In Defense of Donald Trump
It hasn’t felt to me like Donald Trump has been winning lately. He sort of turned himself into a laughing stock when he decided that he was going to run for President. He went, literally overnight, from being a very serious candidate to a candidate worse than Sarah Palin. Sometimes I feel like Donald Trump is some kind of cartoon character playing an American businessman, other times, I feel like he very much is a very brilliant businessman. I’ve come to the conclusion that he simply is both.
Something that the Donald does is build golf courses. He does this for a living. He builds them with the intention of making money out of them, much like thousands of other developers from around the world. He also does this with apartment buildings and hotels and he has built a VERY powerful brand around it utilizing the media in the best way he knows how, with a great deal of skill (and arrogance that bothers a lot of people).
Some say that his run for President was a complete media attention getting rouse, others say that he was just being a complete narcissist, and others think that he should be President.
At the end of the day though, Donald Trump is a real estate developer, and he’s like countless other American businessmen rolling the dice on real estate developments that do very much in fact create sales jobs, construction jobs and countless other jobs around it.
This new documentary called “You’ve Been Trumped” which demonizes the business of real estate development and won an award at the Hamptons International Film Festival is a bit over the top if you ask me. Yes, fine, I agree that maybe Trump was over-zealous when it came to this specific real estate investment. But that happens all the time in the world of business. There are countless examples of companies coming into an area, thinking that their business plan is a good idea, and then getting driven out of the town when they realize that it’s a poor investment. It doesn’t make the business person evil, it makes them stupid for trying to start a business in a place that clearly does not want it nor has demand for it. It’s called a miscalculation. When it works out, everybody looks brilliant, when it doesn’t, they look stupid, and because of the risk of financial loss and reputation, very few people have the courage (or in Trump’s case arrogance) to take the leap head first into a business venture.
A documentary like this could be made in every town across the world that engages in capitalism and doesn’t like a new industry coming in. Specifically targeting Donald Trump is clearly a rouse in itself to gain public attention for a movie and in that sense, “You’ve Been Trumped” is engaging in the exact same clever marketing tactics that The Donald engages in.