The Donald Trump I Knew Vs. The Media's Chupacabra

The Donald Trump I Knew Vs. The Media's Chupacabra
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When my first iTunes podcast was underway some six years ago, I was surprised to have booked a very unusual guest -- an outspoken billionaire and real estate developer, Donald Trump.

Mr. Trump and I had crossed paths online after he read something I'd written about him for a former employer's news publication. He printed out the article, scrawled his comments across it, then had an assistant scan it and email it over to me. Very old school, and very Trump. Prior to receiving this, the last I'd ever heard of an American business mogul actually interfacing with junior reporters in such a way was Michael Eisner, former chairman and CEO of Disney. A former reporter at the Journal told me she occasionally received the personal missive from Eisner, when the coverage about Disney was or wasn't what he was expecting.

Nowadays, no one does this. The "PR team" and "legal" handles pushback and any tussling with early twentysomething reporters like I was at the time. We live in a grey concrete Clinton Foundation age, where teams of soulless, borderless legalese visionaries serve as infantry to the nameless "PR team," both of which lack even one iota of the vision that presumably generated enough profit, at some point in time, to justify such a bloated PR department's budget in the first place. But that's the modern world, and in some ways, Donald Trump is not a part of that world. He'll call you on your cell phone. He'll scrawl comments on your article and have it scanned/emailed over to you. He'll call you out on Twitter. He doesn't give a f*ck.

And that's a change in tone that, to an electorate that feels increasingly lied to, is welcomed: the outsider who doesn't give a f*ck. Now that is a man or woman who just might get the job done.

Six years ago, on my podcast listened to by approximately no one at the time, Donald Trump took time out of his afternoon to warn me about China manipulating their currency, to discuss other economic issues, the exodus of manufacturing jobs - ideas very similar to his current campaign messaging.

My limited experiences with Donald Trump simply do not reconcile with the racist, irrational, anti-woman, anti-black, anti-Semitic, blood-draining chupacabra the corporate media is conveying on a nightly basis. We have to understand here: the corporate media in the United States is mostly owned by only a few interests, and some of them are very much in the bag for Mrs. Clinton, regardless of optics at this point.

Mrs. Clinton, who said not a word during her husband's disastrous drug policy and astounding marijuana possession prosecution rates, is today a forward thinking marijuana-friendly millennial rights warrior? Not so fast.

Especially in the wake of the latest batches of Wikileaks emails, it appears factual reality that the DNC remains anti-marijuana largely to placate massive alcohol industry contributors: not the democracy I learned about in school, and not the republic some of my fellow citizens have died for over the years. The DNC and Mrs. Clinton have a lot of answering to do. The corporate media has a lot of answering to do. Yet they haven't even begun.

Mrs. Clinton, who has never known real success or failure within the private sector as many of my readers have, will look out for our economic interests? How does that reconcile with the economic interests of the backers of the Clinton Foundation? Forgive me if I'm supposed to find humor in Mrs. Clinton's humorless campaign, which tells us we are living through an era of unprecedented economic growth - we are not. And a campaign that tells us all is well at home and abroad - all is not well. It's a sham message, and an insult to the intelligence of... anyone with intelligence.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, is a person. Not one I always agree with. Not one I'm certain would be at the top of my list for stewards of the fabled nuclear "red button," if I could pick any able-bodied person on Earth.

But Donald Trump is a billionaire. He's overseen some failures, but that has been overshadowed by the many successes he has helmed... or he wouldn't be a billionaire. I like the idea of electing someone who has already proven to the world they are, mostly, very good at something. And that something happens to be generating revenues and jobs? Well, call me old fashioned, but there are parts of America that could still use these things.

And more than any specific excitement about Mr. Trump's vision for the country, I'm excited about the prospect of Mrs. Clinton and her kind - the Bushes and Clintons, the forever insiders, the DNC, the RNC, all of it - being shut out once and for all. Thank you very much, now be on your way. The dishonest, unhinged way in which the corporate media has treated Mr. Trump... the way in which they have treated Julian Assange and all but blacked out substantive coverage of his organization's latest batch of DNC emails... tells me the American public is very much justified in craving an outsider - even if he is loud, unpredictable, and a billionaire.

A perfect man he is not, but a man, rather than a finessed avatar for a corrupt system of moneyed insiders that deserves to be sent packing by voters as soon as possible.

Godspeed, Mr. Trump.

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