Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
New Yorker: What Myeshia Johnson Revealed About Donald Trump
https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/what-myeshia-johnson-revealed-about-donald-trumpOver the weekend, I re-read John R. O’Donnell’s book “Trumped! The Inside Story of the Real Donald Trump—His Cunning Rise and Spectacular Fall,” from 1991. O’Donnell was a longtime casino executive who ran the Trump Plaza, a Trump casino in Atlantic City. And although the book is dated in some ways, O’Donnell’s recollections are valuable in that they show how little Trump has changed: the Trump in O’Donnell’s book is vain, myopic, and consumed with the fear of being one-upped.
“He had a tremendous fear of baldness,” O’Donnell writes. “He swept his hair across the front of his head like a man trying to hide a thinning patch. He once observed to Mark”—Etess, another Trump executive—“that he considered baldness a sign of weakness. He gave a tube of the gel he used to Mark, warning him: ‘The worst thing a man can do is go bald. Never let yourself go bald,’ as if nature could be circumvented through sheer force of will.”
In a different passage, O’Donnell describes how the Plaza tried to attract more high rollers by comping them food and luxury suites, allotting them ringside seats at prizefights, and even siding with them when they claimed to have won disputed bets against the house. These gestures were designed to keep the high rollers coming back, O’Donnell explained, because, eventually, given the mathematics of gambling, they were sure to lose more money than they won. But Trump had a problem with the strategy.
“Donald did not understand this, but then his conception of time was so circumscribed that it was astounding,” O’Donnell writes. “He did business almost entirely in the moment.” He “would become extremely anxious whenever sizable piles of money shifted to the player’s side.” On the other hand, when someone lost a lot of money, he couldn’t hide his glee. When a high roller told Trump he had dropped a quarter of a million dollars during a weekend at one of his casinos, he replied, “Great .?.?. oh, that’s great.” Trump’s shortsightedness drove away many heavy gamblers, O’Donnell recalled, and the people who worked for him were “constantly trying to soothe sore feelings.”
Sound familiar? For almost a week now, Trump has been caught up in a bitter dispute about a condolence call he made to the family of La David Johnson, a sergeant in the U.S. Special Forces who was killed in Niger on October 4th. On Monday morning, Myeshia Johnson, the soldier’s pregnant wife, appeared on “Good Morning America” and said that Trump’s call “made me cry,” saying, by way of explanation, “I heard him stumbling on trying to remember my husband’s name and that’s what hurt me the most, because if my husband is out here fighting for our country and he risked his life for our country, why can’t you remember his name?”
n response to Johnson’s interview on Monday, Trump immediately disputed her account, thereby further escalating what had already turned into one of the ugliest episodes of his Presidency. ”I had a very respectful conversation with the widow of Sgt. La David Johnson, and spoke his name from beginning, without hesitation!” he tweeted. As the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake quickly pointed out, Trump “effectively called a Gold Star widow a liar.”
....continue ed at link
9 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
Knowing what they were getting themselves into when they signed up, I knew exactly what the problem with the phone call to Mrs. Johnson was. It was his TONE. A man like tRump has no clue how to sound sincere and empathetic. He can say the words but not get the right tone in his voice. And yes, he probably did stumble over La David Johnson’s name. It is a little bit unusual and tRump, being the arrogant asshole that he is, had probably not read over the names to make sure he was familiar with them.
He is going to lose this fight but it won’t stop him from attempting to win. He is just that pathetic that winning is everything to him, even if he has to take on a young, pregnant, grieving widow to try to prove a point.
