Trump Must Fade Away

For conservatives to gain back our country and make America great again

In 2020, the Democrats took control of the Senate and the Presidency. In a year when Democratic politicians had universally failed the American public, Republicans should have had overwhelming victories. Again in 2022, after Democrat Party policies encouraged illegal immigration, destroyed the economy, turned a blind eye to riots and rampant crime in our cities, promoted divisive social policies, enforced coercive and ineffective mask mandates and dangerous COVID injection policies, showed military weakness and cowardice in Afghanistan, and kowtowed to despotic leaders in Iran, the time was ripe for the Red Wave that most of us expected. But we barely gained ground in the House and lost the Senate. Like many Republicans, I hold Donald Trump responsible.

Throughout the COVID pandemic, more than anything else, Americans needed a comforting voice. Trump didn’t provide it. Instead, he was continually distracted by any insult, no matter how trivial, that easily goaded him into a childish and angry response.

With regard to the January 6 intrusion on the Capitol, I don’t believe that Trump planned it or encouraged it, but he surely did nothing to prevent it or diminish it.

During the Georgia Senate elections of 2020, Trump purposely campaigned against the Republican candidates who had “abandoned him” by certifying the election results. These people were desperately needed to prevent the Democrat majority in the Senate that led to two years of harmful progressive policies.

During the recent elections, Trump promoted candidates, many of whom lost. Some candidates were extremists. Others just lost by association, because clearly, independents, rightly or wrongly, are reluctant to vote for a Trump-endorsed candidate. Trump-endorsed Dr. Mehmet Oz is a well-known and generally well-liked television celebrity, but he couldn’t beat out John Fetterman, an odd, inarticulate character whose recovery from a stroke left him hardly able to communicate intelligibly. In my home state of Nevada, just barely associated with Trump, Republican Senate candidate Adam Laxalt was branded as an election-denying extremist. Maybe the mainstream media is corrupt and the Democrats lie, but Republicans can’t make changes until we win both houses of the legislature. At least in part because of Trump, Republicans lost the Senate and made only a modest inroad into the House.

My left-leaning friends spent four years with the ridiculous claim that the man who brokered one of the greatest peace agreements between Israel and Arab states, and whose daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren are Orthodox Jews, was an antisemite. Yet Trump recently invited Kanye West to dinner after his recent antisemitic tirade and allowed Nick Fuentes, a leading white supremacist to accompany him. Now, my arguments in support of Trump are difficult to maintain. Trump is not an antisemite. But does he encourage antisemites? I can no longer confidently say no.

My pro-Trump friends make the oft-repeated statement that Donald Trump “tells it like it is.” He fights. He’s a businessman, not a politician. But I can tell you that he’s not a great businessman, because a great businessman is a great politician too.

Throughout school I always got good grades. There was a simple formula for succeeding in school: do the research, get the right answer, and show your work. After college, I naively thought the same formula would work in business. I went into meetings with arms full of papers and printouts. I was prepared to give presentations of formulas and statistics and cost/benefit ratios to make my case. Other people came prepared only with opinions and “experience.” If someone was wrong, I told them so. Publicly. Yet sometimes it was the most popular or persuasive person who decided the future of a project. I left one company after another, but each operated in the same way. This illogical system drove me crazy and caused a lot of stress as I saw others’ projects funded while mine were not and while other, less qualified people, were promoted over me.

One friend who had founded a software company, told me his secret for success: the lessons from the book How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. He told me how much it had changed his own outlook on life and especially in business. This thin, overly simple self-help book changed my business life, too. I realized that people in business are just as emotional and sometimes irrational as anyone else. They can want instant gratification as often as they want long-term profits. Success in business, as in other aspects of life, requires one to be a politician too. I employed the techniques I learned, and my business career took off.

I’d been fascinated with Donald Trump for years, long before he ran for President. I've followed his businesses since he renovated my boyhood summer vacation destination, Atlantic City. I’ve been very impressed with his ability to continually raise investment funds for his businesses, despite failure after failure, and to walk away with a pile of money. I watched The Apprentice TV show, mostly to see Trump fire the best people because they disagreed with him, while promoting those who flattered him. I did a business transaction with one of Trump's companies, a crowdfunding site called FundAnything, only to find out that the fine print screwed me out of my investment.

Trump is not a great businessman, and he doesn’t act like one. He acts like someone who has always had money and power and expects people to do what he says. Only people born into wealth and power act as though no one else matters. As Daddy Warbucks said in the musical Annie, “You don’t have to be nice to the people you meet on the way up, if you’re not coming back down again.”

In contrast, I also closely watched the career of Steve Jobs at Apple. He started the company as a young, college dropout. He was arrogant and unethical, but he created a great product and a great company, so people rarely told him no. Until he got fired from Apple. It changed him. He had to struggle for some years before he made his way back to Apple. Once there, he became somewhat less arrogant and somewhat more diplomatic and pragmatic. He realized that he needed other people to support his vision. He needed to fail once to become a great businessman. That taught him to be a great politician too, at least in the business world.

Trump never learned this important lesson. He attacked his own supporters. He could have scrapped Obamacare if he hadn’t embarrassed and angered John McCain. He might have avoided impeachment if he hadn’t attacked Mitt Romney. He might have had an effective Department of Justice, Cabinet, FBI, and CIA if he hadn’t continued to fire his own appointees as if they were contestants on his game show. Some of his greatest supporters through all the controversies became his targets—Senator Jeff Sessions, Senator Tom Cotton, Vice President Mike Pence, and Governor Ron DeSantis.

A lot of my readers are now swearing at me that these people deserved what they got, but that’s not my point. In business, I’ve succeeded when I complimented people I didn’t like, compromised on issues that were important to others but not to me, and worked with people less competent than me. I could come home and figuratively kick the dog or yell at my wife to relieve my pent-up frustration and anger, but I needed to show respect to those who could help me reach my goals. That’s what I learned from Dale Carnegie. That’s also what I learned from Ronald Reagan who famously said, “There is no limit to the amount of good you can do if you don't care who gets the credit.”

In the time of COVID, every American wanted someone who was sympathetic, who felt their pain and sympathized. But Trump never did that—he was always on the attack. Like him or not, Bill Clinton had that kind of empathy and it won him two elections. And he understood how to compromise with Republicans who had no great love for him and whom he certainly detested.

There’s no question that Donald Trump implemented more conservative policies in one term than any president in two terms during my lifetime. There’s no question that Donald Trump retrieved the Holy Grail of all modern presidents when he brokered the Abraham Accords. He built the wall with Mexico and curtailed illegal immigration. He leveled the trading field with China. He stopped Iran’s nuclear weapon development and decimated its economy. He lowered taxes and lowered unemployment. His list of accomplishments is long. But will they last?

Republicans should have won nearly every election this year. I hold Donald Trump responsible for their losses. Trump accomplished great things, but many of those things are being undone. America will suffer for years because of Trump’s ego and his shortcomings and his inability to be a great businessman or politician. It’s long past the time for him to fade out, retiring from politics and maybe business too, and bask in the glory of his many accomplishments. Otherwise he risks having each and every one of his accomplishments undone by his massive ego and childish nature.