This was no accident

Trump told us who he was and what he would do.

A majority of Americans chose that.

There was a Trump-shift all across America. Ninety percent of America's counties gave Trump a higher margin yesterday than they did in 2020. For example, in 2020, my Jackson County, Oregon, home voted for Trump over Biden 50-47%, a three-point gap. We were purple. Yesterday Trump won, 52-45%. We are red now. 

In statewide voting in Oregon, Trump lost, 56-40% in 2020, a bright blue 16-point spread. Yesterday Trump lost 55-42, still blue, but closer.

Trump will claim a mandate from the American people. He will overstate it, of course, but he is not wrong. He won.

He will take actions. He will end U.S. support for Ukraine. Ukraine must settle for whatever terms they can get. Ukraine will get carved up and will cede Crimea and the eastern third of the country to Russia. Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy sent Trump a congratulations message calling attention to  the "Ukraine-U.S. strategic partnership, the Victory Plan, and ways to put an end to Russian aggression against Ukraine." He is trying to put a good face on an impending disaster for his country. The war will end on Russian terms.

The U.S. will reduce its NATO commitments. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, and Poland see the handwriting on the wall. A Russian invasion against them isn't an invasion against the USA, not anymore. They are on their own, so they will scramble to make themselves harmless to Russia, or its friend.

Netanyahu rushed a congratulation to Trump. Israel will have a free hand now to do what it will with Gaza.

Domestically, Trump was just declared "not guilty" for his behavior surrounding the 2020 election. He will fire Special Prosecutor Jack Smith, pardon and apologize to the January 6 Capitol rioters, and condemn the ongoing state prosecution in Georgia. He will get a slap on the wrist for the 34 business-records hush money felonies. He will say the public vindicated him. I consider his effort to overthrow the 2020 election to be a crime against our democracy. I agree with Mike Pence and Liz Cheney when they said a person who would do this should never be allowed near the Oval Office. But half of Americans don't see it that way.

Trump will crack down on the border, and do so with a dramatic flair. We will see concertina wire, mass roundups, and highly-publicized deportations. It will divide families of mixed status. There will be complaints and images of "good people" being sent away. A majority of Americans want to see people being forced out of the country against their will. 

A majority of people are concerned about transgender men in female spaces, including sports and bathrooms. Trump found a wedge issue. He will box Democrats' gender ideology orthodoxy -- that it is fluid and a social construct -- into a politically untenable corner. This will be a bad period for people with gender dysphoria. 

Trump will challenge the 14th Amendment statement that people born in the U.S. are citizens. A court somewhere -- perhaps the friendly Amarillo, Texas, court of Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk -- will deny someone the ability to register to vote, claiming that his U.S. birth to an undocumented mother did not confer citizenship. The Fifth Circuit will concur. It will go to the Supreme Court with Trump's strong support. The Supreme Court will reconsider the 1898 U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark decision. That court said Wong, having been born in San Francisco, was a U.S. citizen, even if he was of Chinese ethnicity at a time when people of Chinese ethnicity were unwelcome. This will be a popular issue for Trump. The Supreme Court may reverse the century-old precedent.

Trump understands that abortion bans are unpopular. He will let red states go crazy if they want, and some will, but he will stop a national abortion ban. People who really want an abortion will need to travel.

Trump has deep flaws as a messenger, but a great many people saw those flaws and simply looked past them. He has an agenda, and he sold it to America. 

Democrats will attempt to confound its implementation, but resistance will be incomplete. His issues had popular support.

What Trump supporters may well find out, though, is that his agenda was far more popular as an idea than it will be as a reality. That was the story of abortion bans. It will be the same with chaos in Europe, ending the ACA, tariffs, and mass deportations. Most of Trump's agenda will age very badly. Success sows the seeds of over-reach and its own reversal.

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The year of the woman

Eight years ago I wrote: Prediction Trump.

On election day morning, 2016, the polls and consensus opinion were clear: Hillary Clinton had it in the bag. I published my prediction anyway.

Click: 2016

I saw an enthusiasm gap between Trump and Hillary. I saw the Archie Bunker/George Wallace blue-collar appeal that Trump had with voters who didn't write opinion columns for newspapers. I observed male college classmates at a reunion 20 days before the 2016 election take me aside. They quietly told me -- out of earshot of female classmates who were enthusiastic about Hillary -- that they thought Trump wasn't that bad. I made a guess that there was invisible, un-polled support for Trump from people uncomfortable with Hillary's brand of elite feminism. It was a lucky guess.

I don't know who will win this election. No one does. I put Year of the Woman as the headline because I think this year we will see a resurgence of female power. 

This election more women will be voting their gender, not their social class or race. Trump made a decision, I suspect based on his gut and personal history, that men were tired of being pushed around by the attitudes and mores of modern feminism. Men aren't allowed to lust after women anymore, not even in secret, and certainly not in the workplace. Trump was old school. Men were men and hot women are prey. That's how he thought and how he lived his life. Trump's campaign turned his instincts into strategy and brand. Therefore JD Vance for VP. Therefore teleprompter speeches belittling Kamala Harris. Trump didn't make her an ogre. He made her subservient. He couldn't pronounce her name; he called her low-IQ and mentally disabled. His campaign circulated memes that (snicker, snicker) she gave blow jobs.

I am prepared to see that Trump won this election but my prediction goes in the other direction. Two things have emerged since 2016. The Dobbs decision on abortion enabled red-state legislatures to ban abortion, ban abortion pills, endanger IVF, and ban travel to seek an out-of-state abortion. Put together, it comes across as a war on women by legislatures and courts. It looks like an effort to rewind the clock back to a time when girls went to college to get a husband, not an education. When girls were supposed to have babies at 20, not 30. When men were the default "head of household" and when that term made any sense at all.  It was old fashioned. It is the chimpanzee-style society I described in yesterday's post, where powerful males beat down females. Many women are okay with it, but fewer now. 

The second thing is hinted in the screen shot of my 2016 post. I described Trump as a "whistleblower." That wasn't sarcasm and it was correct when I wrote it. He was the outsider. He said he would "drain the swamp" and it seemed plausible at the time. He blew the whistle on the plutocratic GOP and its financial elites, saying that corporate wealth did not trickle down to the working man when jobs went overseas. He criticized Hillary Clinton and the over-civilized cultural elites of the progressive left. He was the anti-elite, common-man candidate. It wasn't exactly true, but it was a plausible brand.

That changed. He soiled his brand as a whistleblower reformer out to protect us from financial and cultural elites. Now it's just cultural elites. He hangs out with billionaires now, openly and publicly. Elon Musk has the bad-boy iconoclasm vibe, motivated in part because a son made a gender transition. But Musk and the other politically-active billionaires have an agenda and Trump is in league with it. It isn't pushing money down to the "forgotten man." He openly tells oil companies he wants a billion dollars from them for his campaign, but not to worry, he will cut their taxes and they will make it back many times over. 

This will all be lost on most voters, especially ones so un-engaged that they are still undecided swing voters. Fox News viewers hear none of this. Trump is their hero. But this is an election that will be won or lost because of a few voters in a half-dozen states. On the margin, the difference in outcome will be a few extra women who decided that Trump isn't on their side, after all. In the past it was plausible that he was. Now he isn't.

 

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Primate brain: seeking alpha.

     "Peter, face it. Trump will win. No woman can win election as president. A woman could be a Prime Minister, because she would be the consensus choice of peers, but not a U.S, president, voted in by the public. The president is commander in chief. Humans are hard-wired to want a man in the role of protector. Women may think they want equality, but they only want equality after they get protection first. Harris faces a headwind of human biology and instinct. Women want a strong man.
     Anonymous email I received this week.

All social animals pick leaders. Humans. Bonobos. Chimpanzees. All of us.

Bonobos are matriarchal. Females lead their social groups. Leaders gain power within the group by showing sound judgment and by winning friends and allies with grooming and sex play. 

Chimpanzees, a close cousin species, are physically larger and more aggressive than bonobos. Chimpanzees are far more violent than are bonobos, both within their groups and to outside groups. Male chimps beat the females. Juvenile male chimpanzees beat their mothers and as practice before taking on males within the group. Females dislike the beatings, but take it. It is what males do. Leadership has its benefits, the main one being primary mating rights with the females, including the ones they beat up. 

Harris cleared the Democratic field of rivals with an "inside game" of alliances within the party, rather in a way that a prime minister emerges within a political party. She briefly feinted in the direction of having a neutral mix of gender vibe. She was theoretically tough-gal Harris, the tough-on-crime prosecutor. She said "lethal" once in reference to the military, and people noticed. That did not persist. She has settled into being the happy get-along candidate. People notice and comment on her laugh. Social laughing is an act of submission. A social laugh signifies "I'm not a threat to you."

Harris faces delegitimization, as predicted by the anonymous quote that begins this post. She gets snickering accusations on social media of having offered oral sex to men, a submissive asymmetric act, to get ahead. A real leader doesn't give. A man's man takes. Trump takes. Within Republican circles, it is acceptable to wear T-shirts calling Harris a whore. In chimpanzee culture, all adult males beat up females. 

Tee shirt for sale at Trump merchandise venues

Trump projects a chimpanzee leader quality. Trump is physically dominant, and he has allies who are physically dominant, sometimes cartoonishly so, with Hulk Hogan ripping off his shirt. JD Vance, the chosen one, wears a beard. Ted Cruz, the wannabe, grew one. Trump was frustrated by his glitchy microphone at an event this weekend. He said he may have to beat up the technical people. The crowd laughed and cheered. "I'm going to be a little bit rough, especially at the beginning," Trump said at a rally this weekend. More cheers. He said he will be a protector of women, even if they don't want it. Cheers. We hear objections to that from professional women in politics and the media. The presumption! The condescension! 

Trump is taking a gamble here, one that paid off in 2016, and perhaps still does. Some women are turned off, but he still gets female votes, including a majority of votes of White women. A great many women accept the trade-off between respect for women as equals versus a strong male protector, even one who asserts on-demand sexual access. The sexual assault claims, lawsuits, and legal judgments against Trump for his sexual behavior have not ended his support from women, especially evangelical Christian women. This behavior is part of Trump's brand: the man who takes what he wants. "And when you are a star, they let you do it. You can do anything," Trump said. It shocked people for its crudeness, but it did not stop a great many of them from voting for him.

Women in America have ample reason to reject Trump. Trump made a choice that seems unintuitive. He is reversing the trend of second-wave feminism that took root in the 1960s and doing so flagrantly. It disempowers women. It places them in subservience. Surely women will reject that. Trump thinks they won't. Chimpanzee females don't.

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Easy Sunday: "Oh, what a catch."

A moment away from politics.

The Oregon Ducks are number one in college football rankings.

Don't think about the professionalization of college football. Or the big money. Or NIL. Or transfers. Or recruiting. Or in what sense, if any, this is a team of University of Oregon students. 

Instead, take ten seconds to watch something spectacular in its athleticism.

The perfectly thrown ball:

Wide receiver Evan Stewart's left-handed catch over his shoulder:

Stewart's care to get a foot down onto the field before going into the end zone:

It's just a game, a happy diversion from choosing leaders in a republic. In the great scheme of things, neither the play nor the game matters much. Someone wins. Someone loses. There is another play, another game, another season. This catch was a moment. Moreover, the touchdown didn't even count. A lineman, far away from this action, was downfield, and there was a five yard penalty against Oregon.

The brevity and beauty of the catch -- and its insignificance -- are what makes this so perfect a moment of respite.

Click here: Ten seconds on YouTube. Easy Sunday.

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Perspective from the Oakland Hills

     "It makes me feel better to believe that Kamala will win next week with relative ease."

             Tony Farrell

College classmate Tony Farrell is a familiar name to my regular readers. He is the marketing executive who worked for The Gap, The Nature Company, and The Sharper Image. He has posted here about having managed the short-lived Trump Steaks account, even though he gets teased about it.

I value his perspective. He lives in an especially nice part of the San Francisco Bay area, the bay-facing west hills of Oakland. He lives among friends who golf, attend tennis tournaments, and take international vacations. Tony's general circle of friends and associates represent an essential element of American politics. They are "the donor class." Their opinions matter, even though their influence has been diminished by multi-billionaires muscling in with nation-state-size investments in political campaigns. Donors play a filtering role, deciding which local mayor, district attorney, or candidate for statewide office could fund a winning campaign. They make or break the campaigns of the presidential candidates hoping for a breakthrough in Iowa and New Hampshire. Candidates drop out when they run out of money.

Some readers resent their influence. I don't. They pay attention to candidates. They make qualitative decisions. They have a perspective and self-interest, but at least they are Americans making judgments. Better them than the alternative that has taken its place: people "doing research" by reading lies cooked up by Macedonian server farms paid for by Putin, or by Twitter/X bots re-tweeted and amplified by Musk's revised algorithm.  

Tony thinks Kamala Harris will win. I interpret this as a reflection of the opinions from his small but important micro-climate. Trump isn't merely crude and offensive to that set and to Tony. Trump's tariff policy is bad for business. 

Guest Post By Tony Farrell            

Election Forecast
I do not worry about polls because didn’t polls give Hillary a 90-percent chance of victory in 2016? Pollster -- what a funny way to make a living; but apparently easy and without penalties for being utterly wrong.

I once heard good advice (in a business context): “You don’t need to know anything more about the future than you already know" -- which is nothing.

In my self-absorbed anthropologist role, among my old-White-man country club set, Trump is toast. A group of eight of us are planning a golf trip to Ireland next year; when the original itinerary was published, among the six courses was one named “Doonbeg.” The tour operator had tried to pull a fast one: When you Google “Doonbeg,” you’ll see it is a “Trump International” resort and, to a man, all in our group refused to go. No one was willing to give a penny to the grifter Trump; we all agreed, privately and separately before discovering all had the same attitude. That is very different from 2016, when there was some quiet Trump support. Now, there is none. The criminality of January 6 turned the tide, and Trump’s recent behavior is sealing the deal with everyone I come across (except during a recent trip to South Carolina.)

It makes me feel better to believe that Kamala will win next week with relative ease. For this, as amateur pollster and pundit, I will suffer no penalties for being wrong. But I believe the energy level on the Democratic side is too high, too fervent, too heartfelt, compared to the Trump side, which is leaking fuel and, at some level, has no energy to continue. I think the female vote, across all tabs, will be decisive; many more women than men will vote, and those women will be overwhelmingly Democratic. Quietly, I believe a good number of Trump supporters will not vote for him, although they may vote Republican down ticket. Some may feel they have nowhere else to turn, and are strongly driven to maintain consistency (as we all are), but I believe the energy to continue is weak.

On Tariffs
One source of Republican weakness (and certainly among my elevated business crowd) is the issue of tariffs, and Trump’s utterly misplaced love for them. As many of Peter's regular blog readers know, I worked as a merchant for The Gap in the late 70s and early 80s, often traveling to Hong Kong to source jeans. It’s completely stupid, dealing with tariffs in reality! The tariff on “basic” jeans was 10 percent; on “ornamented” fashion jeans, 45 percent. We spent an inordinate amount of time ornamenting fashion jeans with functional stitching, so they could pass customs as basic clothing (because the decorative stitching, for example, held the back pockets together). We’d have to get a ruling (for the paperwork), that the lower “basic” tariff applied. Moreover, our wonderful government had issued annual quotas on the number of jeans that could be imported from various countries, like Hong Kong. “Quota” was an asset that could be owned and licensed; quota was a huge source of wealth among many former factory owners overseas who, by luck, ended up owning quota; they closed their factories and lived off quota fees! Depending on the economy and fashion trends, quota varied greatly in price; sometimes almost zero per pair; sometimes as much as $5 per pair of fashion jeans. All this to protect a non-existent clothing manufacturing business in the U.S.! So, as I would negotiate buying jeans for The Gap, we’d deal with Hong Kong factory owners (they all seemed to have gone to Notre Dame or USC), and we’d get invoiced for the basic manufacturing cost of the jeans (say $3.85 per pair), plus 45 percent duty/tariff (if “fashion,” now $1.73), plus the price for “quota” (let’s say $4.00), for our final cost for one pair of jeans of $9.58. The retail price would depend on our target gross margin, in those days about 58 percent, so The Gap prices the jeans at $22.80. Notice who pays! First Gap, ultimately the customer. And look what duties and quotas did to that price: Instead of less than $10 for a pair of fashion jeans, it’s more than double that. Not sure where Trump thinks the U.S. gets money from all this.

 The reality was tariffs and quotas had nothing to do with saving U.S. jobs or specific industries. All the know-how and skill were overseas. We could barely get crude Ocean Pacific shorts made in the U.S.! I just saw it all as progress: In the late 19th century, New York City was just like Hong Kong, with clothing makers on one floor, button makers on another, zipper makers elsewhere in the building. That work first migrated south, then overseas. And my first job tossed me right into the stupidity of a very messy, distorted marketplace; our government hard at work getting union votes, basically. I was distressed to be a part of it.

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Ranked Choice Voting: Oregon Measure 117

What is more important: simplicity or majority rule?

Advocates for ranked choice voting

For most voting in America, the winner is the person with the most votes. That is true even if that person gets far fewer than a majority of votes. In multi-candidate races, for example the Iowa presidential caucuses or the New Hampshire primary, the "winner" gets only 23 percent of the vote. In multi-candidate races -- like this year's four-candidate race for Medford, Oregon, mayor -- a consensus candidate acceptable to a majority may not be the winner, not if a cohesive niche of Trump-supporting voters concentrate their votes on well-known Republican cheerleader and provocateur Curt Ankerberg, one of the four candidates. 

There is also a "spoiler" problem. In a race featuring a Democrat, a Republican, and a Libertarian, the Libertarian candidate may get some otherwise-Republican votes, allowing a Democrat to win with only 40 to 45 percent of the vote. A  left-leaning PAC might find it strategic to encourage a Libertarian candidate for that very purpose. 

That is happening right now in the opposite direction. Jill Stein is on the ballot as a Green Party nominee in battleground states. She is lavishly funded, but not by Green Party supporters. Instead, Republican PACs, in total opposition to her views, are funding Stein, hoping to split the progressive climate activist vote. Cynical, but smart.

A politically engaged Medford neighbor wrote me, saying this blog should attempt to explain ranked choice voting. I said she should do it. Sal Edwards is accustomed to doing difficult things. She is an author of 25 books, a pioneer in women's sports, and a leader in teaching endurance training using a wearable heart monitor. She won the Western States 100-mile Endurance Run. She maintains a newsletter on fitness training: https://www.heartzones.com 

Guest Post by Sal Edwards 

The following is the initial text for the measure on the ballot: 

Measure 117: "Gives voters option to rank candidates in order of preference: candidate reaching majority of votes in final round wins." 

Currently, the candidate who wins the election is the one with the most votes. In a multi-candidate race, the winner might be favored by a minority faction, but not a majority. That seems wrong to me. There is a way to get fairer elections without holding expensive runoff elections.

Let's use this example: 

Candidate A gets 40% of the total votes
Candidate B gets 30% of the total votes
Candidate C gets 20% of the total votes
Candidate D gets 10% of the total votes

There is no majority winner. Sixty percent of the voters wanted someone else. It entirely possible that those 60% share common policies and supporters and are simply dividing up the majority preference of voters. The candidate with 40% of the vote may be the candidate least acceptable to the majority of voters.
 
If Measure 117 passes, the law “Establishes process for tallying votes in rounds, with the candidate receiving the fewest votes in each round being defeated and votes for the defeated candidate going to the voter’s next-highest ranked active candidate. Requires the candidate must receive majority of votes in final round of voting to win election.”

In voting, we sometimes have a favorite candidate, but then one or two others who we think would be okay-enough, if our first choice doesn't win, and certainly better than someone we do NOT want. We vote for our favorite, of course, but mark number two or three in declining order. If there is someone we don't like, we don't mark that one at all. That is how it would work if Measure 117 passes. Ranked choice voting lets a voter express their preference of candidates. If someone wins a majority of the vote, they win, same as now. But if they don't, the second choices of voters would get allocated to people still in contention. A majority means a combination of first place votes, plus second place votes of losing candidates if no one wins on the first round. And third place, if no one wins on the second round. This continues until someone has a majority. The winner is either the first choice of the majority or at least the most acceptable candidate to a majority, measured by winning second or later choice votes.

In my example, Candidate D with 10% of the vote is eliminated but their votes are not. Rather, Candidate D's voters who had selected other candidates in declining preference have their second choice of candidate added to the vote count of the candidate that they marked as second place. This is called a “round.” These rounds continue until one of the candidates reaches a majority of 50%-plus-one vote. As a practical matter, it means that the winner in a multi-candidate race is the candidate who wins a lot of first place votes, plus some second place votes, and in rare cases third place votes. That person has a better claim on majority support than someone who is loved by a non-majority faction but then found so objectionable to a majority that they get few second or third place votes.
 
It is going to cost the counties more money to implement, but it is worth doing. Other places are doing it, and the software and procedures have been tried and found successful. It will give us winners who better reflect the will of the people, which is the whole point of a democracy. I'm voting “Yes” on Measure 117. 

[End note by Peter: Ranked choice voting is fairer. But RCV requires explanation, and some people don't understand it even after having it explained several times. We are in a strange moment. A former president openly attacks the validity of our elections. They are all rigged, he says. He created tens of millions of election deniers and skeptics. They show up at county clerk offices demanding election officials discard tabulating machines and count by hand tens of thousands of ballots in dozens of races. Utterly impossible. Ranked choice voting would provide new arenas for doubt. This proposal comes at an inopportune time. Oregon may need to emphasize clarity and simplicity in elections, not fairness, if fairness comes at the cost of continued election denialism.]

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Donald Trump: The origin story

Roy Cohn to Donald Trump:
        "The first rule is the simplest: Attack. Attack. Attack."

Trump was famous long before he came down the escalator. He was famous even before the NBC reality TV show, The Apprentice.

He was famous as a hard-nosed, play-dirty New York real estate developer.

In 1990, early in my career as a financial advisor, I remember a supposedly-hot investment: high-yield bonds backed by Trump and his Taj Mahal casino. Trump's name gave the bonds cachet and credibility in a way that similar bonds issued by a no-name company would lack. Trump was somebody, a familiar name on the radar of the investors and investment advisors. (I didn't sell them. I had no clients interested in buying individual junk bonds.)

College classmate Sandford Borins is Professor of Public Management Emeritus at the University of Toronto. Much of his ongoing research and commentary is about politics in Canada, but a person cannot study Canada without studying the U.S. Today Sandy shares his observations about a biopic on our Donald Trump. Sandy continues to write and post his observations about politics, management, and life at https://www.sandfordborins.com. 

He is pictured here in a photograph taken by his son Nathaniel. He is standing under a maple tree wearing a shirt we received at our 50th college reunion.

Guest Post by Sandford Borins

The Apprentice: Moving the Needle?

From the movie

In an interview in the print version of The New York Times last Sunday, Jeremy Strong, who plays Donald Trump’s mentor Roy Cohn remarks on the timing of The Apprentice’s recent release in the US – “incredibly fortuitous that it can come out at a moment where it has the potential to illuminate something about the inner workings of this man” – and the possibility that it could become a game-changer: “I think it offers vital insight which could move the needle in a real way.”

A Devil Mentored by Devils

In The Social Network, another bildungsroman, Aaron Sorkin has one of his characters – a lawyer who mentors the fictional Mark Zuckerberg – opine that every creation story needs a devil. At its heart, this creation story has several, Donald Trump himself, his father Fred, and most importantly, his eventual surrogate father Roy Cohn. From Fred, Donald imbibes the message that there are two types of people, killers or losers. Then Cohn provides a three-part roadmap for becoming a killer: first, attack, attack, attack; second, admit, nothing, deny everything; third, always claim victory, never admit defeat.

Not only does The Apprentice portray a person whose political modus operandi exemplifies dishonesty and negativity, but it heightens its disdain by showing Trump’s relationships with other people as purely self-interested and transactional. Trump thus disposes of his mentor when he is suffering from AIDS. And his marriage to Ivana is equally exploitative. The movie also mentions Trump’s amphetamine habit and his physical self-improvement through hair implants and liposuction.

When Ivana tries to spice up their sex life by giving him the best-seller The G-Spot, he responds by telling her he is no longer attracted to her and doesn’t like the feel of her augmented breasts; when she answers back, he rapes her. Trump dismisses his girlfriend Marla Maples – a non-speaking role – by walking away, unconsummated, from her blowjob when he gets a business idea. The film’s depiction of Trump is thus loathsome and disgusting, evil and weird.

Will this melange of historical fact and cinematic embellishment move the needle in the current election campaign? The film hasn’t had particularly large audiences or rave reviews. After its initial showing at the Cannes Film Festival, Trump has attacked it (rule 1) and denied there is any truth to it (rule 2). And we know that many voters support Trump despite an assessment of his character similar to this film’s because they endorse his political agenda, especially his America-first hostility to immigrants and mercantilist economics.

Acting and Emplotment

The film’s strength is that the actors in the three major roles are convincing: Jeremy Strong depicting Roy Cohn’s unflappable cynicism, Sebastian Stan expressing Donald Trump’s ambition and self-centeredness, and Maria Bakalova portraying Ivana Trump as a woman trying to be a loving spouse and mother in an impossible situation.

The film’s major weakness is how its plot was structured. To avoid the dreariness of chronology, writers and directors of biopics often build the plot around a revealing and pivotal aspect of the protagonist’s life and present it as a quest to achieve a key goal. For example, Steven Spielberg in Lincoln focused on Lincoln’s political strategy and machinations to convince the House of Representatives to confirm the thirteenth amendment, outlawing slavery. Similarly, Aaron Sorkin, in The Social Network, used Mark Zuckerberg’s legal battles with his former partners for shares of the value Facebook created. Reagan, while not nearly as successful as either of these movies, revolves around on Reagan’s opposition to Communism, in particular his efforts to overthrow the Soviet Union.

The Apprentice begins with Trump’s quest to build the Trump Tower, but after that quest is completed two-thirds of the way through, it segues to Trump’s efforts to build a casino in Atlantic City and his ensuing business and marital troubles. It thus becomes merely a chronological treatment of Trumps’ rise to prominence between 1973 and 1986. In the culminating scene of the film, Trump is interviewed for The Art of the Deal and tells biographer Tony Schwartz that what you see is what you get, and any attempt at psychological explanation will be fruitless. This biopic admits defeat in the key task of that genre, shining an interpretive light on personal development.

 

Homage to Oliver Stone

Before concluding I must mention that The Apprentice includes an homage to Oliver Stone’s Wall Street. Wall Street’s famous limo scene involves Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) convincing his acolyte Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) to cross over the line to criminality while The Apprentice has a scene where Roy Cohn, riding in a limo with Trump, shows him how to make a convincing phone call. While I chuckled at the homage, I thought the original was a far stronger scene. I’ve included the links, so you can decide for yourself.

An Alternative to CNN

In the last week before the US election, I admit to spending a lot of time watching CNN, reading The New York Times, obsessively checking 538, and reading more than a few writers pointing out the potential inaccuracy of polls in a close race in which turnout and shy voters’ misleading responses to pollsters are important factors. Seeing this film was an attempt to look for a different perspective on the events unfolding this week; it’s no classic, but it’s appropriate entertainment.

 

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