were much more important things to write about, and nobody seemed to care anymore about Trump’s buffoonish behavior. I figured the article was DOA.
But yesterday, The Donald came to my rescue, making a bold bid for attention by officially confirming what I’d been saying from the start: No, he’s not going to run for president after all.
Being a native New Yorker, I kind of grew up with Donald Trump. I’ve been subjected to scandal sheet coverage of his shenanigans for almost thirty years now, watching as he used the press to build his name and then sell that name for whatever he could get. I remember when while still married to Ivana Trump, mother of his three teen-aged children, he paraded his adulterous affair through the local tabloids. She was a showgirl named Marla Maples, nearly twenty years his junior. He eventually dumped Ivana and married Maples, who bore him yet another child. Trump then sued Maples for divorce just before the clock in their pre-nuptial agreement was set to raise her settlement from $1,000,000 to $5000,000. Since then, he has predictably moved onto Wife Number Three, a trophy who’s nearly a quarter-century younger than him and not much older than his oldest child.
Growing up with this kind of crass, unethical, self-promotion, it doesn’t take long to realize that while Donald Trump is a very successful salesman, he’s also a clownish businessman and a horrific human being. So to me, none of the idiocy surrounding his aborted presidential run was in the least bit surprising. His phantom candidacy was just more hot air from a high-priced con-man. It was just another dog and pony show from a guy who wants to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge, just the predictable, irritating cacophony of a broken one-man band looking to hawk some snake oil.
For years, Trump has tried to hide his true nature behind the dazzle and bluster, but now there is no longer any denying it. Because being President of the 
United States is actually a serious thing, so this time, people started demanding to see a deed to the bridge and a list of ingredients on the bottle. And he wasn’t ready for it.
NBC News produced a five-minute expose about what a corrupt, double-dealing failure Trump is. They revealed a litany of “high profile bankruptcy filings, multi-million dollar real estate deals that went sour, and a trail of ongoing lawsuits accusing Trump of deceptive business practices.”
Critics from within the business world piled on. For example, Joshua Green of The Atlantic interviewed a former Deutsche Bank big shot who worked with Trump and said, “it’s pretty well known in financial circles that this guy is a deadbeat.”
My favorite story of Trump floundering as a businessman is what he did to Trump Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City. As chairman, he managed to run that business into bankruptcy. Three times. Think about that for a second. He couldn’t turn a profit running a business where, generally speaking, customers show up in droves and just handover a bunch of money. And you think he was actually going to run for president? Of course not.
The truth is, Donald Trump’s primary accomplishment is prostituting his name. Because instead of the self-made business tycoon he portrays himself to be, he’s actually just a megalomaniacal, spoiled brat, the privileged son of one of America’s most successful post-WWII real estate developers. He did in fact manage to capitalize on his family’s fortune during the real estate boom of the 1980s, but he squandered it all by the mid-1990s, amid the greatest economy of the last four decades. So why is he still “on top?” Because he has been bailed out by numerous bankruptcy filings, a $35,000,000 inheritance, and tens of millions in loans from his siblings.
And now? Now he’s a loudmouthed whore whose fortune depends mightily on his ability to auction off his dubious persona through embarrassing 
licensing deals, shoddy businesses, and a run-of-the-mill reality TV show that actually depends on the fame of others. So in retrospect, it’s almost to be expected that he would concoct a bullshit presidential run to burnish his empire of self-branding. Only this time, he could not control the accompanying publicity, and it has unmasked him for the charlatan that he really is.
But what caught some people off guard was his willingness, and even eagerness, to pander to the most debased, racist instincts in modern America. First the Birther nonsense. And after that blew up in his face, the implied accusation that President Obama only got into Ivy League schools because he’s black.
Donald Trump is an absolute embarrassment as a human being, and a pathetic joke of a would-be politician whose bold move was to position himself as a sad, dated stereotype of a 1980s-style racist. He was never really going to run, and was only pretending so he could grab some free press, just like when he threatened to run back in 1999. After all, the only thing Trump is any good at selling is himself, right down to simply slapping his name on just about every piece of crap that comes his way.
Fortunately, this time hardly anyone’s buying. So it’s back to the boob tube and scandal sheets from whence he came. Good riddance to bad rubbish.