NEVER ENOUGH: Donald
Trump and the Pursuit of Success
MICHAEL D’ANTONIO
St. Martin’s Press, 2015, 389 pages
Review by Phil Shannon
What will America and the world be getting from ‘President Donald
Trump’ if such a frightful prospect comes to pass in 2016? Michael D’Antonio’s biography of the
Republican Party’s front-running Presidential candidate gives us some clues -
denial of global warming, vaccination, marriage equality and abortion; insults
and worse for religious and ethnic minorities, and for women and the disabled;
and a turbo-charged American imperial power.
The winner, on the other hand, would be big business,
Trump’s true religion. The business
mogul’s early training was one of honing a Social Darwinist survival of the
most aggressive (Trump thrived during his disciplinarian schooling at a
military academy) combined with the pampering that only true family riches can
provide (the rain-marred trials of young Donald’s paper round would be relieved
by completing it in his father’s chauffeured limousine).
Trump likes to dismiss those born into wealth as members of ‘the
lucky sperm club’ but he glosses over his own origins in one of America’s wealthiest
dynasties, which made its fortune, not through honest, hard work, but through buying
real estate cheap and selling it dear, from the 19th century Gold
Rush to New York in early century boom-time and 1930s Depression.
A family fortune of around $100 million assisted Trump’s emergence
as a high-end property developer in Manhattan in the late 1970s, as did another
family inheritance - the financial cultivation of politicians and government
bureaucrats to secure favourable contracts, construction permits, zoning
approvals and tax concessions.
The Trump brand expanded to every enterprise he owned (skyscrapers,
hotels, casinos, airlines, beauty pageants, golf resorts, football teams,
‘universities’) and those he licensed to use the Trump brand (board games, credit
cards, mattresses, deodorants, chocolate bars, neckties, steaks, cologne). Trump’s gold-glittering name adorned the ostentatious
symbols of his personal wealth - his 300 metre yacht, his $10 million
helicopter, his $100 million private jet.
Not every business venture was a success, but because
Trump’s loans were in the billions rather than thousands, he had power over the
banks and other lenders who could not afford to see Trump fail. Unlike ordinary American borrowers who were
ruined by the banks if they defaulted, Trump’s creditors advanced him new loans
and let his assets alone.
Trump made his pile through hard-headed, Trump-friendly deals. These were driven by Trump’s insatiable greed,
massive self-belief and a firm faith in the bankability of notoriety. Trump begins each day with a sheaf of papers
covering all his press mentions, positive or negative, judging their value to
his brand not by their content but by their total weight.
With Trump, publicity is all. Three previous Presidential electoral feints
were all designed to promote his self-help/get-rich books or his reality television
show, ‘The Apprentice’, a brutal ode to competitive capitalism. Trump’s current tilt at President is motivated
by the lure of becoming CEO of America, the missing political Godhead so far in
Trump’s deities of “wealth, fame and power”.
The political currency of Trump’s campaign, says D’Antonio, is
that of a populist ‘anti-politician’, stoking public outrage against minorities
whilst lambasting ‘elites’ such as the White House ‘Establishment’ and big
money political donors who pay too little tax.
This resonates loudly enough with Trump’s power base – aggrieved,
economically-struggling, white, southern males - to drown out their concerns
about Trump’s serial lying, refusal to apologise and evasiveness on policy detail.
The ascent to economic and political stardom of Trump, the self-styled
“people’s billionaire”, began four decades ago, says D’Antonio, at exactly the
moment when working class and corporate income differentials began to diverge
exponentially and when collective trade union responses to this escalating
inequality receded. Only if individuals aspired
to be like Donald Trump, and if the ‘undeserving’ were delegitimised, could you
find success.
D’Antonio’s penchant (apart from being besotted with the
mechanics of business deals) is for psychological analysis, diagnosing Trump’s obsession
with himself as ‘narcissistic personality disorder’. The real pathology, however, is the environment
which fosters the Trumps of the world - the economic system of winner-take-all
capitalism which rewards the privileged, greedy and ruthlessly competitive. Donald Trump is truly the poster-child for the
1%, for whom too much is, indeed, never enough.
