Presuming that billionaires are necessarily superior to the penurious swinish multitudes of which I am a prime member, one must pay attention to what Michael Bloomberg said yesterday about Donald Trump. One of these two men is a real billionaire while the other insists that he is one too.
Bloomberg, in throwing some serious shade, said this of Trump during his speech at the Democratic National Convention yesterday, “I am a New Yorker and I know a con when I see one.”
This after calling him a “bomb thrower” and a “dangerous demagogue” who as a businessman has “a well-documented record of bankruptcies, thousands of lawsuits, angry stockholders and contractors who feel cheated and disillusioned customers who feel ripped off. “Trump says he wants to run the nation like he’s running his business? God help us,” Bloomberg said to rapturous cheers.
You might think the 74-year-old former mayor of New York whose real time net worth as of this morning, according to Forbes, is $47.7 billion, would have been done with this stinging rebuke but he had more when he implied that Trump is neither sane nor competent. He even said, “Truth be told, the richest thing about Donald Trump is his hypocrisy” in a not so subtle crack at Trump’s wealth.
I began with the absurd proposition that billionaires are superior to the rest of us but let’s continue that for a moment or two more. If that is the measure of a person’s intelligence than Bloomberg is reputedly ten times smarter than Trump because that is how much richer he is supposed to be.
If this extraordinary endorsement of Hillary Clinton coming from a politically independent billionaire can still not get her into the White House, I don’t know what to say. And that too just one day after Trump openly called on Russia to hack American computers to find Clinton’s reportedly missing 30,000 emails. If someone other than Trump had stood up in Central Park in New York and called on Russia to hack former secretary of state’s server to gain access to her emails, the FBI would be all over that person.
As an aside, I think in Russia’s President Vladimir Putin Trump perhaps sees a role model because the former is said to be much richer, lives in an obscenely ornate palace, rules without entertaining any opposition and eats hubris for breakfast.
One looks at Trump and wonders whether he knows that there is a real world outside of his mind that is actually listening to all that he says and does. Actually, there has not been a presidential candidate who is as acutely aware of the real world outside his mind as Trump. He says whatever he says fully aware of its implications. That is where Bloomberg’s description of him as a bomb throwing demagogue comes in.
Trump operates so much outside the norm that it is no longer possible to adjudicate on his case with normal standards. Here is a man who has led a life of absolute conceit without any need for external reinforcement or vindication or correction. It is a self-perpetuating narcissistic loop. Now that he has found a receptive and captive audience, which at best agrees with him and at worst couldn’t care less about his consequence, he has become unstoppable. It is almost as if some unseen force is propelling him. How else can one explain that polls suggest he is ahead of Clinton and could win?
Those who do the complex electoral math insist that there is no way Trump could win with tens of millions of independent voters who would eventually settle for Clinton. I am not so sure because oftentimes in life bomb-throwing for the sake of it is known to irresistibly draw people. Let’s hope this does not turn out to be one such time. In my limited exposure to America’s electoral system, which has meant watching and reporting four presidential campaigns since I arrived in 1998, I have not seen a candidate, namely Hillary Clinton, who has been so eminently qualified for the job as president. Yet, and I am fusing Bloomberg’s descriptions of Trump into one, a dangerously demagogic, bomb-throwing con of doubtful sanity could win against her.