If Wishes Were Horses, We'd All Take a Ride
. . . in which I dare compare myself to the GOAT, Donald J. Trump
@NuclearHeart169 on X
[credit: Dick]
[TLDR:CAMERA warning]
Those who claim to honor Donald Trump’s strengths and accomplishments while denouncing his style are misguided.
Period.
Trump’s triumphs are inseparable from his supposed weaknesses.
What follows is a set of anecdotes I’ve shared numerous times, but they bear repeating in the context of the choice our country’s voters will finalize in November: I can simultaneously acknowledge that I’m no Donald J. Trump while confidently asserting that, albeit on a much smaller scale, DJT and I are cut from very similar cloth, which gives me a somewhat unique ability to defend him from my own educated, legitimate personal experience.
Donald Trump recently gave a speech in which he declared that pronouncements of impossibility should only be used as inspiration to prove the pessimists wrong. I could have written that speech, and it would have come from my own heart as well as serving the purpose of describing the mettle of our great once-and-future President, because that has been my motto for many decades: the best way to persuade me to tackle a project is to assert that it cannot be accomplished, because the opportunity to demonstrate the opposite is more than enough to inspire me to create a solution.
Donald J. Trump has actualized this spirit in the real estate, entertainment and political realms. My accomplishments pale in comparison, but my testimonial has relevance, because what I can most relate to are all the talking-head opinions offered from mainstream media to academia and even to conservative pundits like Michael Savage that Trump would be “so much (better) / (effective) / (likeable) / (popular) / (acceptable) if he would just (stop the mean tweets) / (be less defensive or bombastic) / (refrain from calling people names) / (etc.).”
Bullshit.
Those commentators are fans or detractors who may have accomplished one thing or another in their lives (most frequently: reading scripts, pushing paper or publishing books), but also people who are predominantly in the stands instead of being out on the playing field. They know how to criticize, but they decidedly do not know how to do the overall things about which they’re giving advice. The most appropriate question to ask is, “Given that Donald Trump is doing things no one has ever done before, how can they possibly know President Trump could do a better job at it by taking their deportment advice?” I assert that the unequivocal answer is that they have absolutely no basis on which to provide their counsel. In fact, the opposite is true: it is far more likely that, if Trump took the bedwetters’ advice, he’d be far less successful.
My own lower-scale-but-legitimately-comparable realm was running university dormitories. Despite (or perhaps because of) having been an authority-challenger in the years leading up to that vocation, I became a nationally-recognized and sought-after expert on university-residence-life discipline, facilitating numerous well-attended disciplinary-strategy presentations at regional and national student affairs conferences. Ultimately holding related positions at six universities from Pennsylvania to Texas to Alaska, two in particular provide the analogues for the criticism Trump now faces from critics, friends and foes alike.
One was an all-male building with 440 mostly-freshmen residents at a larger-than-average rural southern public state university primarily-residential campus.
The other institution was a moderate-sized urban, northern, private, religious, mostly-commuter university, where I administered a coed 1200-resident building that included sophomores to law students, as well as housing conference rooms, the resident-student cafeteria, an Olympic-size pool, the medical clinic for the whole school, living quarters for the campus’s nun population, and the maintenance department for the entire campus.
In both cases, I entered my employment taking over residence halls that were pretty much entirely out of control.
With the first, I started out with nothing but strategy-devoid mandates from university superiors who had no advice to give me ultimatums that would have to be met on a semi-annual basis to avoid being fired. I basically had to make up everything as I went along.
With the second, my fourth campus, again my superiors had no clue about what to do, but what worked in my favor was having had previous successes with similar, albeit-smaller-scale, problems. (You might not recognize this, but the same can be said for Trump going from tackling-and-taming first NYC real estate, fine-tuning his conquering skills with entertainment, and then tackling the administration of the out-of-whack greatest country on Earth.)
In each case, I was transparent about what I would do. It would start with effective but no-nonsense communication with the communities over which I had some level of authority, followed by rigorous enforcement of rules and laws paired with consistent-but-caring disciplinary justice heavy on communicating the actual rationales behind why the rules were finally being enforced and how enforcement would improve the environment for everyone, including for those who were temporarily in trouble.
In each case, I was also transparent with the people supervising me, approaching the endeavor as a project I’d be proud to accomplish but harboring no illusions. Not only did my superiors have no idea how to guide me, but I also knew I couldn’t even really count on them to have my back. In fact, what I accurately anticipated was that they would throw me under the bus if the going got tough. Not all did, but in each instance some of my supervisors made the job even more difficult than it had to be.
At the urban university, the 1200-resident building had had 350 false fire alarms between midnight and 6am the previous year; the problem was so bad alarms weren’t even being tabulated during other hours. My predecessor ended up having a nervous breakdown over this situation. The city fire department had first threatened, then instituted, a $1500/incident fine against the university for any false alarms, set to begin my first semester on the job. Recruited from a different school in the same city based on a presentation I’d facilitated a couple years earlier in New Orleans, I was interviewed all the way to the presidential level due to my assertions of the radical approach that would be necessary. As soon as they offered the position, I organized a formal meeting between my immediate supervisors, higher-level university honchos, the members of the local fire station, and that metropolitan city’s Fire Chief. Within minutes, he asked the university officials to just listen, and he and my 31-year-old self negotiated terms of a delay in their enforcement of the $1500 fines: during each fire alarm, I would assign a small number of staff to determine if any fire danger was present, while the remainder on duty of my employees (50 resident assistants and 100 desk staff) would scour the entire building to ensure that every last person left before anyone would be allowed back in – the actual law across the nation but very rarely enforced.
We had 41 false alarms during all 24 hours of the day during the first half of the first semester before students finally identified the group of people who’d been pulling the alarms, 9 more during the remainder of the semester, and 7 more the entire spring semester. The number of students caught trying to stay in the building required me to hold 1100 disciplinary hearings, over 100 of which occurred during the first semester. But for the first time in the building’s history, it had a waiting list after next-year spaces were made available for that year’s freshmen.
In the end, I received key support along the way from the Director of Resident Life and the Vice President for Student Affairs, but they were in the minority – just as had been the case back at the southern rural public institution. At both institutions, they didn’t fire me in the middle, because I was only doing what I had said right up front that I would do – and they sure liked the results (in the former case, in addition to solving a false-fire-alarm problem, eliminating rampant vandalism, and significantly diminishing student-on-student violence, my staff and I raised the average GPA in the building over 3 years from 1.86 to 2.16, which changed the fail-out rate from 70% to under 20%) – but this is where the analogy to how people complain about Trump really kicks in.
At all six universities where I ran dorms and apartments, only a handful of supervisors gave me significant support without accompanying criticism of my personality or my tactics, all of which were quite humane not to mention entirely legal. I wouldn’t be able to give a reasonable tally of all the times I heard something that followed the pattern of, “We like what you’re accomplishing, and you’ve exceeded our expectations, but could you please change your [personality], your [demeanor], or the way you explain things to people” — this, despite, as with Trump, the fact that I never said anything to anyone that I hadn’t already put in writing and/or posted throughout the environments I was in charge of. I wish I had a dollar for every time a supervisor told me something like, “I can’t believe you’ve exceeded our expectations, and we don’t want that to stop, but don’t you think you’d be even better at what you’re doing if you sugar-coated all of it a little bit more or tried a more gradual approach to turning things around or came up with solutions we could imagine coming up with ourselves?” Or, “You know, you’re good at what you do, but you’re just not normal, and maybe people would like you more if you’d just be [more normal].”
My answer was always the same:
“You’re just wrong.” . . . and . . .
“What you don’t realize is that there’s no separating out what you consider to be abnormal or unacceptable from the reasons why I’m successful. If I were normal, I wouldn’t be so successful.”
One supervisor responded during just such a conversation, “So, you’re telling me that abnormal circumstances require abnormal solutions devised by an abnormal man?”
“That’s one perspective on how to put it, but perhaps instead of ‘abnormal,’ the more accurate word you’re searching for is ‘extraordinary.’”
Yes, you’re right: maybe an even more fitting word might be ‘arrogant,’ but here’s my point: what all that unnecessary supervisory cajoling really comes down to is an irrational assertion that, if a person would just be more like all the people who don’t really have a clue what to do, everything would be better. What’s unspoken is that a large component of why most people don’t know what to do is that they’re unwilling to think beyond the limits of their own fears of failing to acquire general approval from their fellow human beings. Social acceptance is thus a higher priority than happiness, contentment, success or even significantly diminishing suffering.
Heaven forbid a student have to experience enough discomfort that he has to go outside during a fire alarm, even though it would end up eventually meaning that everyone in the building could get enough good sleep at night to pass their classes and acquire their degrees, not to mention prevent the very real possibility that multiple people could die in a high-rise fire because they became so numb to false alarms that they didn’t leave during an actual blaze.
And Heaven forbid people should have to endure a President who gives people silly nicknames or says he hates some robotic pop star who’s been equating him to Adolf Hitler.
Heaven forbid anyone should be made uncomfortable about the manners in which they’re contributing to the demise of our borders, language and culture, even though it could eventually contribute to We The People being able to return our country to a state in which violence and financial or philosophical insecurity once again became rare rather than commonplace.
Donald J. Trump is actually the Man for Our Times, and he’s increasingly surrounding himself with others of that caliber. For those who complain about his mean social media posts, his impatience with fools, or the fact that he actually possesses such human qualities as having a defensive ego, I think Elon Musk may have the best GFY advice, but I’ll conclude this by being at least a little more diplomatic:
Get Over Yourself, pussies. You have the right to harbor sociopolitical fantasies in the privacy of your own mind – and even to privately believe that the world would be better if everything were done according to your delusions – but in the real world, it takes thick skin to put oneself on the line to actually make a tangible difference rather than just bloviating.
I’ll end with what I very frequently told my university student affairs supervisors when they counseled me to alter my personality or my style while somehow still achieving the same results: “I know you think you’ve come up with the perfect solution, but here’s the real problem: I’m all you’ve got, because you’re asking me to be Jesus, and Jesus wasn’t available. He didn’t apply, because he’s got bigger fish to fry. And if you really knew how to do it better, you would have never needed to hire me in the first place.”
If our leadership class themselves hadn’t been so incompetent . . . if such a high percentage of them weren’t so corrupt that they’ll sell out the citizenry to take bribes from defense spenders, fake-vaccine producers and organized crime syndicates . . . if those who fancy themselves superior to the average American weren’t in actuality limited to being legends in their own minds . . . Donald J. Trump never would have needed to interrupt what he was doing to run for office and the American People would have never needed to hire him in the first place.
I consider every instance of people claiming that Trump would be so much better if he were nicer, or less defensive, or more patient – to be the equivalent of a cartoon in which the character passes gas in reverse out of his own pie-hole.
Jesus isn’t available to be President of the United States, so please spare us the pontificating about how Donald J. Trump would be so much better if he just wasn’t so dang human.
@realDonaldTrump on X and Truth Social
#MAHA