What I Said about Trump as President in 2011

My original article, predicting that Trump would be welcomed by the public

Why Donald Trump Could Win in 2012

By Alan Brody   

We don’t elect politicians any more. We elect Superheros. At least, that’s what we are looking for.  Ordinary politicians need not apply.

Guess what, Donald has started to look like one.

Needless to say, Trump could be doing this for the publicity – he certainly has done it before. But this time its different. Not only because he might be at a point where he means it - but because the public could insist on it.

Trump may be tapping a perfect storm of trends that have never really occurred before.

1.     We want mythic creatures – not politicians. In that case, Obama – who has never actually run anything, let alone a country, comes to us as the persona prophesied by Bill Cosby and then Nelson Mandela and godmothered by Oprah Winfrey.

Donald Trump comes to us by way of The Apprentice, with his remarkably sensible progeny and godfathered by Mark Burnett who somehow turned Trump the bombast into Trump the Solomon of managerial talent.

2.     The Age of the Entrepreneur. Nations are a product of who runs them: this country is run by lawyers. Once, we were about robber barons and lawyers. Then we became mostly about corporations and lawyers. Thanks to the Democrats, we are now labor and lawyers - as well as Wall Street or high value companies that can afford to reward their employees handsomely. Corporations are now global and they can sidestep the lawyers if they choose. They no longer control the majority of jobs – small business does. I other words, if this country is not really about corporations or labor all that remains re small business and lawyers. Since small business is by nature fragmented, that leaves us with lawyers. Obama is not merely a lawyer but an academic lawyer a professor of constitutional law. No only is he lacking experience in the rapid decisionmaking of executive leadership – although he is not doing a bad job. He has no idea how to create the future of jobs. Trump is not just a businessman, he is an entrepreneurial figure. He has invested in many kinds of self employment companies like ACN. These are often controversial but they also create masses of independent moneymakers. No politician knows about these kinds of businesses and they are the fture. Politicians can only dream of a better GM. Good luck, there!

3.     World Leadership. Once America stood for something. It may have been wrong at times and it may have been called ugly at others, but it was the alpha male of world countries. Not any more. We are so inept at deciding our economic reality that we are both deeply in debt, exporting jobs and importing people to do many of the remaining jobs. We are ravenous users of energy but have neither the courage to live with the environmental risk of our own energy and are terrified to stand up to the foreign countries that sell it to us. It is quite possible to ague that at a moment when a bunch white republicans came to the conclusion that a multiracial world just hate them, Obama looked like just that person to put everyone not at ease. Heck he evn got a Nobel Peace prize just for showing up.

Yet his projection of the US on the world is not leadership. Its comradeship. When he went to Egypt to show the Muslim world a conciliatory face of America, he prattle on about freedom. Guess what – they believed him and two years later when they revolted, he stood back. His one symbolic moment came with Qaddafi. Here one was the one dictator that we owed a bullet, whom nobody supported and he couldn’t make up his mind to take him out. Instead, he waited until he could put together a posse of NATO countries. This was not hasty leadership and the waste time cost us a quick victory and has delivered a slow, bloody struggle.

Tue leaders have to pick a few moments to strike fast and hard and he missed that. One could argue he did that with health care but so far the results have been a joke. Our rates have gone up dramatically and his supporters have been given free passes.

4.     So Rich You can Trust Them. As voters look at the future we are in a strange place. Wall Street has come back but unemployment is still high. We now compete on the world economy and regular politicians don’t seem to have a clue about dealing at a high level of strategy in the world game.