Donald Trump for President

This From Bloomberg Politics:


Despite his claims of being utterly unlike any other pol, he makes a couple of big promises right at the top, including this appealing pledge: “We’ll make sure that when you graduate, we’ll have a job for you.” He also lets students at the small Lutheran college know that they have something important in common: “By the way, I happen to be Protestant. A lot of people don’t know that about me, but I’m very proud of it.”


Then he vows to do for America what he did for the Trump National Doral Miami—a faded treasure that, he says, “had been abused, just like our country, and run by financial people, like Hillary” Clinton. Until he came along and saved the golf resort with a $250 million makeover.
A lot of what he’d do as president, he says, involves getting “horrible people” instead of lovely but incompetent ones to negotiate trade deals. And if they got the job done, he asks, “would anyone care if they’re not nice guys?”


“Nooooo!” answer the nice Iowans.


He wouldn’t exactly invite the Chinese over for steaks, as President Obama did, either, but would serve them McDonalds, and make them pick up the tab, too. Still, he wouldn’t embarrass America by entertaining them, as he says Obama did, “in a cheap tent. The tent looked like hell.”


Trump would bring in so much new money, he swears, that there would be no need to cut Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security. But that’s only one way he differs from other Republicans, who in his view only talk about cutting, and never about building. “Every time I see those guys, they want to cut Social Security!”


Sadly, he says, the country has for too long been run by people who are not as smart as he is, or as successful. Which is why Ford is going to build cars in Mexico—“because we’re stupid.” Unlike President Trump, who would simply inform Ford that “We’re going to put a 35 percent tax on those cars, and if you don’t like it, build something here.’’ Despite Mexico’s narco wars and widespread violence and poverty, he says of that country’s leaders, “They’re doing a good job, because their leaders are smarter.”


And whenever he cedes that some of our own officials and candidates are “nice,’’ or that he likes them personally, an insult is sure to follow. Caroline Kennedy, for example, is a “nice person” up against “killers” as our ambassador in Japan. (Killers being a good thing, fyi.)


Of Hillary Clinton, he says, “I like her, but she’s got some very big problems.’’ Accepting undisclosed foreign donations at the Clinton Foundation is “a far bigger problem than people understand. This is something at the highest levels of wrong.”


Though his potential presidential rival Carly Fiorina would seem to come from the same corporate corner of the GOP jungle, he dismisses her, too: “She’s a very nice person, but we can’t play around with nice people; she was fired from HP—and fired in a vicious manner—and then she ran in California and lost in a landslide” to incumbent Senator Barbara Boxer in 2010. “And now she’s running for president? It doesn’t work that way.”


Though “I’m a conservative Republican,’’ he says, “I’m more disappointed in the Republicans, because they talk about Benghazi, and Hillary’s e-mail,” but then nothing ever comes of it. “They’ll never take you to the Promised Land.”


Also unlike many other Republicans, he sees our military involvement Iraq as a mistake from the start. “I was never a fan of Bush," Trump says. "Some people in this room probably like him, I don’t know why, but that’s OK.”


When it comes to foreign policy, he tells the crowd, we have to show strength but also restraint, just like he does: “Did you notice that baby was crying for half the speech, and driving me crazy, and I didn’t get mad once, or say anything, because I didn’t want to offend the parents? That’s called restraint.” His qualifications are obvious, he said in closing, since “I’m the king of zoning! Anybody who gets zoning to build a city on the West Side” of Manhattan, “which is what I did, with Trump, Trump, all over the place, drives you crazy—there were riots!—and I got it approved, and that’s tougher than dealing with China or Mexico!”


A college official in the audience, Edith Waldstein, vice president of enrollment, was not enthralled. “It was interesting,’’ she said, which is Midwestern for different, which is hardly ever a compliment. “But there were some mixed messages I still have to process, and some I disagree with. I’m still weighing candidates on both sides.”


His pitch worked better for 21-year-old Bradley Waller, from Maquoketa, Iowa: “He is what he is, and you have to deal with that, and that’s what we need more of.'' Trump couldn’t have said it better himself, and, if he actually runs, probably will at some point.