What Would Marcus Aurelius Think of Donald Trump?
Can we call Donald Trump “happy”? I think the clear answer is “no”…
Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig’s Lucky Loser shows that beneath Trump’s public bravado and the myth of a business empire lies a hollowed-out financial reality. Yet Trump somehow managed to build a lasting illusion of success rather than an immense squandering of his opportunity given the enormous New York real-estate boom of his career. Yet he is a success because he has managed to use low cunning and the relentless pursuit of appearances over substance to be perceived as a success—though it is a kind of success that that very few indeed who know even part of the real story could in any sense admire…
This came out rather well, I think:
Brad DeLong: Lucky Loser Review—How Donald Trump Squandered His Wealth: ‘Donald Trump started his career at the end of the 1970s, financed by his father Fred Trump…. Rough calculations say that, had he simply taken the money, leveraged it not imprudently… passively invested it in Manhattan real estate… partie[d], womanised, played golf, collected his rent cheques… reinvested… his fortune could have amounted to more than $80bn by… 2017. And yet… Forbes pegged him at $2.5bn—which… is really anything between $5bn (£4bn) and zero (or less)…. [So] Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig call Trump… one of the world’s biggest losers… [by] manag[ing] to destroy the vast majority of his potential net worth….
[Yet] there Trump was at the start of 2017, in spite of everything, stunningly successful. Buettner and Craig call this an “illusion”. I profoundly disagree. To repeatedly save yourself from bankruptcy—to somehow manage to hand responsibility off to the people you do business with while you hotfoot it out of the picture—demonstrates considerable skill and ingenuity of some sort. Trump has exhibited great (if low) cunning and resilience….
Many of us hope that Trump’s story will end with a proper comeuppance, restoring the appropriate and just moral order of the universe… [as] galaxy-scale hubris… call[s] forth… nemesis. Until then, we must regard him as a remarkable success—although few philosophers would judge Trump’s brand of success as the kind worth having…
Aurelius Antoninus, Marcus. 181 [1887]. The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. London: W. Scott. <https://archive.org/details/meditationsofmar00marc>.
Buettner, Russ, & Susanne Craig. 2024. Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success. London: Bodley Head. <https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/672076/lucky-loser-by-russ-buettner-and-susanne-craig/>.
DeLong, J. Bradford. 2024. “Lucky Loser Review: How Donald Trump Squandered His Wealth.” The Guardian, September 26. <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/sep/26/lucky-loser-review-how-donald-trump-squandered-his-wealth>.
I still have no idea how somebody can lose money in a government-sponsored casino monopoly in Atlantic City. Or fail so completely at having his wealth lifted up by the truly extraördinary boom in Manhattan real-estate that was coterminous with his career. In the end, the only real asset he had was the fake reputation as a sophisticated, clever, dominant manager that was produced by the clever cutting of television snippets by the film editors of The Apprentice. And yet that has proved, so, far—together with the deplorable cowardice of the professional Republicans from Mitt Romney on—to be enough. So far.