Saturday, August 20, 2016
Word Count – 374

All the quotes are from Neal Gabler’s OP-ED piece in today’s New York Times.
Click to read the entire article.

• • – Donald J. Trump may be the first to run because he sees a presidential campaign as the best way to attract attention to himself. There seems to be no other driving passion in him, certainly not the passion to govern.
  • – For Mr. Trump, attention is the whole shebang.
  • – The shift is from politics to grabbing attention, and, quite possibly, from winning the election to winning the defeat, which is how he has spent practically his entire career.
  • – Mr. Trump, the real estate magnate, is after all, the master of taking a property, squeezing out the profit and leaving it for dead, then miraculously turning the loss to his advantage.
  • – A failing building or a failing Republican Party: To Mr. Trump, it may be the same thing.
  • – Basically, he sells his name: Trump steaks, Trump water, Trump University.
  • – He discovered that, in a celebrity society like ours, where so many people are competing for attention, running for president puts you a leg up even on the Kardashians.
  • – Mr. Trump’s was never a political campaign, either in the sense that it was operating under traditional political rules or in the sense that winning the election was its real objective.
  • – It was a decision designed to make sure he continues to be an attention monger rather than another pol. Mr. Bannon, a provocateur at Breitbart, has never run a campaign, but he knows a lot about how to get media attention.
  • – Winning means different things to different candidates. It doesn’t always mean winning the vote.
  • – … has taken a huge edifice, plastered his name all over it without investing much in it, and is very likely to abandon it as a troubled asset once the election is over and its value is diminished, … Only, in this case, the edifice is the Republican Party.
  • – One can well imagine a post-election Citizen Trump crowing that while Hillary Clinton is saddled with four years of headaches and a measly $400,000 salary, he is using the attention he got to make billions more as a media mogul.
  • – Now who’s the loser?