Dr. John Gartner has been warning the public about Donald Trump since 2015.
Not enough people heard him.
Trump’s MAGA base became obsessed with him because they thought he was a strong man. They were impressed that he was a billionaire, a very successful businessman who had achieved financial success because of his brilliance. Even better, this billionaire expressed their grievances. He was on their side. Like Trump, his followers believed that the rest of the world was cheating them, treating them unfairly.
Many evangelical Christians believed that Trump was God’s instrument, the one who would end abortion and make America a Christian nation. Those who hated blacks and immigrants, who believed that these groups were stealing their jobs and destroying their white Christian homeland, thrilled to his rhetoric about ending DEI and getting rid of immigrants.
They were willing to overlook his moral flaws because they believed his promises. He was the ultimate film-flam man, the carnival barker who could sell ice to Eskimos. There was a time when divorce or even infidelity could ruin a man’s chances to be president. Not any more. Trump was forgiven his undisguised lust and sexual escapades. His MAGA cult didn’t care that he had been married three times. They didn’t care that he slept with other women while he was married. Strong men did that. They weren’t bothered by his boast that he could have any woman he wanted by simply grabbing their private parts.
The fact that he was a close friend–maybe even the best friend–of the notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein did not disillusion his fanatical followers. None of that dimmed their adoration for Trump. If Trump said he knew nothing about Epstein’s activities, that was good enough for the cult.
If he was a philanderer and a sexual predator, well, that just proved that he was a strong man, untouched by political correctness.
They believed he was a brilliant businessman because they saw him on “The Apprentice,” playing a brilliant businessman. Having that deeply rooted belief in his business success, they refused to believe that he had gone bankrupt six times.
His image as a strong man impressed both men and women who longed for a rough, tough guy in the White House. Nothing he did, nothing he said, no vulgarity that he uttered, could dissuade them from their idolatry. No matter how many times they heard that Trump had dodged the draft six times by presenting a letter from a podiatrist claiming he suffered from bone spurs, they simply didn’t believe it.
When Trump’s former Chief of Staff John Kelly, who had been a Marine general, said that Trump had called fallen service members “suckers” and “losers,” Trump denied it, and his devoted followers believed him.
His MAGA base believed that Trump was sent by Jesus to lead them, to protect their gun rights and stop abortion. He alone would save them from the others. He cared about them.
Trump’s rise to the Presidency is an amazing riches-to-riches story. I have lived in New York City since 1960, with a one-year detour in Georgia (when my then-husband was called to active duty after the Berlin Wall crisis) and a sojourn in D.C. from 1993-1994 (first as Assistant Secretary of Education in the George H.W. administration, then as a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution).
During the 1980s, the 1990s, and until he annnounced his entry into the Republican presidential campaign in 2015, Trump was viewed as a clown by leaders of the business community. They laughed at him. They knew he was not a successful businessman. It was no secret that he frequently didn’t pay his bills and that banks would not finance his deals.
Trump achieved notoriety as a playboy who took beautiful women to high-end nightclubs. He made sure to get his name in the gossip columns by calling them, pretending to be his own publicist, and giving out the details of where he was seen and which gorgeous woman was with him.
After other banks refused to deal with Trump, he established a relationship with Deutsche Bank, which was documented in 2019 by David Enrich in The New York Times.
In 2003, he borrowed money from Deutsche Bank to pay off loans he owed for his failing casinos. However, “Mr. Trump’s company defaulted in 2004, leaving Deutsche Bank’s clients with deep losses. The bank’s investment division that sold the bonds vowed to not do business again with Mr. Trump.
A year later, though, Mr. Trump approached another part of the investment division for a $640 million loan to build a skyscraper in Chicago. It made the loan — and in 2008, Mr. Trump defaulted and sued Deutsche Bank. That prompted the whole investment division to sever ties with Mr. Trump.
And then, three years after his previous default, Deutsche Bank started lending to him again, this time through the private-banking division that catered to the superrich. In fact, it lent Mr. Trump money that he used to repay what he still owed Deutsche Bank’s investment division for the Chicago loan.
One of Trump’s most successful ventures was selling apartments to wealthy Russians. He got the riches he longed for by selling condos at very high prices to Russian gangsters and oligarchs who needed to “launder” money from their various enterprises.
Craig Unger wrote about Trump and his “Russian laundromat” in The New Republic in 2017.
The magazine, knowing of Trump’s extreme litigiousness, preceded the article with this disclaimer:
The questions began the moment Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president in 2015: What were the extent of his financial ties with Russia, and was he compromised? While some on the left conjectured wildly that Trump was a Russian “asset,” Craig Unger did the hard work of connecting the dots—while resisting the temptation to overreach. “To date, no one has documented that Trump was even aware of any suspicious entanglements in his far-flung businesses, let alone that he was directly compromised by the Russian mafia or the corrupt oligarchs who are closely allied with the Kremlin. So far, when it comes to Trump’s ties to Russia, there is no smoking gun,” he wrote. And yet, there was a lot of smoke in the public record showing that “Trump owes much of his business success, and by extension his presidency, to a flow of highly suspicious money from Russia.” Trump may have simply been “a convenient patsy for Russian oligarchs and mobsters” and “an easy ‘mark’ for anyone looking to launder money.” But there’s no question that the trail of dirty money from Russia to Trump is long and wide—and no doubt continuing to this day.
—Ryan Kearney, executive editor, The New Republic
When he descended the escalator at Trump Tower in 2015 to announce that he was running for President, those who knew his history thought it was a joke. The Huffington Post announced that it would not cover his campaign because he was not a serious candidate.
He won in 2016 because FBI Director James Comey announced that he was reopening an investigation of her emails, only days before the election. A few days later, the investigation was closed. But the damage was done.
A cult was born and Trump continued to burnish his image as a savior and a man of strength.
Historians will sort this out in years to come. And we will know someday whether the nation can recover from the damage he has done to out institutions, to our institutions of education, to the rule of law, to the career civil service, to scientific research, to the environment, and to our international alliances. Whatever he touched has made him wealthier and impoverished our ideals and our standing in the world.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Great summary. The day Trump won in 2016, I walked around in a daze, almost unable to teach. That we had elected a man tied to Russia and to former communist officials suggested to me that the country had changed. I grew up with the assumption that any political candidate who was tied to Russia was politically toast. Trump blew all that out of the water.
Now a decade later, we are where we are. God help us.
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“What were the extent of his financial ties with Russia, and was he compromised?“
I wish Democrats would stop beating the dead horse of “Russiagate.” It’s extremely difficult to prove definitively, and politically it ended up being a gift to Trump—his approval ratings actually rose after the Mueller Report failed to produce anything that could remove him from office. It also bolstered his narrative that the “deep state” was out to destroy him, allowing him to cast himself as a victim and making his victory appear almost heroic to his supporters.
There are far more pressing issues that don’t require “connecting the dots,” where the evidence is right out in the open: economic policies that overwhelmingly favor the wealthy, the weaponization of ICE, efforts to reshape election laws in ways that undermine democracy, a willingness to ignore the rule of law to advance his agenda, unprecedented profiteering tied to inside access, cuts to social services for people in need, and the ongoing demonization of immigrant and marginalized communities—just to name a few. (Need I mention the insanity of the war against Iran!)
Focusing on what can be clearly seen and demonstrated is not only more effective—it’s harder to dismiss.
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I am not sure you meant this for me and my comment above, but I will re-iterate that it is a remarkable turn of events when ties to Russia and to former communist officials are no longer a political death knell.
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“Our” — We elected him president. Twice. We have met the enemy!
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Trump is a malignant narcissist and water is wet. His Malignancy has been malignant in most areas of human interaction for a very long time. Remember the birther nonsense/conspiracy theory that Trump vomited up ad nauseam. Trump’s also a malignant liar and bloviator. Trump’s malignancy and unfitness to be president have been out there for years and yet millions of Americans think he’s a truth teller and effective president. But his war against Iran has triggered the ire of many conservatives and right wingers. At long last, have you no shame (addressing Trump)? Yes, he has no shame.
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You summed up The Donald perfectly. It’s a shame that so many believed in the picture that The Apprentice painted and couldn’t get past that!
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Trump’s MAGA Minions have always known exactly what Trump is. All their reasons for why they want him to be President are The Lie — and they know they are lying. And they will continue to lie and support him so long as he delivers what they want: REVENGE.
The roots of the MAGA movement are in the fetid soil of the post-2008 economic crash: Economic scholars have focused on the macroeconomic factors and impacts of what was euphemistically labeled by economists as The Great Recession because they couldn’t admit that it was actually The Great Depression II. They have paid only passing attention to the ruinous impact The Great Recession had on work-a-day Americans.
Millions of average Americans lost their American Dream in The Great Recession: They lost their jobs. They lost their homes. They lost their dignity. They lost their hope because even as government bailed out banks, brokerages, and corporations, work-a-day Americans were left in the gutters.
Those gutters were the breeding place of seething anger, blind anger, hatred. Hatred for government. Hatred for any scapegoat they could focus on.
2008 was not long ago. Millions of Americans who were thrown into the gutter then are still without what they once had and are still seething with anger. They and their now-adult children who shared life in the gutter are MAGA.
Trump didn’t have to “sell” them anything. They knew when he came along in 2016 and they know now that he represents exactly what they want: REVENGE. Tear down The System Revenge. The democratic republic system failed them, and they want revenge on it. To justify their revenge, THEY — not Trump — created all the lies about him, such as him being sent by God.
In their angry pursuit of revenge they have also scapegoated immigrants and all people of color, as well as “liberals” because Obama — the person who decided to bail out the banks, brokerages, and corporations instead of helping The Little People — was a liberal.
So, don’t blame Trump the showman for playing to his audience. His audience put him on the stage. And he’s acting just like they want him to.
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