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The Art of the Come-on, Part II Not long after fixing Wollman Rink, the Donald found himself skating on thin ice. There was a short time when anyone with a subway token and a VISA Platinum Card had a net worth exceeding Donald Trump’s. While the Keating Five became a household name, the stylish developer was vastly overleveraged in the middle of a real estate downturn and a national recession. The Donald was going down faster than a hooker on the St. John’s men’s basketball team, but the banks wouldn’t have it. If you’re poor in America, they repossess your car. If you’re rich, they restructure your debt. You work the swing shift at Target, Donald puts up Mar-a-Largo as collateral. When Trump hit the skids in 1991, Citibank, Chase, and Morgan Stanley were like George Bailey’s friends and relatives at the end of It’s A Wonderful Life. The last few years have seen Donald Trump attempt to break out of the everyday humdrum existence of being a married billionaire real estate player and into the exciting world of mindless bachelorhood and farce. Dating a woman about your own age or older means intelligent conversation, genuine companionship, and a subtle acknowledgement of your own mortality—all things that scare the living hell out of an egomaniac. Donald Trump could use a little Ashton Kutcher in him. Trump is now flirting with DE, or daughter equilibrium, where you can date only women your daughter’s age or younger. It only gets worse from here. If Trump wants to see himself in about twenty years, all he has to do is look at Hugh Hefner. Trump’s 2000 presidential fling was shorter-lived than the XFL and had less content. During that ephemeral, fated run, he disingenuously proposed a one-time tax on the very rich to eliminate the federal deficit—sort of a fat cat tax. If you want to be Robin Hood, Donald, you can always lead by example. Truth is, Thorstein Veblen’s concept of conspicuous consumption has never been so thoroughly exemplified as by the Donald, with the possible exception of Dennis Kozlowski’s shindig in Sardinia. Trump’s latest gig is starring in the prime time NBC reality series The Apprentice, which is basically The Real World for corporate suck-ups. You wonder if this is just Donald’s way of regaining his self-esteem after not getting the role of Big a few years back on Sex and the City. The original title for The Apprentice was Joe Megalomaniac Developer. An alternate was My Big-Haired, Aging Real Estate Mogul. Another was So You Want to be a Billionaire’s Doormat? Perhaps the best one was American Idle. In The Apprentice, a dozen or so not-quite-polished twenty-somethings are assigned a bunch of meaningless tasks. This is the one job I wish they’d send overseas. In a scarcely memorable episode, the kids run around Manhattan all day buying and reselling chachkes from street vendors to see if they can turn a few dollars profit. At the end of each episode, Trump and a couple of white collar henchmen sit in the board room like an emasculated Don Corleone and sons. The kids sit across from them and throw verbal darts at each other while the word “leader” is bandied about more times per minute than “recovering” at an AA meeting. They fawn, squirm, genuflect, and gradually master the art of the squeal. The idea is one day they’ll be like Donald Trump and lord it over a bunch of insecure, yuppie wannabes like themselves. But in reality, they might as well play the home version of Beat the Clock and carry an egg on a spoon across the Trump Tower lobby. Welcome to GW’s America, where a guy/gal Friday position awaits at the top of a pyramid the size of the NCAA tournament. If I was a college senior watching this show, I’d sign up for Iraq. There is a not-so-subtle message coming across the plasma screen with effects like the ones Malcolm McDowell received in A Clockwork Orange. In the final analysis, The Apprentice is Survivor for corporate lackeys. But how many remakes of Survivor can one survive? Each week, the networks should do a viewer survey and cancel one reality show. Ditch Average Joe II next week. Pull the plug on Fear Factor Couples the week after. By summer, we might be back to 1999 broadcasting standards. Increasingly, we are a soft nation hooked on Zoloft, Prozac, and OxyContin. As Nielsen household members, we flatter and kid ourselves with our Darwin obsession. But sending in a bunch of scared youths to run Planet Hollywood for a day is as far from the year-in-year-out grind of a real professional career as playing Super Mario is from fighting with the 101st in Tikrit. NBC kids itself as well. Donald Trump’s mentor was not a make-up technician on the set of a half-baked reality show. Donald Trump’s mentor was Roy Cohn, and the things he taught Donald Trump will never be aired on a prime time series or, for that matter, anywhere. If you really want to be an apprentice, kiddies, learn how to pay off building department officials. Learn how to lobby for $97 million real estate tax breaks while the city muddles through the second worst budget crisis in memory. Learn how to get major banks to bail you out of bankruptcy to save their own reputations. Learn how to close vital highway entrance ramps because you feel like it. Learn to eliminate nagging debts by going Chapter 11 with your shell company one day and reopening it under another name the next. Most of all, kiddies, learn not even to bother with such a trite concept or relationship as apprentice, or for that matter, any concept or relationship, unless there’s something in it for you. Click here to rant back. |