By Richard John Stapleton
Donald J. Trump, a USian son of a German-descended father and a Scottish-descended mother, after graduating from college with suspicious test scores and grades is given an inheritance of over four hundred million dollars and an organization known as The Trump Organization to play with in real estate schemes of all sorts, including gambling casinos.
Don Trump later becomes the star of a nationally-televised reality show called The Apprentice in which he is scripted as a billionaire real estate tycoon who spends his time hiring and firing ambitious people who want to work for his organization. The show consists of banal sit-com-like conversations in episodes in which underlings discuss ideas with the boss designed to take in more money for the boss, who owns the place, that often culminate with Trump resolutely and self-righteously spewing “You’re fired!â€â€” thereby producing entertaining drama for millions of hypnotized television viewers.
Over the years, Don Trump loses millions of dollars of his inheritance in the real world in fraudulent and legal ventures, resulting in several bankruptcies, but supposedly many triumphs, according to Don, that propel him into billionaire status in the real world. Almost no one outside his inner circle knows for sure whether he ever had one billion dollars in net worth since financial statements compiled by certified public accountants were not made public by his ethically-challenged mafia-like Trump Organization.
An aging Trump, who admired Adolph Hitler and read his writings, having separated from the reality show TV business, got bored with hiring, firing, and bossing real lackeys and employees in his Trump Organization, so he decided to run for President of the United States as a Republican.
Lo and behold, he wins the Republican primary election of 2016 against seasoned Republican politicians such as Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush. In televised debates he cows down antagonists using barely literate crime boss words, sentences, and concepts, having learned his lines and nuances well through experience during his Trump Organization and Apprentice reality show days. No matter what his opponents in debates argued, Trump could concoct a short terse inane rebuttal that would appeal to viewers of the Republican debates, just as they appealed to viewers of his Apprentice reality show, proving his political viewers, like his reality show viewers, would believe and lap up almost anything he said because of the way he said it.
After losing the general presidential election to Hillary Clinton in 2016, he won the USian Electoral College vote, and the USian presidency, because of the way elections in the US are structured by the US Constitution, giving voters in Republican Red states, where Trump’s reality show viewers were in a majority, more power per vote than the per-vote power of voters in Democratic Blue states.
Thus, at age 70 Trump becomes the USian president, with no political experience, because of his early “success†playing a billionaire in a television reality show, since millions of Republican voters in Red states had been hypnotized by Trump watching his nationally-televised Apprentice reality show, who admired his crime boss lingo and schtick, and who therefore voted for him as USian president. Â
The aging Trump then begins his career as president of the United States using the same crime boss personality, group imago, and script he used in his reality show, and in real life bossing The Trump Organization, now seeing all USians and Earthian humans as he saw his millions of reality show viewers and Trump Organization lackeys and employees.
He came across on national and international political stages much as he did when he was a real estate con artist and billionaire tycoon on TV, as a flashy tough blunt brave boss, creating and projecting an aura of personal power and superiority.
He expected his US government subordinates to react to him as his Trump Organization lackeys and his scripted reality show lackeys had. Most of his government hires flexed and adapted to his personality, group imago (the way saw the world), and script messages; but some did not. After hiring the Chairman and CEO of Exxon-Mobil as Secretary of State, the now-Secretary of State blurted out in public, “He’s a f—— moron.†Trump as usual fired him. How many other Trump hires had enough net worth to risk telling the truth about their boss?
Since USian presidents have a lot of power appointing a lot people to do government jobs and a lot of people want government jobs, Trump over four years in his first and so-far only term found a lot of people willing and able to adapt and flex to his personality, group imago, and script, as his lackeys did in his Trump Organization and in his reality show, including three judges for the USian Supreme Court, that he stacked to a 6-3 Republican advantage, proving truth is almost as scarce in political and legal milieus as it is in TV reality shows.
Trump becomes one of the worst presidents of USian history, with no documented betterments for citizens except large tax cuts for the elite rich and significantly increased spending for the USian military, thereby significantly increasing the ominous USian budget deficit and debt, producing an administration that was mostly sound and fury with no systemic or existential accomplishments, featuring Trump as the star of the show every day.
Running for a second term, he loses the general election of 2020 to the aging addled good ole boy Democrat Joe Biden, but refuses to admit he lost and accuses enemies of stealing the election, while manipulating everything he can after the election to overturn the election results, including inciting an insurrection against the USian government January 6, 2021 to prevent the USian Congress from approving the results of the presidential election. After finally being forced to vacate the USian White House he took with him US documents containing information classified and marked top-secret that he showed to cronies at his Mar a Largo “fort,†a crime for which he is indicted by the US Justice Department in 2023.
After losing the 2020 election and refusing to peacefully leave office he creates and manipulates several action scene episodes, recorded and videotaped in some instances, featuring him threatening and trying to intimidate elected government officials into changing vote counts so he could stay in office, coming on strong in one-on-one mano-to-mano encounters applying a heavy dose of his time-tested crime boss demeanor and schtick. He is investigated for having committed USian crimes while acting out these machinations.
He is found liable by a jury for battery in a civil case in which he paid E Jean Carroll $5 million in damages, $2 million for sexual abuse and $3 million for defamation.
His Trump Organization is convicted of tax evasion.
Showing no signs of remorse for what he has done, the now 77-year-old Trump entertains, enchants, titillates, and inflames his still-hypnotized reality show audience in person at political rallies around the country, running for USian president again in 2024, still conning supporters out of millions of dollars in political donations, who say they will vote for him again. He is has taken in hundreds of millions of dollars from his followers and donors from various sources — trinkets, red baseball caps, t-shirts, baseball cards with his picture on them, donations, speeches, etc. —  since leaving the White House.
Despite his abysmal record as a politician, he is the front runner among Republican prospects for president in 2024. He still struts and swaggers around free at rallies wearing a red baseball cap with the letters MAGA printed across the front, Make America Great Again, wearing a white shirt, red tie, and a blue suit, coming across psychologically on stage like a P.T. Barnum and Bailey circus performer in the greatest show on Earth.
In reality he’s an inverse Robin Hood wearing wolf’s clothing, stealing from the poor and giving to the rich, saying little if anything about how he, specifically, would make America great again if he became president again, more than likely not having a clue about what he would do specifically to make this happen. At least the first time around in 2016 he told his hypnotized followers he would build a wall across the southern border of the US to keep out immigrants to make America great again. He did build a bit of this wall when in office, but the immigration problem is as bad or worse now as it was in 2016, and he seems to have forgotten about his great wall.
If he gets elected again there is a significant probability he could start choosing the same sorts of paths taken by fascist dictators such as Hitler and Stalin, ordering mob violence, this time to steal resources by force from Earthian humans defined as enemies, to make America great again, in wars against other countries or in pogroms against demographic groups inside the US, possibly leading to genocidal or democidal crimes against humanity.
His credulous hypnotized adoring loyal ecstatic fans now enjoy his real reality show in rallies, videos, and social and mainstream media. Very likely no one outside his still-operating secret Trump Organization, and possibly a few inside lawyers and bankers, knows how wealthy Trump is now, since most likely no one in published media has yet seen a balance sheet audited by certified public accountants using generally-accepted accounting principles showing his true wealth position. His rhetoric all along about being a billionaire, like his make America great again rhetoric, may have been a hoax.
On the other hand, while he he was probably the worst USian president in history, most likely he has taken in more money from followers and supporters as a loser former president than any other former president.
The 80-year-old Democrat President Joe Biden is becoming increasingly senile and no announced Democratic candidate for president seems likely to beat Biden in the 2024 Democratic primary. While they have not announced their intentions to run in the 2024 Democratic primary, Governor Gavin Newsom of California and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts are seasoned Democratic presidential prospects with good records. If only the USian political system would allow relatively equitable presidential candidates to win….
Trump could get elected USian president again in 2024.
His horror movie-like life script now contains language about his cultish followers using mob violence to rescue him if he is convicted of committing federal crimes such as his insurrection January 6, 2021 in the USian capitol building. He has recently told his hypnotized fascist cult members he wants to change the laws of the US after he is reelected in 2024 so he can deport from the US all citizens who were born here who believe in communism; and it’s a good bet he would also like to deport, fire, or disappear anyone unwilling or unable to adapt and flex to his authoritarian personality and his fascist group imago and life script. His role model, Adolph Hitler, would be proud.
There are two basic types of management systems for organizations, fascist and democratic. Fascist organizations are run top-down by a strong man and his cronies at the top. Democratic organizations are run bottom-up by a majority at the bottom.
There are three basic types of economic systems: capitalism, socialism, and communism. Capitalism is where everything is owned and run by individuals and corporations, for the good of owners. Socialism is where most everything is owned by individuals and corporations but run by governments for the good of the people. Communism is where everything is owned by the people and run for the people.
These possibilities pose six general combinations of mixed systems that now exist in various degrees in various countries—fascist capitalism, fascist socialism, fascist communism, democratic capitalism, democratic socialism, and democratic communism, none of which could be proved best in all circumstances for all Earthian humans; but, according to Trump, in his finite wisdom, only fascistic capitalism should be allowable in the US, and maybe anywhere aboard Spaceship Earth.
Regardless of the consequences for all Earthians, antihero Don Trump is determined to show all Earthian humans he can get away with doing whatever he wants, for life, center stage, in the Earthian human psychodrama.
You like freedom? If so, you don’t want to vote for Trump for president of the US in 2024.
BACKGROUND SOURCES:
2023
“Donald Trump Speaks at Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference,†Faith and Freedom Conference, 2023, Washington, D.C., a C-Span Video, https://www.c-span.org/video/?528898-1/donald-trump-speaks-faith-freedom-coalition-conference
Former President Donald Trump, a 2024 Republican presidential candidate, delivered the keynote address at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s 2023 policy conference in Washington, D.C. He focused most of his remarks on his time as president, touting anti-abortion policies his administration backed and his conservative appointments to the Supreme Court and other lower courts. He also talked about his recent federal indictment, saying his popularity among supporters had only grown since his arraignment.
July 6, 2023
“Donald Trump Wants to Deport US Marxists, ‘That Grew Up Here,’†by Paul Street, COUNTERPUNCH, https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/07/06/donald-trump-wants-to-deport-us-marxists-that-grew-up-here/?fbclid=IwAR2MN6VEk1i9XEnCVwnSfwq43wThKd4Nr9t-K54_WWAJed9A5LDgpV23zwA.
“Probably the stupidest and creepiest thing I’ve run across in all my years as a radical US American socialist and communist is the Trumpenleft. By the Trumpenleft I mean among other things all the very disproportionately white and male left-identified so-called socialists who accused me and other anti-fascist radicals of supposed hysterical Trump Derangement Syndrome and who mocked and otherwise attacked us for making the elementary observation that Donald Trump is a fascist – and who idiotically accused us of being in cahoots with the dismal, dollar-drenched Democrats for having the basic historical and social- and political-scientific integrity to identify and call out Trump and Trumpism for what they are: fascist.
“I’ve dedicated three or four book chapters and numerous essays and interviews to showing exactly how and why Trump, Trumpism, the Trump base, the Trump presidency, and now the Trump ex-presidency are fascist. Not “populist.†Not merely “conservative.†Not simply “extremist.†Nationalist but not just nationalist. Nativist but not merely nativist. Racist but not merely racist. Sexist but not only sexist. Authoritarian but not just authoritarian. No, all of that and more. Fascist, cultist, and eliminationist, potentially genocidal if you ask me, determined to overthrow what’s left of bourgeois democracy and constitutional rule of law and to substitute for the rule of law the rule of raw power and men in the ironic name of law and “order.”
— Paul Street
September 27, 2022
“Dr Bandy Lee warned five years ago that Trump was dangerous. She’s more worried now.” — THE INDEPENDENT
“Psychiatrist Bandy Lee works with gang leaders and maximum security offenders. When Donald Trump ran for office, she noticed frightening similarities and warned the world. Much of her predictions have come – or are coming – true. Now, she’s worried about America’s ‘demise’,†by Shelia Flynn, THE INDEPENDENT,
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/bandy-lee-trump-doctor-election-b2176369.html
1991
Jacobs, A. (1991). Aspects of Survival: Triumph over Death and Onliness. Transactional Analysis Journal. 21(1). 4-11.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1177/036215379102100102
“This article describes the universal (beyond nation, philosophy of life, and leader) reasons for the German Holocaust, specifically, the relationship between the atrocious Ideological/Enslaving Master and his or her Followers. Two script payoffs for this kind of Master are described: a moment of triumph over death and a moment of onliness, or ultimate aloneness, achieved through the deaths of many other people. The exaggeration and joining of these two human needs produce the psychological basis for genocide and holocaust.” — Abstract — Transactional Analysis Journal
I (RJS) got to know Alan “Jake” Jacobs at the Southeast Institute at Chapel Hill, North Carolina in 1975-1978 where he and I took some training and participated as presenters learning and applying the new science of transactional analysis, recently invented by Eric Berne, MD. We were transactional analysis colleagues for many years. Jake was haunted by stories about his recent family members who had perished in Nazi gas chambers in Germany and this motivated him to do some rigorous research into the nature and causes of genocide. He took trips to Germany to personally inspect and photograph the Nazi death camps. His research produced the above-cited Source article that he published in the Transactional Analysis Journal, for which he received an Eric Berne Memorial Scientific Award.
According to his research, documented in “Aspects of Survival,” 150,000,000 Earthian humans were killed in democidal and genocidal actions by governments around Spaceship Earth during the 20th Century, and the question still is, can it be stopped? One of Jake’s conclusions in his “Aspects of Survival†article is that fascist dictators are pursuing what he calls onliness when they commit their democidal and genocidal crimes against humanity.
Jake died at age 87, July 30, 2022. Here is a video of his celebration of life service giving details of his achievements and his well lived life.
Hopefully citing Alan Jacobs’s “Aspects of Survival: Triumph over Death and Onliness” as a Source for this article will help memorialize his outstanding contributions to the I’m OK—You’re OK movement of the 20th Century.
About the author of this article
Richard John Stapleton, PhD, CTA would spin the spinner of his Classroom De-GAMERâ„¢ in his classes to randomly select a student at the beginning of each class session to lead a discussion of the case assigned for the day, a case taken from a planned or operating business prepared by case writers at Georgia Southern, Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Alabama.
This process insured that everyone would be relatively GAME-free transacting in class discussions. They all agreed to a learning contract at the outset of the course that they would read assigned cases and would be graded on the quantity and quality of ideas sold in the class market. Anyone caught obviously unprepared by the spinning De-GAMER would lose a whole letter grade from the course grade. No one could feel or think that s/he was being persecuted or rescued if selected to start the class discussion of the day by the Classroom De-GAMERâ„¢. The psychological GAME roles of Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim were largely banished from the course learning process.
Be it noted that Stapleton sat in the same circle in the same kind of chair as students, and the De-GAMING rules also applied to him. If the Classroom De-GAMERâ„¢ landed on him he had to lay out the case just like any other student and discuss what was the problem, what were the alternatives, and what he recommended.
Grades were based eighty percent on class participation in dialectical discussions about what to do about problems and opportunities found in cases; the rest of the final grade was based on two case write-ups. One write-up was about what the student observed, researched, analyzed, and wrote about an existing business in the local environment or a business plan the student created. The other write-up was an analysis of a case researched and written by professors about a business assigned as the final exam. Cases used in his courses contained processes, problems, opportunities, and data occurring in all functional areas of business such as entrepreneurship, finance, marketing, operations management, control, management information systems, and business policy and strategy.
Stapleton has published refereed journal articles and books explaining how his democratic GAME-free Adult-Adult I’m OK—You’re OK case method system works, by banishing Persecutors, Rescuers, and Victims playing psychological GAMES from the teaching and learning process, first documented in an article titled “The Classroom De-GAMER†he published in 1978 in the Transactional Analysis Journal. He has published seven books and over one hundred articles in various media containing cases, research data, and essays on teaching and learning, management systems, and business policies and practices.
Stapleton learned and trained using transactional analysis with Martin Groder, MD; Graham Barnes, PhD; Vann Joines, PhD; and many others at the Southeast Institute at Chapel Hill, North Carolina (1975-1978).
He was a Harvard Case Method teacher who never went to Harvard, having learned how the case method works teaching with Bernard Bienvenu, DBA and Rexford Hauser, DBA (Harvard Business School doctorates) at the University of Louisiana– Lafayette in 1969-70.
He has a BS in economics (1962), an MBA in organizational behavior (1966), and a PhD in management science (1969) from Texas Tech University, and an organizational and educational certification in transactional analysis (CTA) from the International Transactional Analysis Association (1978).
He taught his own case method track at the undergraduate level in the management department in the business school at Georgia Southern University offering four or five different elective case method courses each academic year (1970-2005), in which he led, coordinated, and graded about twenty-five or so students each year who took all or most of those case method courses in their junior and senior years, of about two hundred students who signed up for all his courses each year. He used a democratic circle or amphitheater classroom layout in all his classes. He also taught most semesters two sections of a capstone integrative business policy course he added to the business school curriculum in 1970 that was required for all undergraduate business majors that could be elected by any student in any major. He was the only professor in the business school to use the case method in any course.
His students agreed to a course learning contract that stipulated they would read the facts of the case before class and would lose a whole letter grade from the course final grade if the De-GAMER randomly caught them obviously not having read the case before class, if they had not slipped a note under his office door before class telling him they had not read the case, which they could do twice during the course without penalty.
About ten percent of his students made A’s and about five percent made D’s. Most made C’s, which is about right, since C = Average. There were few F’s in his courses. The main criterion for course grades was the quantity and quality of ideas sold by students in case method discussions. He used peer ratings to give students feedback showing what their fellow students thought about the quantity and quality of their ideas sold in class, having made it clear the final decision about final grades was his. He did not believe in Lake Wobegon grading.
No student was ever forced to take one of his courses to graduate, and the most hardened GAME-players in the school did not sign up for his courses after he issued his Edict of 1972 in which he clearly spelled out in his syllabi the penalty for getting caught unprepared. His Classroom De-GAMERâ„¢ was roundly discussed by students in bull sessions across campus every year and was labeled various things, such as The Wheel of Fate and The Death Wheel. Most students near the end of his career simply called it The Spinner.
He appreciated Georgia Southern honoring his academic freedom by allowing him control of his teaching methods, classroom layouts, grading procedures, and course books, cases, and materials, some of which he researched, wrote, and published. He was promoted to full professor at age thirty-six.
He solicited anonymous longitudinal research data using questionnaires in 1992 showing his case method students during 1972-1982 reported higher yearly incomes in 1992 than students electing the same courses in 1972-1982 taught by professors using the authoritarian lecture method and the militaristic row and column classroom layout, who graded students based on memorizing or calculating “right answers†for tests, indicating learners learning in Adult—Adult I’m OK—You’re OK GAME-free democratic learning processes graded subjectively became more successful in the real world of business than learners lectured to and graded using so-called objective multiple-choice tests.
Only former students who had worked in the real world ten or more years after graduating from the Georgia Southern business school were included in the study. The data are shown, analyzed, and discussed in full in “Evidence the Case Method Works†in his book Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata, and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds, 2008, pg. 475). The data were also used in several refereed articles.
The ancient Greeks used a similar random-selection democratic process in the Third Century BCE to select leaders of political discussions, learning, and policy formulation in their halls of government. Such a process is called sortition.
For more information on related classroom management ethical issues see Stapleton, R.J. and Murkison, G. (2001), “Optimizing the fairness of student evaluations: A study of correlations between instructor excellence, study production, learning production, and expected grades,†in the Journal of Management Education, 25(3), 269-292.
Stapleton had one of the lowest student grade point averages among professors in the business school and was one of the lowest-ranked professors as an instructor on computerized campus-wide student evaluations that weighted only instructor excellence scores up to 2000; but he was one of the highest-ranked professors in a computerized student evaluation system he designed that generated data also showing and weighting study production, learning production, and expected grades scores for each professor, published in “Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations.â€
To read the Optimizing Fairness article in full, go to https://studysites.sagepub.com/holt/articles/Stapleton.pdf . After this research was published, Georgia Southern in 2001 added study production, learning production, and expected grades questions to the student evaluation form used campus-wide.
“Optimizing the Fairness of Student Evaluations†has by now (July 10, 2023) been cited as a reference in 88 refereed journal articles concerned about the ethics of student evaluations in several academic disciplines, including eleven new citations since April 2021.
As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein propositioned in his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “The case is all there is.â€
If so, everything else said about Earthian human states of affairs is a rendition of what was or might be.
Stapleton’s latest book is As the Rooster Crows Earthian OKness Increases.
For more on Stapleton’s cultural, educational, and professional experiences see “RJS Academic Vita,†at https://blog.effectivelearning.net/rjs-academic-vita/.
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