In case you want a current snapshot of the Trump Organization empire, here’s WaPo with an article entitled “Backlash to riot at Capitol hobbles Trump’s business as banks, partners flee the brand,” which more or less summarizes their incoming disaster:
In the past week, it has lost a bank, an e-commerce platform and the privilege of hosting a world-famous golf tournament, and its hopes of hosting another have been dashed. In the future, the Trump Organization also could lose its D.C. hotel and even its children’s carousel in Central Park, if government landlords in Washington and New York reevaluate their contracts with Trump.
Trump lost a much bigger broker relationship Tuesday night when real estate giant Cushman & Wakefield told The Washington Post it would no longer work with him. The company has handled an array of business for Trump for many years, including office leasing at Trump Tower and 40 Wall Street, and retail leasing in Chicago. It means that Trump’s company will quickly have to find someone else to handle lease negotiations at some of his most prominent properties.“Cushman & Wakefield has made the decision to no longer do business with The Trump Organization,” the company said in a statement.
There’s more in greater detail – it makes me wonder if his son Barron will end up with a tin cup on a street corner. And then consider this report:
A 53-year-old Georgia man who faced charges in connection to last Wednesday’s attack on the U.S. Capitol has died by suicide, according to the Fulton County Medical Examiner’s Office. [Forbes]
And my Quote Of The Day:
“We are being held hostage by permanent adolescents.” The armed so-called freedom fighters are doing their best to bring their comic book, their superhero movie, their violent video game, or their Book of Revelation revenge fantasy (isn’t it all the same?) to real life, and their target list includes all of us who don’t accept their reality.”
From Trump to his cult, none seem to really realize that there are consequences to actions. And I have to wonder how much of that is the result of widespread telecommunications, or remote communications. Even before BBSes, back in the 1980s when I became involved, it was not unknown for those who used remote communications to abuse the form. From obscene phone calls to poison pen letters, those who abused remote communications generally did not suffer consequences for that abuse – at least, not until they were caught, and that often happened only after the abuse had advanced.
In the BBS era, abuse can and did happen, but there were both social and technological limitations, as BBSes generally flew under the legal radar when it came to questions of social conformity, meaning censorship at the system level was entirely at the discretion of the operator, and, technologically, the networks were generally separate – and, again, those networks that did exist often didn’t tolerate public abuse and discussions of how to propagate abuse.
But the Web eliminates the technological limitations, and the social limitations, rather than evolving, have instead been stunted or overlooked by concerns over government oversight – the 1st Amendment absolutism over which I’ve already expressed some unease. Because the oversight has been light, and the repercussions rarely, if ever, occurring, the generations being taught extremism and brought up on the Web don’t seem to get it.
Get what? That there are consequences to extremism. Want more examples? Look for videos of last week’s insurrectionists discovering they’ve been put on the No Fly list. They’re suddenly horrified. It’s puzzling how people can be this stupid.
At least to those of us who were taught there are consequences to being evil.
Now, this doesn’t apply to Trump. No, he took a more traditional route – he’s used copious amounts of money to pad his mistakes away. If you haven’t seen The Great Gatsby (2013), see it – or read the source book.
But that failure to experience consequences also explains the reports that indicate the blowback from the corporate world has shocked him. His family shielded him from consequences in his youth, and since then his money and reputation were the buffer – and thus he’s eternally screwing up. The shield from consequences, whatever the motivation, has left us with a President incapable of predicting the results of his actions. And that inability to predict and understand that the results of childish, selfish actions will, for both Trump and his cultists, lead to disaster, not some wonderful victory, is the weak point for these fools.
And we’re bearing the brunt of that character flaw.
