Donald Trump’s festival of narcissism

Last edited Wed Jun 17, 2015, 05:19 PM - Edit history (1)

Donald Trump’s festival of narcissism

By Dana Milbank at the Washington Post


http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/donald-trumps-festival-of-narcissism/2015/06/16/fd006c28-1459-11e5-9ddc-e3353542100c_story.html

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“I’m not doing that to brag,” he said (heaven forbid!), “because you know what? I don’t have to brag.”

But he can’t seem to stop himself. Trump’s announcement (from Trump Tower, ’natch) that he is seeking the Republican presidential nomination was a veritable festival of the first person. A search of the transcript finds that he uttered “I” 195 times, “my” or “mine” 28 times, “me” 22 times and “I’ve or “I’d” 12 times — for a grand total of 257 self-references. This compares with seven mentions of “America” or “American,” most of which were references to his holdings (“I own a big chunk of the Bank of America Building at 1290 Avenue of the Americas, that I got from China in a war — very valuable”) and his declaration that “the American Dream is dead.”

If the American Dream weren’t already dead, it would have killed itself listening to Trump’s 45-minute greed-is-good speech at a time when the gap between rich and poor is wider than it has been since the Great Depression. But don’t blame Trump, the doughy showman President Obama dubbed a “carnival barker” for his role in the birther movement. This reality TV star is simply exploiting the political system as it exists.

Trump is the Frankenstein monster created by our campaign-finance system in which money trumps all. The Supreme Court has equated money with free speech (by letting first candidates and then contributors spend unlimited sums), which means the more money you have, the more speech you get. Trump may be preposterous, but there are 8,737,540,000 reasons we have to listen to him — the figure Trump claimed is his net worth.


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