Road to debate: Trump built image as he built business
ASSOCIATED PRESS
It’s right there in The New York Times of Nov. 1, 1976. In the same article, the 30-year-old real estate developer talks up his millions, showcases his penthouse apartment and Cadillac, and allows a reporter to tag along as he visits job sites and lunches at the “21” club before hopping an evening flight to California for more deal-making. So much for that shy-guy claim.
WASHINGTON >> Donald Trump once claimed to be publicity shy.
No joke.
It’s right there in The New York Times of Nov. 1, 1976. In the same article, the 30-year-old real estate developer talks up his millions, showcases his penthouse apartment and Cadillac, and allows a reporter to tag along as he visits job sites and lunches at the “21” club before hopping an evening flight to California for more deal-making.
So much for that shy-guy claim.
Young and ambitious, Trump worked just as hard at building his image as he did at expanding his real estate empire.
Along the way, he honed the communications skills that would benefit him at the negotiating table, turn him into a reality TV star and launch a presidential campaign.
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He’ll put them to the ultimate test as he goes one-on-one with Hillary Clinton in three nationally televised debates over the next month that will help determine the next president.
Trump, who’d never participated in a debate before the presidential primaries, is keeping his preparations for Monday’s leadoff general-election debate low key — no mock face-offs or the like.
“Really, you’re preparing all of your life for these,” he told Fox Business Network recently. “You’re not preparing over a two-week period and cramming.”
Is he ready?
Experts on public speaking find all kinds of faults with Trump’s oratory: His vocabulary is juvenile, his syntax is jumbled, he’s casual about accuracy, he’s demeaning, his voice is thin and nasal, he’s weak on policy details and more.
And yet, Aaron Kall, who directs the University of Michigan’s Debate Institute and debate team, will venture to tell you this: “He performs like a maestro.”
“He’s a media natural,” says Kall, who edited a book about Trump’s primary debate performances. “He really understands audiences and tailors a message to what he thinks that they want to hear.”
Trump inherited a flair for promotion from his father.
Fred Trump, who built homes and apartments in Brooklyn and Queens, used all sorts of gimmicks to sell his properties: He filled the scoop of a bulldozer with women in bikinis. He released balloons on Coney Island containing $50 discount coupons. He dressed up apartment building lobbies with bird cages.
From the beginning, his son Donald never passed up an opportunity to be on camera.
Long before NBC’s “The Apprentice” turned Trump into a reality TV star in 2004, he was advancing his biz-whiz image in TV and movie cameos, chatting up Howard Stern on the radio and filming ads for Pizza Hut, McDonald’s and more. Then, over 14 seasons of “The Apprentice” and “Celebrity Apprentice,” he sharpened his ability to work the camera, think on his feet and promote the Trump brand.
As a presidential candidate, he’s drawn on those same skills to keep himself in the news, dishing out provocations and insults sure to guarantee the public’s attention.
“Across his history, he evolved from a builder to a brand,” says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. “He would not be successful were it not for his ingenuity at securing publicity.”
A big question heading into Monday’s leadoff debate in Hempstead, New York, is which Trump will turn up on stage — the bombastic name-caller who dominated stages for most of the primary season or the more disciplined candidate of late who marveled during the final Republican debate, “I can’t believe how civil it’s been up here.”
Voters looking for a smackdown may be disappointed.
Kall says that because a key question for voters is whether Trump has the right temperament to be president, the Republican nominee needs to put the bluster on hold and offer a measured, thoughtful debate performance in which he shows a command of policy detail.
Trump faltered on policy questions at times during the primary debates. At one point he appeared unfamiliar with the concept of the nuclear triad, which includes intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched missiles and strategic bombers. On another occasion, he seemed unaware China was not part of the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.
Lillian Glass, an expert on speaking and body language, said Trump needs to be “completely focused on what is discussed and not talk about himself and how great his business was and what he did in the past. We know. We all know. Now, it’s time to focus on the issues.”
There’s also Trump’s voice to consider.
Ruth Sherman, a public speaking coach, says the public has grown so accustomed to Trump over the decades that people give him a pass on what she says is a poor speaking voice.
“He doesn’t get criticized for the quality of his speaking voice but he should,” she says. “It’s a thin voice. It’s not smooth. It’s somewhat nasal.”
Plenty of critics have highlighted the GOP nominee’s banal vocabulary — heavy on “great,” ”amazing,” ”stupid,” ”dumb,” ”bad” and “sad.”
“It almost sounds at times as if he’s working from a random word generator in which there are a limited number of adjectives that are repeatedly used,” says Jamieson.
But a big part of Trump’s appeal is his knack for simplification, skipping over the nuances of complex problems to dangle the promise of easy solutions.
Trump may find that it was easier to pull that off on a crowded debate stage than it will be facing just Clinton, who is sure to try zero in on missing elements and policy gaps.
Dan Schnur, director of the University of Southern California’s political institute and a veteran of John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign, says of Trump: “For all his bombast, he must know that 90 minutes toe-to-toe with Hillary Clinton doesn’t leave him much margin for error.”
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9 responses to “Road to debate: Trump built image as he built business”
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Hmmmn, five living Presidents, both Ds and Rs, and not one supports Trump. You would think they know a a little bit about what is needed in both the temperament and skill set needed for the position?
As to him being self-made, nothing could be further from the truth, as he had to chronically borrow from his father throughout the course of his life, lest he be out on the streets on numerous bad business decisions.
Donald Trump often has said on the campaign trail that his business empire grew out of a single $1 million loan from his father.
While that is a literal description of how he started in business, the story omits significant additional loans and gifts Mr. Trump received in the early years when he was building his real-estate empire, some of which are described in a document reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
The document, a casino-license disclosure in 1985 by then-wife Ivana Trump, shows Mr. Trump taking out numerous loans from his father and his father’s properties near the start of his career in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
At the time of the disclosure, Mr. Trump owed his father and his father’s businesses about $14 million, according to the document.
That is a different picture from the one he paints at campaign rallies. “I started off with a million-dollar loan and I built it up to more than $10 billion in value—a million dollar loan,” he said at an event in Rome, N.Y., in April. Like the pathological lying that is also part of his big persona, he can’t help but just lie.
The casino document makes clear Mr. Trump received additional assistance soon after that initial advance. The Trump campaign acknowledges the additional loans…WSJ
Telling…..very telling.
Per, POLITICO’s five-day analysis, Trump averaged one falsehood every 3 minutes and 15 seconds over nearly five hours of remarks.
That’s a whole bunch of waha…….
Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/2016-donald-trump-fact-check-week-214287#ixzz4LIBF3Mvg
Mr. Trump’s father left him the business and the cash. That’s earning money the old fashioned way!
Several analyses have been done that found if Mr. Trump had just invested the fortune his father left behind, Mr. Trump would now be an actual billionaire, and not a fake one. But in spectacularly bad business moves, he drove four of his companies into bankruptcy. He also does not honor his obligations, and instead forces small companies into bankruptcy by not paying them.
His “foundation” uses other people’s money to buy self-aggrandizing portraits of himself, instead of using the money for actual charity. And his “university” was an organized crime scam from the very beginning. An outright fraud to steal money from people.
He’s a psychotic.
Ike and Klastri sounds all doom and gloom. They sure were mouthing off with the landslides and double digit poll leads just a few weeks ago.
Ike, Get some new material. We are in the 21st Century. Klastri, You sound like a broken record.
Crooked Hilliary is the perfect candidate for them. She spews hatred. The blacks can’t find jobs because Mama Hillary keeps them in morass.
Good luck tomorrow. Crooked Hillary is going to need it.
Donald Trump…second coming of President Ronald Reagan….will be even better.
You want doom and gloom, here is a poll, which reflects what I predicted last week, HRC back up by 7 points nationally. See: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/polltracker/clinton-trump-september-mcclatchey-marist
This also mirrors, from my count, eight other polls made in the last 72 hours…..
Why an absolute no to Trump–and this is not based on ideology or political slant or preference, but rather facts and his documented history.
When Donald Trump began his improbable run for president 15 months ago, he offered his wealth and television celebrity as credentials, then slyly added a twist of fearmongering about Mexican “rapists” flooding across the Southern border.
From that moment of combustion, it became clear that Mr. Trump’s views were matters of dangerous impulse and cynical pandering rather than thoughtful politics. Yet he has attracted throngs of Americans who ascribe higher purpose to him than he has demonstrated in a freewheeling campaign marked by bursts of false and outrageous allegations, personal insults, xenophobic nationalism, unapologetic sexism and positions that shift according to his audience and his whims.
Now here stands Mr. Trump, feisty from his runaway Republican primary victories and ready for the first presidential debate, scheduled for Monday night, with Hillary Clinton. It is time for others who are still undecided, and perhaps hoping for some dramatic change in our politics and governance, to take a hard look and see Mr. Trump for who he is. They have an obligation to scrutinize his supposed virtues as a refreshing counterpolitician. Otherwise, they could face the consequences of handing the White House to a man far more consumed with himself than with the nation’s well-being.
A financial wizard who can bring executive magic to government?
Despite his towering properties, Mr. Trump has a record rife with bankruptcies and sketchy ventures like Trump University, which authorities are investigating after numerous complaints of fraud. His name has been chiseled off his failed casinos in Atlantic City.
Mr. Trump’s brazen refusal to disclose his tax returns — as Mrs. Clinton and other nominees for decades have done — should sharpen voter wariness of his business and charitable operations. Disclosure would undoubtedly raise numerous red flags; the public record already indicates that in at least some years he made full use of available loopholes and paid no taxes.
Mr. Trump has been opaque about his questionable global investments in Russia and elsewhere, which could present conflicts of interest as president, particularly if his business interests are left in the hands of his children, as he intends. Investigations have found self-dealing. He notably tapped $258,000 in donors’ money from his charitable foundation to settle lawsuits involving his for-profit businesses, according to The Washington Post.
A straight talker who tells it like it is?
Mr. Trump, who has no experience in national security, declares that he has a plan to soundly defeat the Islamic State militants in Syria, but won’t reveal it, bobbing and weaving about whether he would commit ground troops. Voters cannot judge whether he has any idea what he’s talking about without an outline of his plan, yet Mr. Trump ludicrously insists he must not tip off the enemy.
Another of his cornerstone proposals — his campaign pledge of a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslim newcomers plus the deportation of 11 million undocumented immigrants across a border wall paid for by Mexico — has been subjected to endless qualifications as he zigs and zags in pursuit of middle-ground voters.
Whatever his gyrations, Mr. Trump always does make clear where his heart lies — with the anti-immigrant, nativist and racist signals that he scurrilously employed to build his base.
He used the shameful “birther” campaign against President Obama’s legitimacy as a wedge for his candidacy. But then he opportunistically denied his own record, trolling for undecided voters by conceding that Mr. Obama was a born American. In the process he tried to smear Mrs. Clinton as the instigator of the birther canard and then fled reporters’ questions.
Since his campaign began, NBC News has tabulated that Mr. Trump has made 117 distinct policy shifts on 20 major issues, including three contradictory views on abortion in one eight-hour stretch. As reporters try to pin down his contradictions, Mr. Trump has mocked them at his rallies. He said he would “loosen” libel laws to make it easier to sue news organizations that displease him.
An expert negotiator who can fix government and overpower other world leaders?
His plan for cutting the national debt was far from a confidence builder: He said he might try to persuade creditors to accept less than the government owed. This fanciful notion, imported from Mr. Trump’s debt-steeped real estate world, would undermine faith in the government and the stability of global financial markets. His tax-cut plan has been no less alarming. It was initially estimated to cost $10 trillion in tax revenue, then, after revisions, maybe $3 trillion, by one adviser’s estimate. There is no credible indication of how this would be paid for — only assurances that those in the upper brackets will be favored.
If Mr. Trump were to become president, his open doubts about the value of NATO would present a major diplomatic and security challenge, as would his repeated denunciations of trade deals and relations with China. Mr. Trump promises to renegotiate the Iran nuclear control agreement, as if it were an air-rights deal on Broadway. Numerous experts on national defense and international affairs have recoiled at the thought of his commanding the nuclear arsenal. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell privately called Mr. Trump “an international pariah.” Mr. Trump has repeatedly denounced global warming as a “hoax,” although a golf course he owns in Ireland is citing global warming in seeking to build a protective wall against a rising sea.
In expressing admiration for the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, Mr. Trump implies acceptance of Mr. Putin’s dictatorial abuse of critics and dissenters, some of whom have turned up murdered, and Mr. Putin’s vicious crackdown on the press. Even worse was Mr. Trump’s urging Russia to meddle in the presidential campaign by hacking the email of former Secretary of State Clinton. Voters should consider what sort of deals Mr. Putin might obtain if Mr. Trump, his admirer, wins the White House.NYT
Les-less. Your ignorance is amazing, as much as your man crush on Donald. Do you even know what the Secretary of State is responsible for, or, how much effort it has taken to right the US overseas policy which was totally messed up by Bush/Cheney/Powell? Get serious before you cut and paste any more stuff you find trolling the Internet.
Will HiLIARy be able to stand during the debate? She hasn’t looked well.