Jimmy Breslin On Trump.....

[Laxman]

from beyond the grave. He was on to Trump's con long ago. Newsday ran three of his Trump opinion pieces dating as far back as 1988 yesterday as a sort of homage. The guy has always been built on a foundation of bluster and bull and as much as people will fall for that crap over and over, it's not going to withstand scrutiny or pressure for very long. Today's hearings whacked the side of his shoddily built administration with a wrecking ball and no doubt more blows are going to follow soon. He may have an act that works but he has no substance once lights are turned on him, and that won't withstand the kind of pressure he's about to undergo for very long. If you're from the New York area, you already knew about this. Soon the whole country will know what Breslin sniffed out almost 30 years ago.....enjoy his acerbic assessments......

Trump survives by Corum's Law. This is a famous, well-tested theory and is named after Bill Corum, who once wrote sports for the Hearst papers when they were in New York......

"Because, gentlemen, this is the rule. A sucker has to get screwed." Corum ran the Kentucky Derby on this premise for years, and the game was good for all of Louisville. No sucker ever wept.

Today, Corum's Law runs all of Donald Trump's situation. But instead of horseplayers, the suckers who must get screwed are a combination of news reporters and financial people. It is all quite simple. Donald Trump handles these nitwit reporters with a new and most disgraceful form of bribery, about which I will tell you. He uses the reporters to create a razzle dazzle: there are five stories in the newspapers in the morning papers leading into 11 minutes of television at night. The financial people, who lead such dreary lives, believe what they read and see on television. Trump is larger than life. No, not Trump. Don't use that name. It's Donald! He cannot lose. The financial geniuses can't wait to rush into the glamour and lights. They want to touch Trump's arm. "Here, I'm from Prudential, the rock of Gibraltar. Take our $ 75 million to build another crap game. Can I ride on your boat?"

The curious thing about "Between You and I" Trump is not that he destroyed himself yesterday, for all demagogues ultimately do that, but why he became so immensely popular with the one group of people who are supposed to be the searchlights and loudspeakers that alert the public to the realities of such a person. That would be those who work in the news business. Even the most unhostile of eyes cannot say that his buildings are not ugly. Yet all news stories say "imaginative" when common sense shouts "arrogant." Always, the television and newspapers talk of his financial brilliance, when anybody in the street knows that most of "Between You and I" Trump's profits come from crap games and slot machines in Atlantic City, the bulk of that, the slot machines, coming from old people who go down there with their Social Security checks.

It also is an undeniable fact of life that gambling keeps bad company.

Yet with the one quality Trump has, amazing brashness - "I just bought the sky!" - he has overwhelmed the newspapers and television more than any one we ever have had in this city. Barnum or Mike Todd used guile and chicanery, but Trump understood that this year, you can blind their minds by showing them a diamond. During a celebration of greed he became toastmaster.

The second crap game operator from Jamaica, Donald Trump, left Jamaica and found a place, Atlantic City, where a crap game is legal and can be conducted honestly. Trump has a boardwalk joint whose casino is open to retired postal clerks, New Jersey wise guys and half the cocaine peddlers on the East Coast. Yet Trump walks around Manhattan as a magnate. Yesterday, he was busy buying an airline. And I was in one of his apartment buildings, where, if you first look at the advertisements, then at the apartments and ask the price, perhaps you receive a better idea of who he is than you do from newspapers or on television. The man is the best boaster of his time.

Read all three here: http://www.newsday.com/opinion/jimmy-breslin-s-columns-on-donald-trump-1.13288319

[underpants]

1. Classic. Thanks.

[monmouth4]

2. Beautifully presented Laxman, many thanks for this post..n/t

[Laxman]

3. From The Daily News....

Denis Hamill on Breslin & Trump:

Watching Trump in the White House left Breslin “a bit sour with what’s going on in our country.”

“Mainly because (Trump was) the kind of guy that in my neighborhood in Brooklyn and (Breslin’s) in Queens we despised,” Hamill said.

“The bulls--t tough guy, the guy is all mouth and couldn’t fight his way out of an empty lot.”

and more from Hamill:

When Trump held his joint news conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Friday, it was not the American journalists who asked Trump the hard question about the White House’s inflammatory and unsubstantiated claim that the British government helped former President Barack Obama tap Trump Tower. It was the Germans.

“Breslin would have been the perfect guy to really go and illustrate the lies and deceit that Donald Trump has launched upon the nation and the world, by going to the little guys, the guys who had contracts with him and got stiffed, the guys at the casino who got laid off, the people who Trump University swindled,” Hamill said.