Core personas

A commenter at Maggie's Farm suggested that this 25-year-old interview in Playboy would show us that Trump does have a consistent core, and I have to admit that it does have that effect.  He may not be a guy you're crazy about, but perhaps calling him a chameleon is also too harsh.  It's refreshing to see anyone in American public life who knows how to talk about creating and possessing wealth without cringing.

12 comments:

Grim said...

So we're reading Playboy for the articles, now? :)

raven said...

Only the old issues, the writing was better then. It's fallen off terribly in recent months, they say.

Unknown said...

I read the article too. All I can say is that he has an abundance of enthusiasm, optimism and can-do-ism?
I read Althouse a lot and at present, they have a frenetic frenzy of concern over Trump as Hitler. Sometimes, I wonder, are they Trump plants? Whatever their ideology, they have no idea that the target audience is immune.

Unknown said...

Another comment from Althouse
" Dreams said: "The Trump phenomenon is neither a disease nor a symptom – he is instead the beta-test of a cure that the American people are trying out. It won’t work. But this is where our politics are going: working and middle class Americans are reasserting themselves...
"Anglelyne said..
This is what people who are stuck in partisan politics aren't seeing - there's a re-alignment going on. Finding the right candidate to "save us from Hillary" isn't going to "save us from Hillary", in the sense of reversing the progressive, globalist juggernaut and restoring "true conservatism". (I don't think soi-disant "true conservatives" quite understand that economic globalism has political, cultural, and social consequences that negate the possibility of any such restoration.)

Trump the individual doesn't matter, he's not a one shot deal, an anomaly that just has to be dealt with successfully once and then we can get back to business as usual. He's an "end of a beginning" (to put it as pompously as possible)."

A bit optimistic, I think.

Grim said...

Indeed, I think there's a chance of a working-man realignment that would be potentially positive. I also think that the Clinton campaign will do its best to prevent that by turning the debate into a racist one -- I was musing at AVI's place that I expect a provocation at a Trump rally designed to provoke a violent response that can be painted as racist, white-supremacist violence. With the help of the media, that will turn the campaign from Trump v. Clinton into KKK v. Civil Rights Marchers. That song has already been sung.

This morning it occurred to me to wonder if there were any terms under which Trump could solicit Sanders as his VP, if Sanders loses the Democratic contest due to corruption and machine politics. It's not obvious, but there's a kind of alignment between the concerns about immigration-as-economic-threat-to-workers and the concerns about the TPP and free trade that Sanders endorses. If he could be persuaded to be Trump's conscience, he could bring a lot of Democratic insurgents into alignment with the Republican insurgents.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

I am not afraid he will be evil as much as I fear he will be a bumbler.

Unknown said...

I'm sorry AVI but he, who? Sanders? Trump?

Grim said...

I'm sure he means Trump. No one thinks Sanders is evil. Socialism, yes, but not Sanders.

Texan99 said...

I can't get worried about his being a bumbler--more than the likely alternatives. He seems to have a pretty firm grasp on how to work human situations to achieve his goals. It's his goals that concern me.

douglas said...

Yes, because they are hisgoals, not conservative goals.

Texan99 said...

Right--the ideal is to find someone who shares your goals and is good at achieving them. We've elected a lot of people who may share a lot of our goals but are pitifully inept at achieving them, to the point where we started to wonder if they truly shared them or were throwing the game (as in McConnell, Cantor, and Boehner). I think we're seeing a reaction toward someone who looks and sounds as though he can get the job done, and now our problem is we can't be totally sure what the job is that he wants to get done.

But I keep coming back to the (tentative, unproveable) conclusion that the job he wants to get done is considerably closer to my goals than anything Hillary Clinton wants to achieve, to say nothing of Bernie F'ing Sanders.

Unknown said...

Indeed, I think there's a chance of a working-man realignment that would be potentially positive.

Zman caslls it the Cloud People vrs the Dirt People. He has two fairly recent posts along this line:
1)The Shadow Party http://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=6773
and 2) The Master's Servants http://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=6731 .