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Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. People like Trump have careers that resemble repeatedly pumped-and-dumped penny stocks. They rise and fall, rise and fall, rise and fall.

Basically what they do is build themselves up through something like a social capital pyramid scheme. This eventually collapses when there are no greater fools and when all their promises fail, but the good ones already have the next grift in progress before the first one collapses.

Trump is truly one of the greats at this. Not only does he do this very well but he builds the next grift off the previous one. He's IMHO the world's premier expert in "failing up."

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Not sure why you're downvoted because this is what Trump has done through most of his life. While POTUS, his healthcare plan was 2 weeks away, his infrastructure plan was 2 weeks away, the wall - I guess a few feet were built.

Great at marketing, terrible at execution.

I am sure down votes are because he still has supporters here on HN. But even still, there's nothing that's been said that wasn't true.

> he still has supporters here on HN.

Which I always find a bit surprising because you'd think people here would be able to see through the hucksterism.

I have a speculation that some fraction of the tech-libertarian crowd likes him precisely because he was a dumpster fire. He helps discredit the state. Keep electing candidates of that quality and seasteading schemes start looking attractive.

Trump's appeal is precisely that he's the worst candidate apart from all the others, and the opposition keeps proving his point. Plenty of people would have preferred a non-dumpster-fire conservative, but didn't get to pick. Meanwhile, Biden was nominated purely to be an easy mouthpiece for the DNC, (certainly not on his record for race and crime issues,) but had every corporate and media voice possible behind him.

This is such a lame excuse. In 2016 there were 16 other candidates in the primary, and 4 in 2020. Literally every single one of them would have been a better choice. If all else fails, you don't vote. Don't pretend like there weren't options.

Self-righteously holding your nose and voting for a dumpster fire is still voting for a dumpster fire.

I'm not so sure they all would have been better. Republican voters are wary of candidates who get into an establishment position and then abandon conservative policy--for all of Trump's personal ills, most of his voters were pretty happy with him from a policy standpoint. If you know that your party's nominee is going to be vilified by the media regardless, it does make some sense to pick one who's not going to waste time trying in vain to be likeable.

Brilliant comment, I think we are going to see this in the future too with Trump. He has gone quiet for now, but he's going to come back and make far more money than he was making prior to the presidency.

And during! Which was, of course, illegal.

Provided none of the court cases he is currently involved in send him to jail or bankrupt him?

I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for him to be imprisoned. But I do think he's going to be spending a lot of time in courtrooms for the rest of his life and that's at least some consolation.

> bankrupt him

...for the 7th time?

Trump is a true grifter prodigy, who has managed to “fail” hundreds of times – while skimming billions of dollars away from investors, business partners, lenders, suppliers, employees, and customers – often in full public view, and both skate away from criminal liability and still keep finding more marks, ultimately including something like 40% of the general public.

That may be true, but the last piece is genuinely different. If he was a fraud as a candidate, then he was a fraud in a situation where there was no legitimate substitute. Few voters have changed their minds; the aftermath of 2020 has been a digging-in of heels in a culture-war, not a "We've been had!" moment.

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