With the election running close, swaying the undecided vote is becoming more and more important. One argument which seems to have the undecided voters considering Trump is his supposed business acumen… I mean he’s rich, right? So how do we talk them out of this.
Directly attacking the presumption that he is rich and earned it isn’t going to sway these people. They’ve already come to their conclusion about that. You also don’t want to attack the basic presumption that a good businessman would make a good president.. again this will just harden their position
Acknowledge the premise as feasible, but suggest a different way of looking at the answer:
The issue, in this case is not whether or not Trump can make money for himself.. It’s pretty clear that Trump is pretty good at looking out for number one. The better question to ask is
What happened to the people who entrusted their money to Donald Trump?
because — if Donald is elected president, he’s going to be responsible for everybody else’s money. (As far as we can tell, he may not even pay any federal tax, so none of it may be his own).
In other words, the issue to consider is not the fact that Donald’s accountants were able to turn a billion dollar loss in 1995 into a big tax deduction .. instead, one should look at what happened to the people who invented in Trump Casinos and saw their stock prices go from over $35 to under 5 before finally tanking to zero after the second bankruptcy.
Similarly you should look at the banks who lent money to Trump’s casinos and, despite the fact that they’re normally really good at keeping their asses covered, lost hundreds of millions of dollars — in part because Trump misled them as to how he would get the rest of his financing.
Another example would be Trump Resorts in Mexico — a luxury development turned functional scam — where people put down $100,000 deposits and had to sue to get even a portion of it back because Trump Resorts misused their deposit money before abandoning the project.
The reason why I call Trump resorts a functional scam is that the deposits were supposed to be held in trust to secure the purchases once the units were completed. First of all, the units were never built — so when the deposit funds were diverted to operational purposes or to enrich Trump and/or other other principals, I think that it crossed the line from development to scam. That may or may not have been the intent but that was the result.
Again: the point is to not dismiss the ‘business owner’ criteria as wrong, but rather to acknowledge that it is not out to lunch, and simply direct attention to how that criteria actually disqualifies Trump for president.