In a long feature about Donald Trump, Rolling Stone’s Paul Solotaroff breathlessly declares, “What I saw was enough to make me take him dead serious. If you’re waiting for Trump to blow himself up in a Hindenburg of gaffes or hate speech, you’re in for a long, cold fall and winter. Donald Trump is here for the duration — and gaining strength and traction by the hour.”
On CNN, Solotaroff noodled on about the absence of “Republican wise man” among Trump’s political entourage. The pundits are part of the nimbus of power that is DC. As such, they refuse to comprehend that the “Silent Majority” detests them, their politcal masters and their scheming handlers. Very good that Trump’s entourage doesn’t include these Republican snake-oil salesmen.
It is unclear whether Solotaroff is showing condescension when he describes the Trump “singular family gift as seeing the future and beating everyone else to it.”
As to child rearing, Donald Trump was no sissy boy and he has been tough on his own spawn. “If the nation’s mothers and fathers want fabulous kids like Donald Trump’s, they ought to try conducting themselves this way with their stroppy offspring” (From: “Megyn, Jorge, and a Reaganesque Trump”)
… Though Fred [Donald’s father] lived and died a very rich man, he made his kids work like peasants. The three boys spent summers pulling weeds and pouring cement, learning the building trade from the subfloor up, while the two girls toiled in his real estate office in the bowels of Coney Island. Trump tells the story of being dragged by the nose to join Fred on his rounds collecting rents. “We’d go on jobs where you needed tough guys to knock on doors,” he says. “You’d see ’em ring the bell and stand way over here. I’d say, ‘Why’re you over there?’ and he’d say, ‘?’Cause these motherfuckers shoot! They shoot right through the door!'”
Trump has raised his own kids in comparable fashion, disabusing them of any notions of unearned grandeur. “I was a dock attendant for a couple of summers, then went into landscaping,” says Don Jr., a company vice president running international projects, with an office directly below his father’s. “My brother and I are probably the only sons of billionaires who can operate a D-10 Caterpillar.” “I did less-than-glamorous internships in sweltering New York — the South of France wasn’t an option,” says Ivanka in her immaculate office next door to Don Jr. Together with Eric, the third of Trump’s kids by his first wife, Ivana Trump (he has two younger children by subsequent wives), his three grown offspring handle his vast portfolio of luxury hotels and resorts. Polished and restrained where their father is flamboyant, they’ve nonetheless paid him the highest praise by enlisting in the family trade. No less telling, none of them are train wrecks like so many children of billionaires. “We grew up with a lot of those kids and know them well,” says Don Jr. “But I guess we were pushed and motivated differently.”
When all is said and done, the contempt this reporter has for the Trump crazies is palpable:
… As we stand there, hundreds of feet above New York, gazing on the Lilliputian tourists, it occurs to me to wonder: How on Earth, from this vantage, did Trump see into the hearts of underemployed white folk? How did he know that they stewed and simmered over free trade, immigrants and fat-cat Republicans who’d sold them down the river for decades? How did he guess that they’d conflated those things to explain the flight of factory jobs, and that all they really cared about, besides the return of those jobs, was that someone beat the hell out of the party hacks — the Jeb Bushes and Scott Walkers and Karl Roves? …