The Trump Review

Being a Wednesday-morning columnist is a good gig, except the day after Election Day when nobody will be interested in whatever statistics I’d researched on Monday.

So, having no clue how the voting turned out yesterday, let me try to be at least vaguely relevant by finally getting around to telling you My Opinion of Trump.

It occurs to me that I’ve probably written less about Donald Trump’s personality over the past four years than just about any pundit in America.

One reason is because everybody else writes incessantly about Trump, while my niche is analyzing topics that few dare mention, such as how urban murders were up 53% over 2019 during the June–August George Floyd mourning process. (How’s that media-declared Racial Reckoning working out for big-city property values anyway?) Steinbrenner: The Last... Madden, Bill Best Price: $1.21 Buy New $17.04 (as of 06:52 UTC - Details)

Another reason is that my main interest is in pattern recognition: I’m basically a baseball-stats-type guy who instead analyzes social data.

Trump, on the other hand, is sui generis. Over the 35 years since he first surfaced in the national media, Trump has been such a unique personality that I haven’t been that interested in him because he doesn’t seem terribly exemplary of any patterns or trends.

He is who he is and nobody else is quite like him. Trump is perhaps the most “To thine own self be true” personality I’ve ever seen. He has been authentically Trump-like throughout the decades.

Joe Biden, in contrast, although resembling Trump in his egomania and lack of a filter, tries to keep you from noticing as he chases trends, such as announcing in Kenosha that Thomas Edison didn’t invent the light bulb, it was some black dude whose name Joe doesn’t recall at the moment. George: The Poor Littl... Golenbock, Peter Best Price: $1.89 Buy New $11.77 (as of 06:52 UTC - Details)

Moreover, Biden is not all that unusual a personality; in fact, other than being skinny, he’s a cliché cocky jock: the car dealer’s son who played split end in small college football and took a few knocks on the head, a Gerald Ford with fragile self-esteem issues. It’s not a coincidence that in Biden’s three tries for the White House, he has been most successful now that his personality is muted by age, masks, and his basement. Blair Nathan writes:

Biden is the perfect candidate for the Coalition of the Fringes because he’s been running as a generic Democrat, a compromise candidate none of the factions are excited about but all believe they can influence to some degree. So the ambiguity and lack of content of “Bidenism” are well suited to the ungainly coalition that makes up the modern Dems.

The one Trump forerunner I can recall is bombastic George Steinbrenner, who bought the New York Yankees baseball team in 1973 when both the Yankees and New York City were down and out. Like Trump a few years later, Steinbrenner bet big on New York City and won.

Trump has boasted that Steinbrenner was his mentor and best friend.

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