Straight-up "person vs person" would be fair for the spirit of "let's find who's best at it", so I'm fine with it.
Without a cult of personality like Trump, there's no reason for an oligarch to paint a target on their back by running themselves when a puppet will do.
Steve Forbes also ran in 1996, performing about as well as Bloomberg did—showing up third in polls and winning only a couple of contests.
It's not the reason, but without it, running yourself as a Capitalist is a non-starter.
). And he parlayed that into electoral success, elections also being in some measure a kind of popularity contest. A lot of actually successful business folk aren't terribly charismatic: Forbes and Bloomberg are good examples. I've never actually seen Thiel, so I can't judge in his case. (Maybe there's a reason I haven't seen him?)
He is a terrible businessman. He bankrupted 3 casinos. Casinos print money for the owners; millions of dollars every year. To bankrupt one you have to be a special kind of stupid.
Yes, and I like to take advantage of every opportunity to be critical of Trump.
Or a special kind of smart.
The leveraged buyout strategy of the 80s and 90s was a way to gain riches at the expense of others. Typically, the process involved buying one or more smaller companies, using a "promise to pay later" strategy with the old owners, Striping down the company to extract cash now, bankrupting the company to invalidate all future payments to previous owners, Selling the company to a new company the pirates own and moving on. With casinos there is no need to go through all those hoops. Casinos usually drop 7-10% of net win (equivalent to sales) as annual profit without any effort. The largest casino NM which is small by Vegas or Atlantic City standards will drop $100 million annually to the owners. Trump was so poor at money management that he had to "borrow" hundreds of millions from his father to keep his casinos afloat.
His own cult of personality will die, but the damage to liberal democratic institutions and shifting of the US overton window to far right will remain. The question is who or what fills that gap on the right.
My own thought is that the right will be thrown into disarray, as some would-be successors (Vance, Don Jr.) chase after the Trump voting base and some (Haley, Rubio) try to steer back to older ways of being a Republican (and neither group gets much traction). I'm not worried about the Overton window per se; people actually like Democratic policies, when presented without a party label; so that can shift back, when Trump isn't badmouthing them through a bullhorn every day. Trump has done considerable damage to democratic institutions, you're right, most crucially pointing out their vulnerabilities (and any authoritarian-minded successor who could get traction could continue exploiting those vulnerabilities). I don't know if any damage has yet been altogether irreparable (though the SC nonsense will afflict us for the rest of my lifetime). I'll have to muse on that.
