Maybe I’m wrong, but when I was a kid, when you finished school and went looking for a job, you had a choice. You could either ‘go public,’ which meant working for some government agency like the cops, the fire department, or maybe teaching in a public school. Or you could ‘go private’ and work for some company that maked some product which you could go around and sell.
But whichever way you went, public or private, in those days one had nothing to do with the other. Everyone understood these were two very different and very separate work environments and that’s the way it was.
Thanks to Donald Trump, or POS-Trump as I prefer to call him, that world no longer exists. What we now have is a world in which you can do both at the same time – be what we call a ‘public servant’ but also sell something to the public at the same time.
Now you would think that since the government regulates just about every inch of the consumer market that operating in both spheres, public and private, would be seen as a conflict which requires that you choose between one or the other environment and stick with your choice. But I remember when POS-Trump announced he was not going to relinquish his involvement with his private company which owned property both in the United States and abroad, and he defended this decision by saying that he wasn’t ‘breaking any law.’
Well, it turns out that in fact the whole time he was President the company he still headed was breaking the law all the time. They were filing false financial statements to qualify for cheaper business loans which now will require POS-Trump to pay New York State some $355 million and change.
But meanwhile, at the same time that POS-Trump has to scrounge around to come up with all that dough, he can still run for President again and maybe even win. This past weekend he launched yet another product into the private market, a sneaker with a $400 price tag which will soon be available at ‘select’ stores and of course online.
The problem when you combine public service with selling something which nobody really needs, is that you can copyright a design or a product, but you can’t copyright a personal or family name. So, when someone runs for public office and asks people to buy a t-shirt or a mug with their name on it, the money from the sale has to go into a campaign fund, it’s not sales revenue that the particular individual can keep.
Which is why POS-Trump copyrighted the MAGA name, which he did a year before announcing that he was running for President in 2015. Because right from the beginning POS-Trump saw public service as just another market in which to build his brand.
And frankly, as long as POS-Trump continues to spend part or all of his time figuring out how to make a buck out of the MAGA brand, he’ll be about as much of a threat to democracy as the threat posed by Leonard Mermelstein, who happens to be my cat.
When POS-Trump promises to behave like a dictator or throw every so-called ‘illegal’ in a concentration camp before sending them back to one of the shithole countries from which they came, all he’s really doing is promoting his brand. And the key to making a buck in a capitalist market is to get your product onto the best-positioned display case in the store or get an ad for your product on every social media website around.
If you think the complaints POS-Trump keeps issuing about how the 2020 election was a ‘fraud,’ you haven’t been a student in Marketing 101.
And by the way, the GoFundMe website collecting money to help POS-Trump pay his legal bills, is just another marketing ploy by POS-Trump which may violate GoFundMe rules.
Meanwhile, so far that website has collected $650,000 and change, which is .0001% of what POS-Trump owes New York State.
I can just see POS-Trump’s legal team going into court and handing over the deeds to a couple of his properties to cover the bond while he appeals the New York case, and the Court rejecting the deeds because the properties are overvalued up the ass.
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