Are Trump's '24 Aspirations Realistic?

The late Wayne Barrett, journalist for The Village Voice, delivered the true news about the (pre-political) Donald Trump in a masterly biography. Therein Barrett relates an intriguing story (one told by Trump himself). About winning as hell.

Did Trump thereby imply that he might have thrown the 2020 election?

Strange? Stranger things have happened.

Let's now join Trump in the Twilight Zone. But first, candidate Trump bragged, in 2016:

"We're going to win so much that you're going to be sick and tired. You're going to say, 'Please, please, Mr. President, we're sick and tired of winning. Please let us have at least one loss. It's no longer exciting to win.' And I'm going to say, 'No way, we're going to keep winning, and I don't care if you like it or not.'"

Two years later, Trump bragged about the magnitude of his personal sacrifice in serving as president. Did that change his mind about winning?

President Trump then led the GOP to an epic loss of the House in 2018.

He himself lost in 2020.

Then, outdoing even King Cnut (famed for failing to turn back the tide), Trump stopped the 2022 red wave. Per Dick Morris, 2022 portended a looming "mass extinction event" for Democrats.

"'I'm predicting something more than a tsunami, more than a tidal wave, more than an earthquake," Morris said during an appearance on Newsmax's "American Agenda." "Do you remember, in the history books, how the theory is that a meteorite hit the Earth right around where the Caribbean Sea is and that the resulting dust killed all the dinosaurs and made them extinct? Well, that's the magnitude of what I think is going to happen.'="

Could Trump's post-election complaints be a shrewd way of placating his loyalists by obscuring his having thrown three elections? Yet ... why in the world would anyone choose to lose "so much" that we of the Republican Victory Caucus are "getting sick and tired of" ... losing?

Barrett probes young Donald's psyche, his very good brain, at one of Trump's downfall points in his definitive biography, "Trump: The Deals and the Downfall," republished in 2016 as "Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Deals, the Downfall, The Reinvention."

One of his Big Reveals? Trump's favorite "Twilight Zone" episode: "'What are your goals?' he [Trump] was once asked in a television interview when he was at the peak of his success. 'Goals?' he repeated, apparently taken aback by this foreign concept, unable to imagine a sense of purpose grander than a score card.

"'You keep winning and you win and you win,' he said in the midst of the crisis, reflecting on his better days. 'You keep hitting and hitting. And then somehow it doesn't mean as much as it used to.'

"Donald liked to recall his favorite 'Twilight Zone' episode, which featured a venal man who died in an accident, was offered any wish he wanted, and declared: 'I want to win, win, win. Everything I want. I went to get. I want to get the most beautiful women. I want to get the beautiful this and that. I want to never lose again.'

"Then, as Donald recounted the story, the man was shown playing pool, winning every time. 'Everything he did, he won,' said Donald, until the godlike figure who'd granted his wish came back to the man. 'And the man said, "If this is Heaven, let me go to hell." And the person said, 'You are in hell.'" ("Trump: The Deals and the Downfall," pp. 31-32)

Trump therein related to relentless "winning" (by means fair and foul) as "in hell." Strangely interesting.

Who is gratified by worship of the mere lumpenproletariat? "You are in hell."

We enter Guy Debord's prophesied "The Society of the Spectacle." It's an anti-WYSIWYG world: what we see is not what we get.

Instead, we get wonder. Thrills.

But ... cheap thrills.

As David Segel recently observed in The New York Times about mentalist Uri Geller, "an entertainer, one who'd figured out that challenging our relationship to the truth, and daring us to doubt our eyes, can inspire a kind of wonder, if performed convincingly enough. ...  He is a reminder that people thrill at the sense that they are either watching a miracle or getting bamboozled."

In now departing our brief journey into a wondrous land of imagination, the "Twilight Zone," let's recall a line from Rod Serling's predecessor, Christopher Marlow, in Dr. Faustus, as spoken by Mephistopheles: "Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it."

Thrilled at watching a miracle?

Or at getting bamboozled?

Ralph Benko, co-author of "The Capitalist Manifesto" and chairman and co-founder of "The Capitalist League," is the founder of The Prosperity Caucus and is an original Kemp-era member of the Supply-Side revolution that propelled the Dow from 814 to its current heights and world GDP from $11T to $94T. Read Ralph Benko's reports — More Here.