Of Trump and Tea Parties

One of the most enduring urban myths out there is that you have to be smart to make a fortune in real estate, which is demonstrably not true. You just need to be exceptionally, inhumanly sleazy. If you gave your average pederast a real estate license tomorrow, the odds are that he'd be hip deep in gold plated Xbox systems by the end of the week.

Recent history proves my point better than anything else could. Remember our recent financial crisis, whereupon the End of Days was a very dark and very real possibility? Well, the skunks who made out the best from that are the very ones who issued the insane and wrong subprime mortgages in the first place.

Here's how it worked. After Bill Clinton and the Republicans completely deregulated the financial services industry in 1999, investment bankers got the brilliant idea that they could turn mortgages into derivatives called collateralized debt obligations. That meant that if you're a branch manager in fucking Duluth or something, you would sell the mortgage you just handed out to Goldman Sachs for face value. The investment bank would then bundle that mortgage with thousands of other shitty loans, cut them up, and sell them to investors, more often than not institutional pension funds.

Now if you want to build an over the counter business from that, you want to sell loans with a very high interest rate, since that makes investors think that they're getting a higher than average rate of return. As it happens, few loans have higher interest rates than subprime mortgages because of the adjustable rates that were built into most of them. And the adjustable rates got even more profitable for the banks when Alan Greenspan jacked up interest rates in early 2006. Unfortunately, that also started the tidal wave of defaults that would throw the U.S economy into recession the following year.

All of a sudden, it didn't make a difference if the bank manager in Duluth ever saw a nickle back from the mortgage he just issued because he didn't own it anymore. In fact, he was incentivized to issue as many subprime mortgages as he possibly could. As early as 2003 the entire industry was overrun with rampant and blatant fraud as mortgage lenders were giving money to people without assests, jobs or even a basic command of the English language. This was easy because they no longer carried any risk in doing so, the investment banks and institutional investors relieved him of it almost immediately.

By 2006, the wizards at the investment banks finally began to understand that they were making a fortune from an illusion, so they started to hedge their own exposure through credit default swaps, mostly through AIG. In time, they used CDS's to bet against one another's bad CDO investments. And when the bubble burst, all of them were so over-leveraged (betting as much as $40 for every $1 that they actually had. In the case of Iceland, just three banks were betting 100 times the entire country's GDP) that no one could pay off the trillions of dollars that they owed one another.

Everyone went immediately to hell, except for the guys who originally issued the subprime mortgages. If they got out early enough, they got spectacularly rich.

If you got through the last five paragraphs, chances are that you're not a member of the Tea Party. Financial instruments are very complicated and Tea Partiers are very stupid, so they just blamed the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 instead. The fact that the savings and loan industry was tanked through exactly the same kind of deregulation, greed and rampant stupidity - completely independent of the CRA - twenty years earlier escapes them completely. It turns out that life is a lot less complicated when you're not burdened by actually knowing stuff.

Since the Republican party is at the forefront of the idealization of ignorance, it stands to reason that those same idiots would take a tawdry ghoul of a real estate jackal like Donald Trump to their bosoms in the lead up to the Great Apocalypse of Ought Twelve. There are now multiple polls that show him in the very top tier of preferred Republican primary candidates. In most of those polls, he's even kicking Sarah Palin's superior little ass across the country.

And that makes sense. If you're one of those moronic "values voters," where else are you going to turn other than a guy who's been through two bankruptcies, three wives and tried to skeeve his way out of paying a $40 million loan as recently as two years ago? He's a goddamn natural and if you don't see that, you don't know the first thing about modern conservatism.

Trump's platform, as much as there actually is one, is a spectacularly dumb and metaphysically dangerous combination of stealing Iraq's oil, threatening the Chinese, fetus fetishization and Birtherism. If you're a schizophrenic yokel of a know-nothing - and wide swaths of the GOP and Tea Party are - The Donald is almost irresistible. Besides, he's a got a TV show, which seems to be the only actual requirement left for the Republican presidential nomination. For my preferred candidate, Mitch Daniels, to have a realistic shot, he'd have to replace Charlie Sheen on Two and a Half Men this fall.

This isn't the first time that Trump has dangled the nightmarish prospect of his running for the presidency. In 2000 he openly mused about challenging Pat Buchanan from the left for the already wholly worthless nomination of Ross Perot's Reform Party. I'll grant you that this was years before Buchanan was marginalized as a goddless liberal by the tricorner hat crowd, but The Donald presented himself as the very picture of internationalist, pro-choice moderation.  He wrote a book about it, called The America we Deserve,and everything.

The 2000 run turned out to be little more than a masturbatory exercise in delusional ego inflation, but Trump swears that it's different this time, going so far as to bitch-slap Bill Cosby to prove it. Trump now wants you to know that he's every bit as crazed and hallucogenically wrong as Glenn Beck, but better at keeping a show on the tube.

But he wants Republicans everywhere to know that this is a limited-time offer.

Donald Trump will “probably” run as an independent candidate for U.S. President in 2012 if he does not receive the Republican party’s nomination, he told the Wall Street Journal in a video interview on Monday.

“I hate what’s happening to the country,” said Mr. Trump, a real estate tycoon and host of the NBC show “Celebrity Apprentice.” He will not formally make a decision until June, however, when this season of his television show is over. “I can’t run during the airing of that show,” Mr. Trump said, “I’m not allowed to.” But he said he would make an announcement “by June” and his candidacy looks increasingly likely.

Mr. Trump’s candidacy would complicate matters for the GOP as it looks to front someone who can unite the fractious party and mount a serious challenge to President Obama’s reelection bid. A recent Wall Street Journal/NBC poll recently found Mr. Trump tied for second place with former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee among likely voters in a GOP primary. Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who moved a step closer to formally declaring his own candidacy Monday, is still the frontrunner, though not by a wide margin.

“I think the Republicans are very concerned that I [may] run as an independent,” Mr. Trump said. His support is highest among the conservative wing of the party, not least because he is among the so-called “birthers” who doubt that President Obama in fact was born in the U.S. “It’s a very important issue,” Mr. Trump said of demanding that President Obama show his birth certificate, which has separately been reviewed by the media and deemed legitimate. “I’m not ashamed of having raised that issue.”

“I am very conservative,” said Mr. Trump. “The concern is if I don’t win [the GOP primary] will I run as an independent, and I think the answer is probably yes.” Mr. Trump said he thought he “could possibly win as an independent,” adding, “I’m not doing it for any other reason. I like winning.”

He also apparently likes lying quite a bit.

You see, there's virtually no way that the Republican nomination will be wrapped up before March of 2012. We're less than a year away from that, and no one has even formally declared their candidacy yet. That tells me that there is no clear frontrunner and that most of the GOP candidates want to make as much money from Fox News as humanly possible before getting in.

If Donald contests even a single primary, and they won't start until next January, it'll be too late for him to get on enough state ballots to make a difference in the Electoral College. That window closes no later than the beginning of April. So that eliminates a campaign as an independent. Perot got in comparatively late, but not that late, and he didn't go through another party's primaries first. The last time that happened in a serious way was in 1912, and that was long before the system was rigged against independents.

However, the pathway would still exist for him to get a third-party nomination. The problem with that is that there isn't one that got enough of the vote in 2008 to qualify for federal matching money. Legally, if Trump is on a party line, he can't use his own money to finance a campaign. Even if he somehow managed to get in the debates, he would be frozen out of paid media, which is the motherload of a modern presidential campaign.

So, yeah, he's lying. Or he's issuing a particularly vapid and useless threat. Campaign finance law is very complicated but high school history is not. Ask George H.W Bush or William Howard Taft how well a third party or independent challenge from a well-known contender went for them. The Donald probably figures that he could get more free media than Buchanan or Ralph Nader could, and he's probably right.

Because Trump's playing to the cheap seats of the Tea Party, the credibility of the threat is meaningless, since very few primary voters understand that if he gets ballot access, he won't have money, and if he uses his own money, he won't have ballot access. But the odds of, say, Mitt Romney convincing them of that are slim to none. The Tea Partiers like fucking with establishment nominees just because they've learned that they can. The fact that they'll make Obama's reelection even more of a certainty than it already is is incidental to them.

If anybody's wondering why the president declared his candidacy before even a single Republican did, I'll tell you. He knows that the GOP primaries are going to be a bloodbath of almost endless stupidity and he and David Plouffe would very much like to capitalize on that. So while the Republicans are trying to out-Neanderthal one another in their idiotic TV debates this summer, the president's campaign can bombard the airwaves with positive ads and occasionally highlight the wackier shit that comes out of Republican mouths. The only problem is that McCain-Feingold denies Obama the trick Bill Clinton used in '95, which was getting the DNC to do it for him. That means that he has to start raising money now.

Of course, all of the above assumes that Donald Trump is even serious about running, which I don't. I think he's hyst huckstering himself some ratings for his dopey TV show, which will allow him to suck some more money out of the lifeless husk of NBCUniversal next season.

But it sure is fun to think about, ain't it?