Why Would We Re-elect a Serial Failure?

If Trump wasn’t born with money he’d be ridiculed

MartinEdic
3 min readApr 4, 2022

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Photo by Gabriel Meinert on Unsplash

It used to be that Americans admired people who earned their success. It was the American way that we believed that merit and hard work could earn a way to the top of a chosen field. Somehow that idea has disappeared and it is very disturbing. Today we have a generation that is constantly trying to figure out how to game the system, to skip the work, and jump to the next level through some kind of trick.

This is a terrible failure of a basic premise of our society, a premise that has been destroyed by the irrational worship of a guy who has failed at basically everything he touches. Somehow, because he inherited $400 million in his early twenties and spent the rest of his life claiming to be a financial genius, many hold him up as a paragon of success.

To put this into perspective, if Trump had invested his inheritance in an S&P 500 fund in 1985, he would have over $15 billion. Yet most experts put his net worth around $2.5 billion. Which means he has lost the vast majority of his money, nearly $12.5 billion over the past 37 years.

A real business genius, right?

By no measure whatsoever is Trump, a genius or a success. He is certainly not a role model or mentor. Yet many who see the fruits of hard work want those fruits without doing the work, while simultaneously elevating a spoiled rich bully to some kind of cult figure.

Pick any Trump follower and you will see a person whom he bullies and treats like shit. His political lackeys who he discards with disdain. His blue collar fans who struggle to make a living with hard work and who he laughs about in his mansions. Those poor souls who think he has magical powers to undo history.

I could list his failures and outright scams. There are dozens. In fact if you look at the record he has never done well in anything. Banks won’t lend to him because he defaults as a matter of course. Contractors do business with him then never get paid, often losing their businesses as a result. He is convicted of running get rich quick scams targeting the naive. And on and on.

His vaunted social network launch earlier this year is a total failure.

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MartinEdic

Mastodon: @martinedic@md.dm, Writer, nine non-fiction books, two novels, Buddhist, train lover. Amateur cook, lover of life most of the time!