New Anti-Trump Biography Exposes Left’s Hatred

This Trump-hating book carries everything detestable from the Left between its covers: class-warfare, political correctness, race baiting, double standards, arrogant self-righteousness, condescending pseudo-elitism, false pseudo-intellectualism, socialist amateur economic innuendo, and of course the Left’s signature, bottomless capacity for vile demonization.

“Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success” by Michael D’Antonio, is a 400-page rehash of anti-Trump gossip and accusations of the last 30-something years, interspaced with a historical and sociological narrative skewed so far to the left that it would have made Howard Zinn blush.

There are many serious questions about Trump that are worth asking: Does he have a foreign policy philosophy? Does he believe in detente with Iran, Russia, Cuba or “Peace Through Strength”? Will he be willing to do the right thing even if it is unpopular with the chattering class? Will he be willing to abolish the IRS and institute the Forbes Flat Tax plan he endorsed in 2005?

Instead, with this book, we get questions like: Is he Racist? Is he a crook? Is he a Robber Baron?

First of all, much of the book isn’t new. The sections dealing with Trump’s divorce drag on at great length and incorporate every rumor that could be found. It out-trashes ever the infamously trashy tabloid talk shows of the early 90s which covered the divorce extensively. As for the sections dealing with Trump’s bankruptcies and other financial troubles, they don’t make sense. Overall, it is long, confusing, and very boring.

At times, the author brakes off from the story to lecture readers about racist “dog whistles.” He even complains that “welfare” is a racist “code word,” and has been since the 50s. In fact, the author dedicates an entire chapter to calling Trump a racist. For example: How does he know that Trump’s pursuit of Obama’s academic records is motivated by race? Because Trump believed that the detailed, uncoerced confessions of five black men to raping a woman in Central Park was reason enough to call for tougher crime policies. (To read more about the Central Park Jogger case, and the Left’s subversion of it for the benefit of criminals, see here.)

The author goes so far as to cast Trump’s former obsession over Obama’s birth certificate as a reflection of the Tea Party—one wonders what he thinks of the DNC’s endorsement of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, with all their rioting and cop-killing. Or his opinion of Occupy Wall Street, which the Democrats (and especially Bernie Sanders) loudly support. To take a little trip down OWS memory lane:

Americans saw a movement supported by the American Nazi Party and David Duke, decrying the “judeo-capitalist banksters who swindled the American taxpayers out of A TRILLION dollars,” and a Communist Party USA (CPUSA) willing to “play a role in offering more advanced programmatic ideas like nationalizing the banks and socialism.” They saw hordes of people behaving like low-lifes, such as a protester defecating against a police car in New York, numerous rapes, a Los Angeles OWS protester insisting that the “Zionist Jews who are running these big banks and the Federal Reserve…need to be run out of this country,” Portland protesters singing “F**K the USA,” and innumerable incidents of assaults and vandalism perpetrated in cities such as Oakland, Boston, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Seattle, Cleveland, New York and several others.

A constant refrain of the author is that Americans view the accumulation of wealth as the signature of success, and are therefore mesmerized by the super rich. The author takes the reader on a trip through history that can be summarized as follows: In the “Gilded Age” of the 19th century and early 20th century, Americans were subject to the rule of the unregulated superrich “Robber Barons” who exploited the workers until the great depression brought about the New Deal that was responsible for the post-World War II age of prosperity, which suddenly went sour in the 1970s and led to the rise of conservative political ideology that brought Ronald Reagan to the White House and created an economic environment that only benefitted the rich and made the poor poorer — a situation that is still with us today.

A few problems with this pseudo-analysis:

• As Milton Freidman explained, the so-called “Gilded Age” of the 19th century and early 20th century was the era that saw the greatest improvement in the standard of living for the ordinary man that history has ever known. The inventions of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, the development of our major cities and the establishment of our major industries, and the founding of our biggest and most respected charities, all came from this era of near-raw Capitalism.
• Then, thanks to big government (in the form of Federal Reserve failures, Tax hikes, and a trade war launched by tariffs), came the Great Depression, and the New Deal, which strangled any chance of recovery and froze economic advancement. The Depression only ended after World War II, when Congress (especially the extraordinary 80th congress of 1947-48) repealed major parts of the New Deal and cut taxes. The post-war economy boomed, and did so even more when JFK instituted one of the largest tax cuts in history.
• But in the Nixon-Ford-Carter era of the 70s, price and wage controls were reintroduced and taxes were hiked once again. Reagan reversed these policies and presided over a supply-side revolution that benefited all. As one columnist wrote: “Though Democrats preached that under Reagan, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer, in fact the plight of all income groups improved. Not only that but upward mobility, which received its last rites under Carter, made a dramatic comeback, as a Treasury Department study revealed that 86 percent of the people in the lowest 20 percent of income in 1979 graduated into higher categories during the ’80s.”

It is important to point these facts out. Without the facade of a Left-wing economic philosophical supremacy, the book falls apart.

Double standards play a prominent role in the book. At one point, after nearly 300 pages of insinuating corruption on Trump’s part, the author writes: “Shadiness is in the eyes of the beholder, and in the case of Obama’s home [purchase] there was little to see.”

Does the name Tony Rezko ring a bell? He was a Chicago slum-lord, who took advantage of the plight of the poor in order to receive tax-payer money. The slums that he built with that money were uninhabitable: “Mice scamper through the halls. Battered mailboxes hang open. Sewage backs up into kitchen sinks. In 2006, federal inspectors graded the condition of the complex an 11 on a 100-point scale — a score so bad the buildings now face demolition.”

And State Senator Barack Obama was the man steering millions of dollars toward Rezko, who was a financial backer of Obama’s. Here, in the words of National Review, is what Trump was referring to: “Obama entered into his own land deal with Rezko in the summer of 2005. Rezko bought the property adjacent to the Obama’s dream home and sold him a strip of land on which to build a fence. Obama paid a fair price, but by this point the Chicago papers had run more than 100 stories about the federal investigation into Rezko’s influence-peddling.” Nothing to see, right?

If this is really the Left’s best attempt at exposing Donald Trump, it not only fails, but it serves as a vivid reminder that the Trump movement (unlike the Obama movement) is not a cult — it is a rebellion. It is an awakening of Americans who are sick and tired of the ugly Alinskyism which books such as this exemplify. Support for Trump is the American people responding to the Left with one big “F**k You.”