Fearless

Submitted by QTR’s Fringe Finance

A couple of hours before the assassination attempt of President Donald Trump, I was sitting in a bar having a laugh with some new friends I had just met from Texas.

Our discussion was centered around how divided the country has become and why we all felt another four years of President Biden would be an unmitigated disaster.

In the spirit of honest discourse among new friends, we began to rattle off the things we liked and didn’t like about Trump, as well. We conceded to each other that Trump was vain and a narcissist, obsessed with his own image, but we also agreed his policy stances would be far better for the country than those of the Democratic party.

And the self-obsessed narcissism criticism you, and everybody else, should know by now: it’s been lobbed at Trump for so many decades now he probably takes it as a compliment.

Look, I’m a realist. I understand that it’s easy to look at Trump’s personal life and career prior to being President and conclude he’s always prioritized the money and the image over substance.

From Trump Airlines to Trump Steaks to Trump University to Trump’s namesake casinos in Atlantic City, combined with allegations of not paying vendors that worked for him on projects and fabricating positive press about himself in the media, I don’t fault people for taking that view of the man.

We could sit here and analyze what drives Trump to engage in these patterns of behavior, which would probably take forever since it would require him to undergo a trillion hours of therapy to uncover his deepest trauma, or we could zoom out, take a 30,000-foot view and simply take note: for one reason or another, the f*cking guy is driven.

And it’s this incessant, relentless, fearless drive and desire to win — no matter what is fueling it — that has allowed Trump to shake off his past business failures and eventually land on The Apprentice, which became a resounding success. It’s the same drive that empowered Trump to campaign obsessively in 2016 and then defy all odds to win the presidency.

People first joked that Trump was running in 2016 as a PR stunt. Maybe he was. But at the end of they day, he manifested himself into the White House. And, to boot, he did a decent job: he ran the country effectively, slashed regulations, cut taxes, kept us out of war, and kept the economy booming. Regardless of why he wanted to become president, once he was put in that position, he did a decent job of “getting shit done” and won the respect of many world leaders who otherwise wouldn’t have taken him, or the United States under a President Hillary Clinton, seriously.

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As I was saying to my new friends last night, his style is brash and he is cutthroat as a businessman. He’s the personification of the Wall Street shark who, in business, gets a reputation for screwing the little guy. But if you’re not his counterparty and he’s negotiating on your behalf (or your country’s behalf) isn’t that exactly what you want? Someone who will fight tooth and nail, to the death to win, and who refuses to be intimidated? If Trump is striking a deal that’ll benefit the country, does it matter to you that it’s his ego driving his bold nature?

Putting aside what drives him, the fact is simply that nobody needs to tell him to get out of bed in the morning. While campaigning, he often makes multiple stops in a day, and while he was president, he went to war with the press for hours at a time nearly every single day. Those are positive character traits for a President no matter what is fueling it. It’s consistency, perseverance, reliability. Trump is the gun Boris the Blade sells Tommy in Snatch:

“Heavy is good, heavy is reliable. If it doesn’t work you can always hit him with it.”

And last night, after surviving an assassination attempt, President Trump didn’t hurriedly rush off the stage. Even after he was surrounded by multiple Secret Service agents, and it became evident that his life was in danger, he chose to stand on the stage and raise a fist in the air to show the world that the engine that drives him to push forward still hadn’t shut down.

I said to another friend last night that Trump is such a PR genius that it’s probably just muscle memory for him to seize momentous occasions as photo opportunities.

Anybody that has watched him publicly knows a lot of times he’ll “pose” in the middle of saying certain sentences or during certain meetings because he knows a photograph of that image will capture the brand that he wants to sell to the world.

It’s how we wind up with gems like this.

Think about this. When we watch the UFC, do we care about what’s going on in the personal lives of the fighters outside the octagon? Do we spend time bemoaning how some fighters, like Nate Diaz, for example, are simply just “built different” and love to fight for the hell of fighting? No, we sit back and watch them take personal pain and obsession and turn it into remarkable careers. Then, we celebrate them.

At this point in Trump’s life, he has gone far past being a caricature of himself and has simply believed and manifested himself into being a success by being “built different”. You can call it ego and narcissism if you’d like, and it probably is, but, as is the case with most all of us, Trump‘s personality disorders are the gasoline that he uses to fuel his engine.

So we can talk about Stormy Daniels, or we can talk about taking on irresponsible amounts of debt to fund the Taj Mahal. We can talk about Trump’s obsession with his image or how he lies about golf scores and bullshitted his way to the top. But how can you argue the man isn’t a success? He was President of the United States and one of the most well-known individuals on the face of the earth. How can you say he’s that he’s a terrible family man when his children routinely show up to support him and he has been a provider for them his entire life? How can you say he’s not courageous to stand down a litany of extremely damaging, false allegations throughout his entire tenure as President?

And putting aside his motivation, how can you not say that choosing to stand on stage after being shot instead of ducking, hiding and scurrying away isn’t courageous?

At the end of the day, I don’t care what drives him. Trump is a guy that perseveres.

And if you view the country like I do right now, as a scattered, disorganized free-for-all, badly losing its grip on both law and order and its moral compass, a little drive, direction, perseverance and courageousness could go a long way for us.

QTR’s Disclaimer: Please read my full legal disclaimer on my About page here. This post represents my opinions only. In addition, please understand I am an idiot and often get things wrong and lose money. I may own or transact in any names mentioned in this piece at any time without warning. Contributor posts and aggregated posts have been hand selected by me, have not been fact checked and are the opinions of their authors. They are either submitted to QTR by their author, reprinted under a Creative Commons license with my best effort to uphold what the license asks, or with the permission of the author. This is not a recommendation to buy or sell any stocks or securities, just my opinions. I often lose money on positions I trade/invest in. I may add any name mentioned in this article and sell any name mentioned in this piece at any time, without further warning. None of this is a solicitation to buy or sell securities. These positions can change immediately as soon as I publish this, with or without notice. You are on your own. Do not make decisions based on my blog. I exist on the fringe. The publisher does not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the information provided in this page. These are not the opinions of any of my employers, partners, or associates. I did my best to be honest about my disclosures but can’t guarantee I am right; I write these posts after a couple beers sometimes. I edit after my posts are published because I’m impatient and lazy, so if you see a typo, check back in a half hour. Also, I just straight up get shit wrong a lot. I mention it twice because it’s that important.