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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
John W. Dean
Read between
September 18 - September 29, 2020
the equivalent of an explosives-loaded freight train with no brakes.
even if Donald Trump disappeared tomorrow, the millions of people who made him president would be ready to make someone else similar president instead.
base forgives all. They thrill to the man, and many of them would probably march with conviction into cannon fire for him.
Donald Trump only has the power to flaunt American institutions, treaties, and laws because he has a large, dedicated base who will believe whatever he says and do whatever he wants.
base’s endless loyalty springs from the same psychological trait that some observers think runs deeply in Donald Trump himself, authoritarianism.
American presidents have access to experts in almost every field to advise them on matters outside their knowledge. Trump supporters also know that the president says he knows more than anybody else about almost everything. Accordingly, he was not inclined to listen to the experts who told him the virus posed a very grave danger to the United States.
By the start of the final year of his first term, he had accumulated more power than any president in living memory.
he addressed the nation from the Oval Office, reading a speech written by Stephen Miller and Jared Kushner. (His measured and flat reading of someone else’s words on the teleprompter reminded many of a hostage video.)
An authoritarian leader will not last long without followers—lots of them.
demagogue as “a political leader who seeks support by appealing to popular desires and prejudices rather than by using rational argument.” They almost always crave the role of authoritarian leader.
He wants to be lifted on high by masses of adoring supporters to supreme authority, so he can take control of everything. He may believe all his spiel, but whether he does or not, demagoguery is just a means to his ultimate end: autocratic dictatorship.
The drive to dominate everyone around him is a hallmark of an authoritarian leader.
Trump has “an absolute lack of interest in anything beyond power and money.”
Donald was in awe of his father, and very detached from his mother.”
Donald was raised, twenty-five hours a day, eight days a week, to intimidate and control others.
At age five or six he went into a neighbor’s yard where a toddler named Dennis Burnham was sitting unattended in a playpen. When the child’s mother came outside, Donald was throwing rocks at her son.
He became “extremely rebellious,” Maryanne remembered, and threw blackboard erasers at his teachers. “Who could forget him?” said his former teacher Ann Trees, eighty-two. She added, “He was headstrong and determined. He would sit with his arms folded with this look on his face—I use the word surly—almost daring you to say one thing or another that wouldn’t settle with him.”
had once punched a music teacher at the school in the face, giving him a black eye.23
resented, even as a child, anyone who was smarter than he was.
his parents did not find “girlie magazines” under his mattress, but switchblade knives. What possible need did Donald have of them, especially so many?
he started weaving a false history about his accomplishments.
No one has ever mentioned him having even a steady date until he met his first wife when he was thirty.
by age eighteen, Donald Trump was at work creating his legend. He wanted to look not just accomplished, but heroic.
Although he told many people afterward that he graduated first in his class at Wharton, he did not distinguish himself at all academically and was not even listed among the fifty-six students on the honor roll at graduation.
“There really is no such thing as ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’ It all boils down to what you can get away with.” “One of the most useful skills a person should develop is how to look someone straight in the eye and lie convincingly.” “The best skill you can have is knowing the ‘right move at the right time’: when to ‘soft-sell’ someone, when to be tough, when to flatter, when to threaten, when to bribe, etc.” “There’s a sucker born every minute, and smart people learn how to take advantage of them.”
Donald had been given an army physical exam when he arrived at Wharton in 1966 and passed it with no problem. Yet, two years later, a physician said he had bone spurs on his heels, which would keep him from proper soldiering. That seems preposterous since he had been a star athlete in high school, regularly played squash, and bone spurs that severe would have been evident two years earlier.
learning how the contracts were won, the kickbacks were kicked, the profits were hidden, professionals were corrupted, valuations were manipulated, federal requirements were ignored, Black tenants were systematically excluded, and the family fortune was siphoned off to its members with nary a penny going to the taxman.
never admit or apologize for a wrongdoing, but instead use the media to deny everything.
Lie without hesitation whenever necessary, over and over, (2) threaten your opponent by counterattacking much harder than you were attacked, (3) be ruthless and get even with anyone who crosses you. (4) If you are undeniably in the wrong and guilty as sin, accuse your opponent of being ten times worse than you and put them on the defensive. Finally, (5) if after all this you still lose, claim you won, and move
Trump learned three things from the Commodore con: Image matters more than reality. If you looked and acted like you had enormous wealth, people believed you did and behaved accordingly. Lying works even when it can be easily exposed. Few people bother to check. And overplaying your hand pays off.
“One thing I’ve learned about the press is that they’re always hungry for a good story, and the more sensational the better.”
midway through 1987 Trump decided to convert a space at the top of the Trump Plaza tower to an exclusive lounge for high rollers. But since the tower was already built and had pipes in the roof, the ceiling in the lounge had to be about a foot lower than usual to hide the infrastructure plumbing. But Donald liked high ceilings, so he swore mightily every time he visited the work site. After the reason for the low ceiling was explained to him, he said “Okay.” Then he would explode the next time he visited the workplace. One day after the ceiling was finished Trump led a group of twenty
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Trump also ripped into his family, including his first wife, Ivana, who suffered protracted public humiliations.
publicly paraded his affair with Maples to humiliate Ivana when she would not go quietly into the night.
he was intent on making Ivana suffer all the way to the divorce courts while their children watched.
When the banks around the world finally stopped climbing over one another to loan him money, he sold junk bonds that promised a return of 14 percent a year, or more.
Donald sent “The Bank of Dad” a twelve-page document that needed, he said, an immediate signature. As his eighty-five-year-old father worked his way through all the legal rigamaroles, supposedly aimed at protecting the family fortune from Ivana’s divorce settlement, he saw that his son was sneakily trying to get him to change his last will and testament so that Donald would have vast powers over the family’s wealth.
most of Donald’s showy and unwise investments kept losing money faster than one could count it. All three casinos
closed and the Park Plaza Hotel declared bankruptcy in 1992. While Trump lost a whack of his own money, it was the various banks, buyers of his junk bonds, and hundreds of subcontractors who had built Trump’s casinos who took the big hit.25
The five bankruptcies he produced over this period showed what Trump did best as a businessman: crash and burn.
He got himself into his messes by vastly overestimating his own inherent wisdom, relying on his instincts, and by believing his own publicity that he was a master dealmaker.
“I win,” he wrote. “I always win. In the end, I always win, whether it’s in golf, whether it’s in tennis, whether it’s in life, I just always win.
No one mentions his being an incredibly boring person, only able to talk about himself.
he is lying to himself more than anyone else, and whenever he begins to have a doubt about a decision he made, whenever he imagines his father’s voice telling him he is a loser, he immediately starts singing a song of praise to himself. And the more he fails, the louder the song.
What Trump surely liked best about selling his name was that people believed these were his projects and properties, not merely licensing deals, so he must own almost everything. Trump liked the optical illusion.
One of the female contestants on The Apprentice accused Donald Trump publicly in 2015 of sexually assaulting her in a hotel room one year at season’s end.
advice Trump gave a friend who had admitted some bad behavior toward women: “You’ve got to deny, deny, deny, and push back on these women. If you admit to anything and any culpability, then you’re dead. That was a big mistake you made. You didn’t come out guns blazing and just challenge them. You showed weakness. You’ve got to be strong. You’ve got to be aggressive. You’ve got to push back hard. You’ve got to deny anything that’s said about you. Never admit.”48 The friend he was advising had assaulted the women, but Trump was telling him that the facts had nothing to do with the situation.
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sexual intercourse with Donald Trump appears to be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Beautiful women are sexual objects to Donald, useful for making other men envy him and for “relaxing” him, but otherwise unimportant and utterly interchangeable.
He thinks that women in general are awful and holds them
in contempt, seeing them as sinister, aggressive, but clever manipulators who are out to exploit men. He is especially contemptuous of accomplished women and women who stand up to him—as
