GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1097: PLAYBOY 4: TRUMP VS CUBAN

 Back when I was a subscriber, Playboy interviewed both Donald Trump and Mark Cuban (separately over the course of years, I should add). Here are a few highlights that I thought you might be interested in.

I wonder if Hochman is still "comfortable" with Trump. Also, "sumptuous" is possibly the grossest way to refer to Trump's office. But the part about him being enthralled with himself is by no means a stretch of  my imagination. The Duke of Mammon only thinks about other people when he's in a room with an attractive blonde woman, and it's not because he's considerate.

How's the Taj Mahal doing these days?

That was probably the extent of it back then, but now I want to know who does his combover. Ever watch Penn & Teller's Bullshit? There was an episode on hair featuring a Vegas magician with the most elaborate combover ever. I suspect Trump might use that guy. I mean, Trump knows Penn, so . . .

He keeps talking past tense here. I think he's still a brat, which is a little weird considering how, in the 2024 election, it was his opponent that kept getting called a brat. But did you notice the lie he told in this answer? He lies so often that it's hard to catch them all, but he just claimed to not be violent, yet he gave one of his teachers a black eye?

Everything you need to know to understand this piece of human offal is right here. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: if Fred Trump had only told his son that he loved him, we wouldn't be going through this fucking disaster.

This interview was in 2003 or 4, so he really hasn't changed all that much. He's been using the same tactics all these years. Also, there's that V word again. I've listened to a lot of Washington insiders who used to work for him talk about the experience, and they all agree: if Trump doesn't get his way, and he's not in front of a camera, he throws a temper tantrum, which I think is a more accurate term than "controlled violence."

That part about the Guinness Book of World Records is true. He was very, very briefly listed for this comeback. However, per Politico, they dropped it a year later because the idea of a comeback "was subjective and not standardizable across the globe." I wonder how he feels about no longer having that record. Is he even aware of it?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! If you're wondering what my laughter is in reference to, look up how that foundation is doing these days and, uh, why it doesn't exist anymore.

I do believe him when he says he's never had booze or drugs. I even believe the coffee thing. He gets his caffeine from Diet Coke instead. The good news is, when we get to the Nuremburg part of this shitshow, he can't say, hey, I was drunk at the time. Or, I was high at the time. All of this madness is him. Sober. No excuses to save him from being found guilty. Also, why are you talking to people who are fucking on a table in front of you? They're busy, and that's rude.

So. How's that call to Saudi Arabia going?

I would pay good money to see that clown doing his jerking-off-two-tall-invisible-men dance while listening to Eminem.

Hm. Something sticks out in that block above. What could that possibly be? When you see it, please join me in wondering where *that* Donald Trump went. Oh right, he never existed. This is just more bullshit.

I'm just going to let that one stand on its own. Because holy shit, that is a staggering level of hypocrisy. I mean, he had no way of knowing that one day he would be in such a leadership role, but still, if you're going to talk about how the world should be, and then find yourself in a position to make those changes, and you do the exact opposite? I don't believe in Hell, but I'm pretty sure that if Hell existed, it would be built specifically for people like Donald J. Trump.

And don't get me started on John Trump.

(I guess I didn't let that one stand on its own. Ah well.)

Oh yeah, I almost forgot. This was Trump vs. Cuban. Don't worry, there aren't a lot of excerpts from Mark Cuban's interview.

There are two things happening here. Remember those insiders I mentioned earlier? They all agree that almost all of Trump's bullshit is performative. Behind the scenes he's polite, and he always apologizes for giving someone a hard time publicly. So if he's on TV calling you names, he usually gives you a call after to say, hey, sorry for all of that, but you gotta play the game.

The second thing is, of course, Trump's love affair with himself. I'm sure Cuban has a high opinion of himself. He's a billionaire. It comes with the territory. But it's refreshing to see someone on his level note this about Trump.

This probably goes without saying, but this was before streaming was a thing. This idea was clearly ahead of its time. Playboy was right in this case. It was too early. There's more:

Here is the key difference between Trump and Cuban. Trump clearly cares more about money than anything else on the planet except maybe for himself. That makes him like almost every CEO on the planet. To them, the purpose of a business is to make money. And while it's true that this is *a* purpose, it's not *the* purpose.

Cuban understands the latter. He concerns himself with the consumer experience. A business exists to solve a problem for the consumer. The byproduct of that is putting money into the hands of the business. Also note that he wants to cut the theaters in on the profits. If Trump had come up with this idea, sharing the profits would be unthinkable to him. That's why, if I had the choice to work for either Trump or Cuban, I would pick Cuban. Trump's employees get yelled at. Cuban's employees make money. Just ask the people who worked for him at MicroSolutions. How many of them walked away from that business as millionaires? Almost all of them.

I'm ending on this note because Cuban is warning businesspeople not to buy their own line of bullshit. Sure, it's easy to look back on that particular bubble and say, yeah, it was destined for failure. Yet here we are again, except this time the bubble is AI. The techbros are drunk off their own shit, thinking they have the ability to print money.

Except . . . do you keep an eye on the Stock Market? I do, enough to know that facts are meaningless in the current market. Confidence is the only thing holding it up. What's the percentage of the market that's currently propped up by AI technologies? I've seen numbers ranging from 30-45%. Even if it's closer to the former, what happens if that bubble pops?

I think we're about to have another depression, one that will put the Great Depression to shame. I know in America we're trying to turn the clock back to when heterosexual rich white men held all the power, not just most of it, but can we not rewind to the 1930s, please?

I'm at a loss as to why we don't do what we usually do: wait for someone else to figure out the AI thing, then kill them and steal it and claim it as our own. We'd save a lot more money that way. Although to be fair, we don't have a lot of weapons right now due to our quixotic Iran jerkoff fantasies*, so if China beats us to the punch, we probably wouldn't be able to take them in a fight.

All right, that's all for now. The Playboy series will continue. I already have a new batch of shit, including a Dustin Hoffman fart joke told by John Malkovich, but we'll get to that at some point in the future. I'll try to make tomorrow night's GF shorter.

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*I think we went into Venezuela first because Trump's administration knew, 100%, that we'd be in Iran for months, if not years. The oil in Venezuela is supposed to tide us over until we conquer the Strait of Hormuz. And by "us" I mean US oil companies.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #941: THE DUKE OF MAMMON

 

Tomorrow is Weasel Stomping Day, so this is my last chance to shit-talk Donald Trump as a presidential candidate, at least until he returns in four years to make our lives a living hell again. If you are still somehow on the fence about this guy, it is my intention tonight to try to get you to vote for someone else. Anyone else. Is Ross Perot running again? Vote for him.*

Back when I was in college JFK, Jr., created a magazine called George, named after the first president of our nation (as opposed to the King we fought a revolution against?). His intention was to explore where politics and pop culture meet. It was an interesting idea at the time, so I subscribed. It turned out to be a very uninteresting magazine, though, so I let the subscription lapse after a year. I think it would have been a lot more interesting today, in a world where politics and pop culture are inextricably linked to one another.

As you may know I've been cleaning out my house since my grandma's death, expecting to be kicked out at any moment by the bank who now owns it. So I've been exploring a lot, and I found my old issues of George. (Not, sadly, the one the MAGA douchebags point to as evidence that JFK, Jr., was supposed to come back and be Trump's running mate. I think that one, worth thousands (as opposed to this one, worth hundreds), was a couple of months before my subscription started.) One of them stood out from the rest of them: the issue pictured above.

(Please note, in the bottom left-hand corner, these words: THE TRUMPSTER. I'm pretty sure it was the editor who came up with that idiotic nonsense. If you're too young, there was an inexplicable time in our history when adding -ster to anything was cool. It was not actually cool. It was incredibly stupid at the time, so I'm going to take to calling him the Trumpster until he dies.)

As we were living under the threat of another Trumpster Administration at the time (and still are, at least until tomorrow) I thought it would be an important article to read. It was most illuminating. I'm not going to say much myself in this, just some commentary here and there. These are pictures I took of the article at various times. There's also a bonus section at the bottom for the unfortunately named "First Babes."

Let's start off with why I've called this column such:

This portrait of the Trumpster hangs in Mar-a-Lago, a chintzy Florida property he bought up way-back-when and covered with the cheap gilt shit he puts on everything. He bragged about putting a million down to buy it, but we know what his brags are really about. If you don't, you will shortly. But just for a second, let's pretend that the Trumpster (which nearly rhymes with "Dumpster," by the way, very apropos considering his recent jaunt in a garbage truck) was a normal person. Like a dude who lived down the street from you. Could you imagine going into such a neighbor's house and being confronted with this gaudy painting of himself? Could you take him seriously? I certainly couldn't. But the Trumpster was Not Serious when all this started. More on that in a moment.

This article was published in 2000, back when he was running for president the second time. I don't have much info about that first time (you'll see that little bit of info in a moment), but this time a reporter was smart enough to ask him why he was running.

The Trumpster, not being all that bright, told him the truth. (Or, as Gore Vidal would say, he "gave away the game.")

Wait, he was running for president as a PROMOTIONAL TOOL?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?! So then . . . what about that first time he ran?

OK, let's stop for a moment. He ran for president the first time to bring visibility to his book? HE RAN FOR PRESIDENT AS A BOOK PROMOTION?!?!?!?!?! That son of a--wait a minute. That sounds kind of familiar. OK, yeah, I ran for president as a book promotion once. I, uh, don't have a lot of shade to throw on that one, I guess.

The first argument against this is, the Trumpster already has a lot of money. Why would he need to get more? Boy, do I have news for you about our corporate overlords! But here's a few thoughts on the Trumpster's personal worth as "presidential material":

That's not bad. Not bad at all. That's definitely worth telling a few lies over.

The Trumpster ran again between then and 2016, much with the same result: bowing out of the race with the ability to rent condos worth millions instead of hundreds of thousands. But 2016 changed everything. Do you remember how he conducted himself back then? There was no way that dude was serious. Even in 2000 everyone knew he was not a serious contender.

What went wrong in 2016? To ensure that he was not going to get elected, he said just about anything and everything he could imagine that would turn people off. My theory is, he didn't count on how many pieces of shit we have in this country who want a racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic (except Russia and Germany (specifically Nazi Germany)) garbage man as their Commander-in-Chief. He was not pleased when he won the White House. Perhaps these passages from George are the explanation as to why. And if you doubt his rage upon becoming the most powerful man in the world, here are a couple of quotes. The first is from author Mary Jordan, Melania Trumpster's biographer.

“The election night win came as a surprise even to Trump, according to many on his campaign, and little preparation had been done for what came next. Trump had even talked about going to one of his golf courses in Scotland immediately after the election so he didn’t have to watch Hillary Clinton bask in her success. One campaign aide recalled that candidate Trump had ‘told the pilot [of his private jet], ‘Fuel up the plane.’ “

Or how about this from author Michael Wolff? ("Their" being the Trumpster campaign.)

Their unexpected adventure would soon be over. Not only would Trump not be president, almost everyone in the campaign agreed, he should probably not be. Conveniently, the former conviction meant nobody had to deal with the latter issue.

As the campaign came to an end, Trump himself was sanguine. His ultimate goal, after all, had never been to win. “I can be the most famous man in the world,” he had told his aide Sam Nunberg at the outset of the race. His longtime friend Roger Ailes, the former head of Fox News, liked to say that if you want a career in television, first run for president. Now Trump, encouraged by Ailes, was floating rumors about a Trump network. It was a great future. He would come out of this campaign, Trump assured Ailes, with a far more powerful brand and untold opportunities.

“This is bigger than I ever dreamed of,” he told Ailes a week before the election. “I don’t think about losing, because it isn’t losing. We’ve totally won.”

That's pretty tasty, but here's the best part of Wolff's assessment:

Shortly after 8 p.m. on Election Night, when the unexpected trend — Trump might actually win — seemed confirmed, Don Jr. told a friend that his father, or DJT, as he calls him, looked as if he had seen a ghost. Melania was in tears — and not of joy.

There was, in the space of little more than an hour, in Steve Bannon’s not unamused observation, a befuddled Trump morphing into a disbelieving Trump and then into a horrified Trump. But still to come was the final transformation: Suddenly, Donald Trump became a man who believed that he deserved to be, and was wholly capable of being, the president of the United States.

Let's pause a minute to contemplate the fact that Don Jr. calls his dad DJT. Seriously. DJT? Your dad? It makes me wonder what Donald called Fred Christ the First. A few funny things occur to me, but in all reality Fred strikes me as the kind of dad who would accept nothing less than "sir" from any of his children.

The whole article is a great read. It's part of Wolff's bigger book on the topic. But tomorrow's Weasel Stomping Day. Treat yourself.

So the Trumpster accidentally became President. I'm pretty sure it was at that point when the privilege we witnessed during Fred C. Trump III's discussion of his uncle manifested. Suddenly the Trumpster was not just the US President; God had meant to put him there. He was now on a mission from God. And that's what all this nonsense he's spewing now in 2024 is about. He recognizes that garbage talk got him into the White House, and now he's hoping it will do the same again.

(It just now occurs to me that I said I wasn't going to say much, that I would only add commentary here and there. Whoops!)

But George isn't done. While the author of the article points out all these insanities in the Trumpster's character, he also makes it clear that he admires said Trumpster for it. It is his opinion that the Trumpster is America. The 2016 election results seem to bear that out.

Lest ye forget, the Trumpster is never as rich as he says he is. Even his 2016 campaign made comments about how cheap he was being with his own money. Why should Americans invest in the Trumpster (who is really America)?

Thankfully I'm not the only one out there telling you how much of a shit person the Trumpster is. Note to self: Find and read The Lost Tycoon.

Because Blogger is being a piece of shit right now and won't let me continue with the next picture without fucking the rest of my formatting, I need to put this line here. Continue please.

How can anyone vote for this dipshit with a straight face? He has flat-out told everyone he's a conman. But the Trumpster has learned Samuel Johnson's lesson well: "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel." At the end of the day, there is no real justification for voting for this grifter. Are you really that far gone as a human being that you have to vote for a scarecrow stuffed with empty promises?

I'll let the article have the last thought on this. It's not meant to be a condemnation, but it can very well be taken as one.

ADDENDUM:

There's a sidebar to this article that's actually a two page spread called the "First Babes." It's a list of women the Trumpster has been with, along with weirdly distorted pictures of them. I'm not sure what the point of that was. I mean, I can guess. Let's impress everyone with all the hot chicks the Donald has fucked! But if so, why the distorted pictures? What this sidebar does instead, I think, is denigrate those women. Editorial sure didn't give much of a fuck about them beyond objectifying them. Here's a sampling with Melania saved for last.

A noble sentiment, to be sure, but, ah . . . well.

Does it surprise me that the Trumpster doesn't know anything about Black culture? Do I need to go over how ignorant he is of history again? But as far as Ivana goes, I couldn't check up on her. For obvious reasons. (There seems to be some evidence that Trump can't recognize his wives in pictures. To borrow a joke from Seth Meyers, is it possible that he's not cheating? That he thinks he's just sleeping with his wife when he's not?)

I find this one fairly disturbing, but not for the reasons you think. A lot of people give Melania a pass because of who she's married to. I don't . . . because of who she's married to. I have another picture regarding that, but I want to mention the part about her having broken up with the Trumpster between the interview for the article and the publication of the article. All the same, take a look at that magazine cover from the top again. Notice someone else in that picture? Here's the full image found inside the issue.

Isn't that a little weird? Creepy, even? That Melania had broken up with the Trumpster, and yet here is George still using that image as if to prove, hell yeah, hot chicks dig this guy! If I were Melania, I would have sued the magazine over this. But I don't feel too bad for her. You shouldn't, either. After all, who is she married to right now? Also, she knew exactly what she was getting into:

If you still think voting for this cumstain is going to make America great (again?) or is going to take back America (from whom?), you're out of your mind. As previously discussed in GF, America hasn't been great since 1950. Who didn't have many rights back then? Oh yes. Now it becomes clear. It's not a docile zoo elephant. It's one of Hannibal's war elephants. If you wanted to travel back to that shameful era of American history, why didn't you just build a time machine? It would be a lot easier . . .

*Ross Perot is dead?! Why didn't anyone tell me this?! Anyway, you should still vote for him.