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This memo is dedicated to one of my hero's - Martin Luther King and I am posting only one op ed that I believe is very insightful and was sent to me by a very dear and respected friend and fellow memo reader.I consider it important that you realize I received this article after I had written what I am posting below
This article provides extraordinary insight into Trump and verifies his narcissistic roots and provides reasons why. Trump is goal oriented and his ability to get things done is his sole focus. In that regard he is a "genius." His personality is abrasive and off the wall different but that is a method he apparently uses and believes effective in his market driven efforts to turn things around - "Make America Great Again."
Frankly, I would have said "Make America Even Greater."
Again, I wrote my comments before I received the article I am posting and ended my own commentary by suggesting we swallow hard because of Trump's "quirkiness" and focus on what he can accomplish or fail to accomplish. With Trump, we have an interesting and unique opportunity and we should not allow his persona negatives shape/dictate our focus because we could lose the opportunity to make this nation greater.
With Obama, we endured another narcissistic persona who still believes he is president. The difference is what Obama accomplished, or failed to, was not oriented towards keeping America great, in my opinion, but actually making us smaller, less important etc. (See 1 below.)
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One of the best ways to build yourself up is to lower the position of your adversary.
Government bureaucracies do this all the time. They lower standards so they have more authority over larger numbers and thus, claim they need more funding to take care of their expanded obligations/responsibilities.
Government seldom challenges and rewards the top save for the military, which is undemocratic. When all else fails lower your standards is a consequence more likely to fit government results/achievements.
In the case of many of the failing/flawed black leadership, they attack sins of the white community while ignoring their own community failures. Rev. Wright, Jesse Jackson, members of The Black Causcus et al are all guilty. When did they ever speak truth to their own and really mean it and if they do, like Justice Thomas, they are called Uncle Tom's.
In a greater world sense, the attack on Western Civilization is, in large measure, a need to lower Many standards so the comparative difference will be narrowed for nations on the bottom who simply cannot rise to/overcome their own challenges. American youth have come to embrace socialism over capitalism because of the flaws of the latter yet, they ignore Venezuela, Cuba, Russia for instance.
Black NFL athletes kneel as a sign of contempt for/protest against America's symbols and racism while earning millions of dollars, yet fail to recognize white attendees have finally accepted their physical prowess and, in many instances, elevated them to hero status.
Haven't they learned you don't bite the hand that applauds?
I have a bright and accomplished friend who believes pulling down statutes of Confederate Generals etc. who, he claims, solely sought to destroy our nation so they could sustain slavery, is the way to go. If we deny the worst of our history what guide is left to move us away from repeating the same mistakes? Why even teach history?
I am confused why people want to come to America and then seek to change the society they sought by not learning the English language so they can prosper? Is their objective to make English a second status language by elevating their own tongue something we should tolerate or allow?
I am reminded of the play - I love you, I married You, Now Change!
America is one of the few nations that has been willing to experiment with multi-culturism. Without a common language, I believe a significant impediment stands in the way of its success.
America prides itself in being a melting pot. That which is melting implies a lot of flames and heat must be brought to bear. Does burning down one's neighborhood serve any purpose other than to gain attention for the moment while simultaneously building fear and resistance to a sought solution. Even if benefits accrue, they are generally the result of radical reaction and often result in overkill.
Attack the entire police department and call them racists and they will respond by not policing. Crime increases so what has been gained? More distrust? More Misunderstanding? More set backs and new wounds that require healing? More racial division. That's the "healing" change Obama brought about for which we are now paying the price.
Don't get me wrong. I am all for progress, I am all for change that truly improves. I am totally in favor of wrongs being righted and as quickly as possible but haste not only can make waste it can destroy what actually works because there also is something to be said for that which is classical.
Also, wrong policies, fuzzy thinking can destroy as Moynihan warned over 52 years ago.
This is as true in architecture as in life.Some of our nation's most beautiful structures have been replaced by drab modernism. Where would Savannah be without those who understood the beauty of the past. If we tear down statues why not the historic homes people lived in during that terrible time in our history?
I understand America is undergoing sort of a second rebirth, a significant re-look and self- questioning as we address unresolved issues because our political system and our political parties failed us and technology, like Murine, is forcing us to take a fresh look. Yes, social media technology has sped up the time demand for bringing about change.
My old firm had a series of clever ads and the one I most remember was: " Turtles makes progress only when they stick out their heads."
However, a turtle blind to its past, in my opinion, is going to, more likely, be flattened by a driverless car and, I ask,the turtle, is that progress?
The importance of the informed human element is critical if the change we seek turns into a true reward. This is why a solid education is so important and why I am so opposed to replacing reasoning with rote nonsense all because a certain party wants to curry favor with unions who then re-launder pay raises and tenure into campaign funding. What hypocrisy and who suffers the most? Black inner city children who are trapped in two ways - fatherless families and schools that serve cynical politicians.
The nation's plate is full and I have not even addressed the external threats we face, again, because feckless. misguided politicians did not place the nation first and/or thought through the consequences of their actions.
If we believe we are going to move forward by hating Trump because "we deplorables" concluded the alternative was unacceptable and were willing to go out on a limb and throw a "Hail Mary," we are sadly mistaken. Trump is all that has been written when it comes to the downside aspects of his character/personality but he is not a racist. Inarticulate at critical times, yes. Boorish and compulsive, again for sure? Capable of shooting himself in the foot, oh for sure and even several times in a day. Is he insane? Hardly.
I look at what a mess he inherited and what he has accomplished and what he hopes to accomplish against all irrational detractors and significant odds and if we follow the lead of the Anti-Trumpers', the biased mass media we will pay a very heavy price and miss a golden opportunity.
I choose not to walk down the path of those who have been consistently wrong and where anger and bitterness has distorted their judgement. Our own local Cartoonist continues to have not ink but egg on his face.
Something is going in the right direction if statistics mean anything and markets remain a decent predictor.
Swallow hard, give Trump a chance and I suspect things will turn out better than if we believe following the dictates of Maxine Waters , who lusts to impeach, is the better course.
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1)The ‘genius’ of Trump: What the president means when he touts his smarts
The genius in the White House has always believed that what makes him special is his ability to get things done without going through the steps others must take.
In school, he bragged that he’d do well without cracking a book. As a young real estate developer, his junior executives recalled, he skipped the studying and winged his way through meetings with politicians, bankers and union bosses. And as a novice politician, he scoffed at the notion that he might suffer from any lack of experience or knowledge.
So when President Trump tweeted last weekend that he “would qualify as not smart, but genius....and a very stable genius at that!” it was consistent with a pattern of asserting that he will do this his way, without bending to expectations about what constitutes proper presidential behavior.
The tweet, issued in response to a new book that suggests his closest advisers doubt his mental stability, not only doubled down on his belief that smashing conventions is the path to success but also underscored his lifelong conviction that he wins when he’s the center of attention. In the ceaseless battle of life, Trump made clear by claiming the title of genius that he won’t give way to those who believe he doesn’t belong at the top.
“There is a certain kind of genius to winning the presidency like it was an entry-level job,” said Dave Shiflett, the co-writer of Trump’s first book about his political views, “The America We Deserve,” which was published in 2000. “To go into those campaign rallies with just a few notes and connect with people he wasn’t at all like, that takes a certain genius. His genius is he’ll say anything to connect with people. He won by telling the rally crowds that the people who didn’t like them also didn’t like him.”
To many people who worked with Trump throughout his career, last week’s tweets — and Tuesday’s virtually unprecedented Cabinet Room reality show, in which the president conducted an on-camera negotiation about immigration policy with stunned congressional Republicans and Democrats — were familiar tactics: a bold, even brazen, drive to put on a show and make himself the star.
Even when he is not overtly trying to win attention, his natural instinct — a form of genius to some, a sign of instability to others — is to choose the unfiltered path, as he did Thursday, when he told senators during a White House discussion about immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and some African nations that the United States should bring in people from countries like Norway, not from “shithole countries.” Although Trump on Friday appeared to deny having used that vulgarity, he tweeted that he did use “tough” language — a long-standing point of pride for the president, whose political ascent was fueled by his argument that, as a billionaire, he is liberated to say what some other Americans only think.
From his earliest days in the real estate business, Trump boasted frequently about being smart, said Barbara Res, who was Trump’s top construction executive when he built Trump Tower on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue in the 1980s.
“He needed to be stroked all the time and told how smart he was,” she said. “Every decision process was clouded by his sense that he knows more than anybody else. But you could work with that: The way we got things done was to approach him with an idea and make him think it was his. It was so easy.”
Res added: “Donald was always a forest person; he never knew anything about the trees. He knew concrete was brought in on trucks, but he really didn’t know how to run a project. What he had was street smarts — good instincts about people.”
Those instincts did not always bring about stellar results, as Trump’s enterprises suffered a series of bankruptcies and other setbacks from the 1990s through the years before he entered politics.
Those who have watched Trump for decades say he has always encouraged people around him to view him as someone who could see things that others could not. A.J. Benza, a former journalist who covered Trump for many years in New York and in 2001 had a public spat with him when Trump began going out with Benza’s girlfriend, said that Trump often talked about being the smartest guy in the room.
“He never meant ‘book genius’ when he said it,” said Benza, who now hosts “Fame is a Bitch,” a podcast about celebrity. “He means, okay, he didn’t hit the brains lottery, but he’s brilliant and cunning in the way he operates. He’s amazing at taking the temperature of the room and knowing how to appease everyone. You want that kind of instinct in your quarterbacks, in your generals. It’s not what we’ve ever thought of as what makes a great president, but he’s never going to be the guy who makes great speeches. This is who he is.”
Being something of a genius was central to Trump’s self-image, his former executives said. Everyone around him learned to cater to that — even his father, who trained Trump to follow in his footsteps as a developer.
In the first major newspaper profile of Trump, in the New York Times in 1976, his father, Fred Trump, describes his son as “the smartest person I know.”
Throughout his life, Donald Trump has believed that his instincts and street smarts positioned him to succeed where others might struggle. At the University of Pennsylvania, he concluded that “there was nothing particularly awesome or exceptional about my classmates” in the real estate division of the Wharton School’s business program, Trump later wrote in one of his books. “Perhaps the most important thing I learned at Wharton was not to be overly impressed by academic credentials.”
Res said that Trump often bragged that he was “first” in his class in the Wharton program or that he was a “top student” there, but his name does not appear in the school’s honor roll, and classmates recalled him as someone who skated by doing little work. “He did what it took to get through the program,” classmate Louis Calomaris told The Washington Post in 2016.
His father often told Trump that “you are a king,” instructing him to “be a killer.” Fred Trump was a student of Dale Carnegie, the evangelist of success through self-improvement, and an acolyte of Norman Vincent Peale, the New York minister who preached a gospel of positive thinking.
Never a strong student, Donald Trump said that he came to believe he did not need to study as others did to make their way in the business world. Rather, he believed he had the inherent smarts to make the right decisions. “I know in my gut,” he said in an interview last year. “I know in 30 seconds what the right move is.”
But that instinct was undermined, according to several former Trump executives, by his Lone Ranger style: “He can’t collaborate with anybody because he doesn’t listen to anybody,” Res said. “He doesn’t trust anybody, except his family. That’s why [his former wife] Ivana was involved in everything and why now his children are, too.”
Trump said his father taught him about the mechanics of real estate development, as well as the softer skill of massaging the political system on behalf of his building projects. But he also believed he had something more: a genius for showmanship, a knack for surrounding himself with the trappings of success, thereby creating the perception that he was uniquely capable of big, bold action.
Genius and ego were essential elements of success on a grand scale, Trump said. He told an interviewer in 1990 that every great person, including Jesus and Mother Teresa, found the path to success via ego: “Far greater egos than you will ever understand,” he said.
“I believe in being prepared and all that stuff,” Trump told biographer Michael D’Antonio. “But in many respects, the most important thing is an innate ability. I’m a big believer in natural ability,” which, Trump said, he had “always had.”
Throughout his business career, Trump expressed deep skepticism of book learning, scoffing at the notion that academics were smarter than others, contending instead that his instincts would prevail over those who studied a subject to death.
In 2000, when Shiflett co-wrote Trump’s book on politics, a newspaper that was writing about the book asked what author had most influenced Trump. Shiflett said he called Trump’s office to find out what he should tell the reporter, and he was told to pick any writer he wanted to. “So I told them he likes Dostoevsky,” Shiflett said. “It was all just good times; the spirit around him was kind of mirthful. Everybody understood that and nobody took any of it very seriously.”
In Trump’s vocabulary, “genius” is perhaps the highest praise, and it refers to a street-level ability to get things done. Trump often referred to his lawyer and early mentor Roy Cohn as “a total genius” or a “political genius,” even if he was also “a lousy lawyer.” Trump explained in one of his books that his own true “genius” was for public relations: Rather than spending money on advertising, he said, he put his efforts toward winning news coverage of himself as a “genius.”
Despite his long history of boasts and his many admissions that he has a large ego, Trump has also had moments of extreme self-doubt. Biographer Harry Hurt described a period around 1990 when, as his marriage to Ivana Trump was breaking up, he occasionally spoke about suicide, according to friends and relatives.
Ivana Trump decided that the couple should see a psychiatrist. Her husband resisted at first but then agreed, telling her he’d go, “only if you think it will fix what’s wrong with you,” according to Hurt’s 1993 book “Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump.” Hurt reported that the future president attended only one session.
Soon, he was back to his usual publicly bullish self, “Trump being Trump,” as he sometimes called it.
“He says things because it gets attention,” Shiflett said. “He just wants people to talk about him.”
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