Donald Trump’s festival of narcissism
Last edited Wed Jun 17, 2015, 05:19 PM - Edit history (1)
Donald Trumps festival of narcissism
By Dana Milbank at the Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/donald-trumps-festival-of-narcissism/2015/06/16/fd006c28-1459-11e5-9ddc-e3353542100c_story.html
"SNIP.............
Im not doing that to brag, he said (heaven forbid!), because you know what? I dont have to brag.
But he cant seem to stop himself. Trumps announcement (from Trump Tower, natch) that he is seeking the Republican presidential nomination was a veritable festival of the first person. A search of the transcript finds that he uttered I 195 times, my or mine 28 times, me 22 times and Ive or Id 12 times for a grand total of 257 self-references. This compares with seven mentions of America or American, most of which were references to his holdings (I own a big chunk of the Bank of America Building at 1290 Avenue of the Americas, that I got from China in a war very valuable) and his declaration that the American Dream is dead.
If the American Dream werent already dead, it would have killed itself listening to Trumps 45-minute greed-is-good speech at a time when the gap between rich and poor is wider than it has been since the Great Depression. But dont blame Trump, the doughy showman President Obama dubbed a carnival barker for his role in the birther movement. This reality TV star is simply exploiting the political system as it exists.
Trump is the Frankenstein monster created by our campaign-finance system in which money trumps all. The Supreme Court has equated money with free speech (by letting first candidates and then contributors spend unlimited sums), which means the more money you have, the more speech you get. Trump may be preposterous, but there are 8,737,540,000 reasons we have to listen to him the figure Trump claimed is his net worth.
.............SNIP"