http://www.weeklystandard.com/trump-the-worst-human-being/article/2000122Donald Trump, scourge of Gotham, running roughshod over all convention, meanly belittling all in his way, ugly red hair ablaze above remarkably histrionic gestures and facial expressions, is an almost perfect avatar of Batman's nemesis The Joker (Cesar Romero version).
And like The Joker, Trump is particularly predisposed to trample upon ordinary people, stomping on almost any prototypical "little guy" who gets in the way of his quest for attention, wealth, and power.
Indeed, the remarkable thing about Trump's popularity is that it is rooted overwhelmingly among the very socio-economic classes – struggling workers and their relatives – whose well-being he has a long, long record of undermining or directly abusing.
The reality is that, for all his grandiose claims of being such a success and a "winner" – claims that are substantially exaggerated for someone born as Richie Rich and whose wealth creation since has been no better than average – Trump has rarely "won" for anybody other than himself, while leaving in his wake a host not just of wounded opponents but also wounded would-be allies.
Trump's propensity for, well, screwing the little guy (please forgive the Trumpian language) is most famously evident in his outspoken support for radically broad governmental powers of eminent domain property seizure. Completely upending American tradition, Trump again and again has expressed little remorse for "somebody that's in the way" not just of publicly owned and shared projects like highways and parks, but of private developments – specifically, in one case, for a "limousine waiting area" for one of his garish casinos that would have forced out of business a family-owned Italian restaurant of 27-year vintage..
(Trump has claimed that those losing their property "get paid a lot of money," but in the infamous casino deal above, his government lackeys tried to force out a nearby homeowning widow for only $251,000, for property for which she had turned down a million-dollar offer.)
Yet the virtual evisceration of property rights inherent in Trump's expansive eminent-domain advocacy is hardly the only example of Trump breezily leaving innocent victims behind him.
Consider the four Trump corporate bankruptcies which Trump dismissed as merely hurting lenders who "are total killers… not the nice, sweet little people." As usual, Trump was spouting bunk.
In truth, Trump Entertainment Resort's 2009 bankruptcy had the result, according to the Press of Atlantic City, that "low-level investors, contractors, small-time vendors—got less than a penny on the dollar for their claims."
And even apart from the bankruptcies, reported the newspaper, "Trump was a chronic haggler 'notorious for stringing people out and not paying,' [said one contractor]…. 'It was a joke among all the subs that you'd tack on an extra 10 percent onto your bids' to hedge against delayed payments, he said. 'He was slow pay, everybody knew.'"
Small contractors knew that Trump's inherited wealth could be used to force them to accept lower payments, because the mere threat of a Trump lawsuit, with millions of dollars of cut-throat lawyers in his employ, would overwhelm any ability of their own to fight his rapaciousness in court.
To this list of small lenders and vendors, of contractors and homeowners, of family businesses and pensioner-investors, all dumped on by Trump, we can also add Scottish farmers, Hispanic-immigrant workers at a current Trump project, and illegal-immigrant workers from Poland who won several rounds in a long-running court fight against Trump – for conspiring (as per a judge's ruling) with a local union to wrongly withhold medical and pension payments for work they did building the Trump Tower under "horrible, terrible conditions."
Against all these abuses, Trump's Joker-like penchant for crass or vicious insults seems almost harmless. But when he insinuates that a female news host is menstruating and that a female opponent for president is ugly, or belittles a war hero's seven years in the Hanoi Hilton and another, even worse prison camp, or deliberately makes fun of a reporter's disfiguring disability, those blows are low enough to be beneath contempt.
Trump compounds his contemptuousness through a propensity for lying that seems pathological – including lies about those very insults. Trump's backers seem enthralled by his refusal to apologize for his own crassness. What they miss is that he doesn't actually have the guts to stand by what he actually said; instead, he claims to have said, or meant, something else, only to have been misinterpreted.
If someone is "misinterpreted" once or twice, maybe the error is that of the listener. But when someone repeatedly makes the same sort of outlandish insult, the intent becomes clear, and the denial of that intent becomes dishonest.
Even that dishonesty pales in comparison to his outright lies. He said he didn't try to lobby Jeb Bush's team for gambling in Florida, but the record in undeniable that he did. He claimed he never criticized Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, but the criticism is found on his own website. He prevaricated about thousands of Muslims allegedly celebrating 9/11 in one New Jersey town; he lied about the turnout and ethnicity of the crowd at a South Carolina event; he claimed to be self-funding his campaign, which must be news to his 75,000 donors; he said this year that he "was never thinking about running for office" even though he publicly considered running for governor of New York twice and for president four times before this year, once actually even filing papers to do so; he said of Vladimir Putin that he "got to know him very well" even though the two have never met … and on and on and on.
In all of this, Trump gives evidence of contempt for his audience, and especially contempt for people born less privileged than he—and often with undertones of racial or religious smears, or outright misogyny. "I have black guys counting my money. … I hate it. The only guys I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes all day," he told USA Today in 1991. "If Hillary Clinton can't satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America?" he Tweeted this year. "You have to treat [women] like sh**," he told New York magazine in 1992.
And (speaking of contempt), he said this (to Playboy) of third-generation coal miners: "The coal miner gets black-lung disease, his son gets it, then his son. If I had been the son of a coal miner, I would have left the damn mines. But most people don't have the imagination—or whatever—to leave their mine. They don't have 'it.'"
With an attitude like that, it's no wonder Trump believes (as he said in a recent debate) that "wages are too high." If you have no imagination, it seems, you deserve low wages and deadly disease.
Donald Trump is now famous for calling various people "the worst" this, the worst that, the worst of everything. The man might want to look in the mirror. What he'll see there is—using his own course standards of discourse—the single worst human being in presidential politics.
