Imagine how easy would be to make money through stock options if you had the power to affect any stock to go up or down. Only ethics would stand in your way and if you think ethics are for loses, nothing is stopping you from doing that.
If you want reduce your risk further, you could simply get paid by your friends from Mar-a-Lago (by purchasing expensive rooms in your hotel) by letting them know your announcement ahead of time and let them do the investment. That will also reduce connections to yourself.
1. Money
2. Adoration
3. Revenge
4. Preservation
The link that went round about the analogies between QAnon and LARP also seems relevant here. If someone lives in and believes their own hype for long enough, have they created their own little bubble of reality?
It's like watching someone try to perform a coup with a foam sword and a Nerf gun. On the other hand, a lot of bank robberies are done with fake guns; so the question is, how much does the plausibility of realness matter? All a bit Baudrillard for my taste.
Reality TV is a bit different in that it is intentionally deceptive.
The President seldom if ever performs for himself on big decisions. There are so many lobbies and power interests moving their hands here and there, according to the tides of power.
It's just convenient for the masses to believe the President to be some kind of idiot (despite the fact that he is the President and they are random people which couldn't get that position if their lives dependent on it - or even much easier ones to get).
Trump is just uncouth and uncultured, with no filter. On some ways it's a disgrace. On others, it's a breath of honesty - between JFKs mafia types (and general non-worthiness, he was just made President by his family's money), Nixon's tapes, Reagans disastrous economics and policies, Bush's cowboyism, Bill Clinton's scandals, sex obsession and Epstein field trips, and Obama's backtracking on promises, warmongering, and empty rhetoric) most politicians are equally crass if not more, they just know how to not show it or show it in moderation.
Since Trump doesn't come from a politics background, he hasn't internalized this automatic filtering, instead he has been brought up on sales and media businesses, so he automatically takes the role of salesman and entertainer.
The Trade War with China thing was a long time coming for the interests of certain parts of the American establishment, and will be continued by Trumps successors. It wasn't some idiot's one-off.
And in those cases, unless you're clearly on top of the other side, there are lots of false bragging and BS symbolic moves that don't amount to much, so expect more of the "Tik Tok" style gestures in the years to come.
My 2 euro-cents.
Trumps "trade war" was a storm in a tea cup at best. It was great cover for business as usual imho. I hope whoever takes it on actually fights it. He's sort of wrecked future efforts by alienating almost every other nation Ns doing nothing imho, so I understand by Biden doesn't want to "continue" it.
We'll see I guess.
It's all in the Starr report.
That was character evidence in a sexual harassment lawsuit from a different woman (Paula Jones) who claims that he tried to pressure her into non-consensual sex.
Clinton was sanctioned for perjury due to lying about that relationship in court, appealed the ruling, then later dropped the appeal and surrendered his law license voluntarily.
So there were elements of perjury and non-consensual sex here and your summary is incomplete.
People remember Clinton as being better than he was because they think he was railroaded over the BJ.
Whether or not HIPAA is a bad thing is very much a matter of opinion. That's the one thing that's keeping medical info from being whored out like all our other metadata these days.
The last uncontroversially good president we've had was born in the 19th century.
Far more damaging was NAFTA and letting China into the World Trade Association.
That probably meant the WTO.
Still, "letting"? As if it's the role of the 4% of the world to dictate whether the 18% of the world would enter a supposedly neutral global trade organization?