President Trump - The First 100 days.

[grumbler]

I think that, when the Republicans lose the Senate (as they will), it will be a more salutary shock than losing the race for the White House.

[CountDeMoney]

Oh, man...first the White House, then the Senate?  That could mean Hillary could destroy America even faster than Obama did!

[CountDeMoney]

I found this in the NYT archives, a book review for his latest work at the time, "Trump: Surviving at the Top".

This review was written in 1990, which makes it all the more fascinating.

Trump Fights Back
By MICHAEL LEWIS
Published: September 2, 1990

TRUMP: Surviving at the Top
By Donald J. Trump with Charles Leerhsen.
Illustrated. 236 pp. New York:
Random House. $21.95.

Toward the end of ''Trump: Surviving at the Top'' the reader actually feels something like pity for the hero. This brief, unlikely moment occurs when Donald J. Trump is describing his bizarre dealings with Leona Helmsley. Long ago, he explains, the middle-aged Mrs. Helmsley took an uncommon fancy to him. ''For some reason,'' Mr. Trump writes, ''even though I was not tremendously successful at that time, Leona always liked having me around. . . . I was always asked to be [at her parties] and was always given a seat, usually right near her.''

Mr. Trump has already alluded several times to his own sex appeal and has once claimed that ''I've never had any trouble in bed.'' The young and dashing Mr. Trump escorts a fashion model to one of Mrs. Helmsley's parties. Mrs. Helmsley flies into what appears to be a jealous rage. ''How dare you bring that tramp to one of my parties?'' she screams, in the presence of the other woman. ''At first I was shocked,'' Mr. Trump says, ''but then all the things people had been telling me about Leona and her Jekyll-and-Hyde personality started coming back to me.'' From then on Mrs. Helmsley, with her ''crazed personality,'' heaps all manner of abuse on Mr. Trump.

This rare passage in which Mr. Trump seems at the mercy of forces beyond his control ends quickly. The roles reverse when Mr. Trump steamrollers over Mrs. Helmsley in a deal, then fires off a few gratuitous insults of his own. Mr. Trump, once again, is the Conqueror.

Filled as it is with Mr. Trump's usual commercial sadomasochism, ''Trump: Surviving at the Top'' is already out of date. Mr. Trump can no longer afford to insult at will. He can no longer sow salt in the real estate of his enemies. We now know Mr. Trump's business, based as it was on rising property prices and foolish bankers, has collapsed. He is losing money. He is a virtual slave to external forces. With his debts possibly exceeding his assets by as much as $250 million, his bankers watch and advise his every move. He has had to agree, for example, not to spend more than $450,000 a month on his personal expenses. Yet he still insists, like a captured tyrant, that he is in charge.

Reading the scene between Mr. Trump and Mrs. Helmsley, I began to wonder if there isn't something in the Manhattan soil that drives those who wish to control it to distraction; it's not just Mrs. Helmsley who seems to have gone loopy. The book Mr. Trump has presided over (with the writing help of Charles Leerhsen, a senior writer at Newsweek) is full of petty, desperate and often laughable swipes at anyone who has ever dared to criticize Donald Trump. Of a Village Voice reporter, Mr. Trump says that the writer, ''whose last book was a major failure, is still trying to make his name at my expense.'' Of a recent article in Forbes magazine estimating (generously, it turns out) his net worth at a mere $500 million: ''Who can say what these one-of-a-kind assets are worth until they're put on the market? Certainly not some mediocre reporter from Forbes'' (whom Mr. Trump names). Of Garry Trudeau's widely loved ''Doonesbury'' cartoons lampooning Mr. Trump: ''Trudeau's wife, Jane Pauley, is much more talented than he is.''

Mr. Trump's relentless accumulation leads people often to mistake his motive for greed, when what drives the man seems to me to be more a pathological need for control. But control of what? Perhaps there was a time when he wanted to control his business; now he seems merely to want to control the opinion others hold of him. Mr. Trump has come to believe that if he nurtures his fame his business will follow. ''Success,'' he writes, ''so often, is just a matter of perception.'' That may explain why he goes berserk when a journalist tries to tinker with his image, but it still represents an odd and - it now seems - wrongheaded approach to commerce. The man whose first impulse after he buys a building is to change the facade has become nothing but a facade.

In ''Trump: The Art of the Deal,'' Mr. Trump celebrated his shrewdness; in ''Trump: Surviving at the Top,'' he celebrates his reputation. The book is a strained, sloppy exercise in facade restoration. Mr. Trump begins by gluing on himself the best tinsel and chrome that money can buy. There are several photographs in ''Trump: Surviving at the Top'' of Mr. Trump with celebrities (Hulk Hogan!) who don't even appear in the text. Mr. Trump devotes a chapter to his instant friendship with Mike Tyson without ever explaining how it began. The rest of the book is a blizzard of name-dropping. The index starts with ''Ali, Muhammad'' and ends with ''York, Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of.'' In between there are perhaps 10 names not recognizable to readers of People magazine. Under ''V'': ''Vanderbilt family'' and ''van Gogh, Vincent.'' Under ''O'': ''Onassis, Jackie.'' (Perhaps there's a new Trump board game in this: I give you a letter from Mr. Trump's index and you guess who is listed underneath. Pick the wrong name and you're foreclosed upon.) ''Pick the wrong name, and no matter what else you do, you'll never be a hit,'' says the author to explain why he called one of his casinos Trump. He explains a lot more than that.

Another of Mr. Trump's cheap bag of building tricks is simply to tell us repeatedly how widely loved and admired he is. Of a trip to Brazil -a country with which he has much in common, financially - he says only that ''I found Brazil to be a lovely, if economically troubled, country. And I was surprised and delighted that children came running up to me with pencils and paper yelling, 'Mr. Trump, Mr. Trump.' '' He walks down Fifth Avenue and ''about twenty-five perfect strangers wave and shout, 'Hi, Donald,' and 'How're you doing, Donald,' and 'Keep up the good work.' One thing this proves to me is that the average working man or woman is a lot better adjusted and more secure than the supposedly successful people who stare down at them from the penthouses.''

So says the penthouse dweller. And in his case, he's right. ''Trump: Survival at the Top'' is a portrait of an ego gone haywire. He saves the reviewer a great deal of anguish by making a brief foray into the nether regions of his mind. ''I'm not the same person that I was just a few years ago,'' he writes. ''The changes I've undergone . . . are what this book is about.'' In a chapter called ''The Survival Game,'' he suggestively offers a list of once wealthy men, some of whom committed suicide; they are, it seems, his bogy. He compares himself to Howard Hughes. ''As time goes on,'' he writes, ''I find myself thinking more and more about Howard Hughes and even, to some degree, identifying with him. Take, for example, his famous aversion to germs. While I'm certainly not as fanatical as he was, I've always had very strong feelings about cleanliness. I'm constantly washing my hands.''

But he's not exposing himself so much as he is shopping for new identities. Having tried Lady Macbeth on for size, he at last selects another equally implausible shell. He tells us, in so many words, that he has discovered the futility of the possessions he calls his trophies. The best-known of these is perhaps the yacht, now named the Trump Princess, purchased from the arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi (see ''Doonesbury'' for details). Mr. Trump devotes a chapter to the Princess identical in tone and content to the braggadocio in ''Trump: The Art of the Deal'': how brilliantly he haggled for it, how his boat is the biggest, how he made it better and so on.

Then he lobs in this revelation: ''But as much as I've enjoyed it until now, and as impressive as it's been to my casino customers, I think I'm giving up the game of who's got the best boat. . . . It's funny how the boat seemed more appropriate to my life in the past than to my future.'' It's even funnier that this decision comes at a time when he can no longer afford the boat. There's every reason to believe that self-denial is just one more gewgaw for the Trump facade, stuck on to distract us from the cheap construction. After all, the man has built a career gloating over his ability to fool others; ''fool'' comes second only to ''loser'' as Mr. Trump's favorite epithet. The truth more likely is that if his real estate recovers, he'll begin bragging more loudly than ever about his boat. But who then will listen? Only fools.

[citizen k]

I found this in the NYT archives, a book review for his latest work at the time, "Trump: Surviving at the Top".

This review was written in 1990, which makes it all the more fascinating.

Michael Lewis 

[mongers]

I think he'll prove a lot of people wrong.

Still hold this view?

[mongers]

I think apart from a few highly visible pet projects like The Wall, a president Trump would be rather ineffective due to checks & balances. Being an outsider will make it hard for him to navigate Washington and get anything meaningful done fast.

Does this still hold sway?

[mongers]

I actually think Trump has a reasonable chance of not being as terrible as we all think.

My horror with him is really not about him, since I actually think his actual policies would have little resemblance to the things he says, but rather about the fact that he says those things, and Americans - a lot of Americans - love him for it.

I think if he were President he would likely be largely incompetent, but not actually malevolent. He would not get much done, and what he did get done would have little in common with the idiotic rhetoric he has been spewing for the last 9 months.

From your more recent posts, I'm guessing you've changed your opinion?

[mongers]

I feel like Trump would be an extraordinarily ineffective President, but the way our government is structured he's really incapable of doing much destruction, and I don't think he's crazy enough to fire off nukes or anything like that.  But there's just no way in hell Congress would ever work with the guy.

Actually, the way our executive is structured presumes that someone like Trump could never get into office.

He has shown that he is radically worse than I feared at the start of what looked like a PR stunt. He has thin skin, a hyper inflated ego, and an incredible lack of self awareness or basic common sense.

In fact, I think you could not construct a human being who could be *more* dangerous as President. This is someone who can order US forces to engage in lethal actions on his word alone in a variety of ways. He might not fire of a nuke, but he could certainly order a air/missile strike on some target basically because he is pissed off or annoyed.

And the damage simply electing him would do to our international credibility would be immense.

Don't disagree with a word of that. 

[mongers]

The kinds of risks that a Trump presidency involve would include:
+ breaking/abrogating treaties
+ panicking markets with antics like exploring debt writedowns
+ causing allies to finlandize to russia/china due to perceived unreliability of US security guarantees
+ ignoring unfavorable WTO panel rulings/imposing illegal tariffs which if done often enough could undermine the multi-lateral trade system
+ do lots of unconstitutional things and then engage in brutal rhetorical attacks on the Supreme Court - further politicizing the Court and generating mini-constitutional crises
+ further to the above, appointing nutbars to the Court and/or trying to pack it ("FDR did it")

That's not end of the world bad stuff but it's pretty bad.

The stuff you listed would basically give up 75 years of American foreign policy.

Yep. I'm not as relaxed about the US' checks and balances but even if they were effective at neutralising Trump I don't think the liberal, Western, rules based post-war world would survive. The US may be able to survive a want to be strongman, but I'm not sure the Western system could survive that from its leader.

And I think people can be a bit over-relaxed about these things. History is full of enduring systems collapsing because in themselves they don't matter if there's not the will to maintain them. Given Trump's comments today about a stolen, rigged election I'd already worry about the ability of the US system to endure. After all, Presidential systems generally end in an authoritarian regime or a coup. Though I imagine the lame duck Congress and Obama would rapidly dismantle the 'imperial Presidency' and I wouldn't be entirely surprised if they found a compromise SCOTUS candidate if that's allowed.

I've no idea what his first 100 days would be like. I think it's impossible to even guess because he's so far from any norms.

Interesting.

And where are you now? 

[mongers]

What effect Trump will have on the GOP has been a major concern of mine.  If he loses, it'll probably be minimal.  If he wins... The GOP could turn into a party completely bereft of ideas, simply a machine for the adulation for a narcissist.

Pretty good prediction.

[dps]

I think he'll prove a lot of people wrong.

Still hold this view?

Well, the people who voted for him were wrong.

[mongers]

I think he'll prove a lot of people wrong.

Still hold this view?

Well, the people who voted for him were wrong.

I wasn't criticising him, came across the thread by accident and pulled out some views that I though interesting in light of how things developed in the the first year.

Berkut seems to be the one whose most hardened his view.

[Razgovory]

What effect Trump will have on the GOP has been a major concern of mine.  If he loses, it'll probably be minimal.  If he wins... The GOP could turn into a party completely bereft of ideas, simply a machine for the adulation for a narcissist.

Well, I'm sure glad that didn't happen.

[Valmy]

I actually think Trump has a reasonable chance of not being as terrible as we all think.

My horror with him is really not about him, since I actually think his actual policies would have little resemblance to the things he says, but rather about the fact that he says those things, and Americans - a lot of Americans - love him for it.

I think if he were President he would likely be largely incompetent, but not actually malevolent. He would not get much done, and what he did get done would have little in common with the idiotic rhetoric he has been spewing for the last 9 months.

I don't know. His previous ventures seem him regularly burn things to the ground because of his ego. I don't think he could be satisfied with incompetent irrelevance. That is why he is dangerous.

I have to say that so far I am pretty much right. He just hasn't done anything too dangerous yet.

[Razgovory]

Oh.  Mongers beat me to it.