Readers were supposed to think that Trump is such a naturally gifted businessman with incredible instincts that he could always rely on his golden gut to steer him in the right direction.
Trump ultimately doesn’t have instincts rooted in a magical gut that’s never wrong. Instead, he has prejudices. His prejudices tell him that as a rich, powerful white man, he is always right, due to his magical gut. It tells him that the world would be perfect if everyone in a position of power looked like Pete Hegseth, which is to say, like the bad guy in a direct-to-streaming action movie, and that every problem is caused by diversity, equity, and inclusion. It furthermore insists that in every situation, there must be a clear-cut winner and a clear-cut loser, and that 100 percent of the time, he’s the winner and the Democrats and other countries are the losers.
We got to see Trump’s magical gut in action after the horrific crash between a helicopter and an airplane. If the president possessed an ounce of decency or compassion, his response would be to express deep sadness over the tragedy, then say it would be wildly irresponsible and premature to say anything about the crash until more was known about the cause of the accident.
That’s not what Trump did. Instead, Trump trusted his gut and told horrified reporters that, unless he learned otherwise, DEI was responsible for the tragedy. Woke was responsible for the crash. The Biden-Harris administration was responsible for the crash, and also, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg claimed he ran the transportation department “right into the ground with his diversity.” Trump stops just short of saying that Buttigieg’s homosexuality is the reason all of those people are dead.
The bodies were still warm, yet Trump was claiming, without an ounce of evidence, that trans people and little people and black people and Hispanics and people with severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities were responsible for the crash.
Trump didn’t need facts. He did not need information. He had opinions and his gut, which told him that the cultural plague of diversity killed all those people.
The president likes to say he has “common sense,” and that’s why he knows that a society-destroying push for diversity is responsible for everything that’s wrong in society.
The president is very stupid. He has the mind of an obnoxious, insufferable child. So his “gut” and “common sense” give him childlike solutions to adult problems.
That’s why the rocket scientist’s answer to the Gaza Strip situation involved taking over the area and turning it into the Atlantic City of the Mideast, complete with a Trump Tower and Casino. Oh, sure, all the Palestinians would have to move out, but that’s not a big deal in his mind.
Build, baby, build!
Unlike Trump’s first term, no Republican seems willing to speak out against Trump out of fear of retribution from him or Elon Musk.
So we’re in for four more years of the government being controlled by the prejudices of a senile, racist, homophobic, transphobic, sexist idiot convinced that he has all of life’s answers when all he really has is a whole lot of hate wedded to a whole lot of arrogance.
You can pre-order The Fractured Mirror here: https://the-fractured-mirror.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
Nathan needed expensive, life-saving dental implants, and his dental plan didn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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