Trump Card

Oh, no, is Donald Trump considering a run for the Presidency again? It certainly seemed that way, as he appeared at the Conservative Political Action Committee conference in Nuremberg - er, Washington - and sounded like a candidate for 2012. Not for his espousal of social causes like criminalizing abortion or anything like that, but because he was taking cheap shots at President Obama, wondering with amazement how someone no one had heard of five years ago could suddenly become President of the United States.

Trump, of course, was appealing to the racism inherent at this overwhelmingly white convention. The New York City real estate developer is renowned for his own unbearable whiteness of being, having come out for the restoration of the death penalty in New York State in 1989 (it was restored in the nineties) when a white woman got attacked in Central Park in Manhattan and the suspects were black and Hispanic but was suspiciously silent later that year when a young black man who went to the Italian Brooklyn neighborhood of Bensonhurst to look at a used car got killed by local white kids in a case of mistaken identity. Trump has shown disregard for poor people in general, edging them out of the way whenever they obstructed his real estate ventures.

Trump got my attention this year when he said America had become "the laughingstock of the world" without realizing that he was addressing the kind of Americans the rest of the world laughs at. He could have seen another example of the laughable American by looking at himself in the mirror and pondering his chubby cheeks and dated haircut. And flying into New York on the way home, he would have gotten a view of his own Trump Tower, easily the most laughably ugly building on Fifth Avenue.

I personally believe that Trump has even less chance to get elected President than Sarah Palin does, if only because businessmen rarely succeed in public executive offices. They can't just order the legislature to pass their agenda, they can't just fire bureaucrats for their own reasons, and government is much more complex than business. Government involves more consensus building and debate, not top-down authority. A governor or President is not a CEO.

Which brings to mind the unpleasant subject of Florida governor Rick Scott, as he tries to impose is Republican-oriented business acumen on the Sunshine State. Keep it up, Scottie - it will be pleasurable to watch you fail.

And if Trump is still relevant, that means the Reagan era never did end, after all.