A Pure Bar Room Brawl
Friday, July 17th, 2026
Bill Bonner, from the W.B.Yeats ferry to Cherbourg
Poor Donald Trump.
He hailed from Queens, not from Manhattan — separated by a few miles, the East River, and a whole cosmos of snobbery. The sophisticates, the intellectuals, the chic folk who had done their time at the Ivy League and paid their annual devotions at the Met, wrote him off as a low-bred clown.
But he showed them, by God.
His father was rich. And hard as a paving-stone. And young Donald learned early the peculiar art of getting on as the son of a rich, hard man: he resolved to be richer and harder still. To that end he engaged a lawyer — Roy Cohn, celebrated far and wide for his meanness and his venom — to tutor him.
“If someone hits you, you hit back 10 times as hard.” There was his code. His formula. His catechism.
The object was to win. By what means? Whatever it takes. By piling deal upon deal. By heaping up money. By slapping his name across the face of everything that would hold paint. And when some New York scribbler pricked him early in his career, Trump fired back the immortal riposte: “I get more pussy than you do.” A real gentleman, as always.
The formula produced, let us say, mixed dividends. The fresh enterprises had a tendency to go bust. The girlfriends arrived and departed like subway trains. And he passed a great deal of time with lawyers — some laboring to keep him out of trouble, the rest laboring, for a fee, to plunge him deeper into it. Honor and Shame Archive:
Donald J. Trump has built a career that is as legally entangled as it is high-profile. From lawsuits over failed casinos and construction contracts to criminal indictments concerning national security and election interference, Trump has been involved in over 4,000 lawsuits — a number unmatched by any other U.S. president in history.
But there was one arena in which the “hit back ten times as hard” gospel paid off handsomely, and that was politics. In business, cooperation pays; a man gives to get...he goes along to get along. But politics is a pure barroom brawl. Trump lost not an instant; he laid into his rivals — “little Marco,” “Pocahontas” Warren. Lindsey Graham he pronounced “one of the dumbest human beings I have ever met.”
It was refreshing. Liberating, even. Gone was the counterfeit respectability, the mincing and the bowing. No more Mr. Nice Guy. There was something strangely heart-warming in Mr. Trump at the zenith of his tawdry power — quick with the insult, sublimely confident, careening along as free and heedless as a runaway freight train down a mountain grade. We happily enjoyed the spectacle...and looked forward to its end.
The climax of the man’s existence very likely arrived in the moments after the election of 2024. For four long years Trump thundered that American elections were a swindle, a fraud, a rigged game. Yet, when the votes were tallied on the 6th of November, 2024, not one syllable of doubt escaped him. That election, mysteriously, had been won fair and square!
Mr. Trump had been given up for dead more than once in his long career. In the early ‘90s it looked a near-certainty that he would go broke. Money Digest:
Trump Shuttle airline to the casinos he opened in an attempt to capitalize on the legalization of gambling in Atlantic City. But by the early ‘90s, he was in dire straits. Trump Shuttle disappeared in 1992, and the early years of a recession sent his other businesses in a downward spiral that left him $3.4 billion in the red.
Trump’s empire of debt was saved by Alan Greenspan, who lowered the cost of borrowing and boosted the value of leveraged real estate. But after his rout in 2020, surely — surely — this time he was finished for good. Convicted of business fraud; compelled to pay out millions to settle a rape charge; impeached; hounded by prosecutors of the enemy party. How could the man claw his way back from that?
And then — lo and behold — up he rose, an angry zombie...undead...loosed from his political grave. He bellowed. He pranced. He barked and he danced. And he won the White House all over again!
A wiser man would have sipped his triumph slowly and then withdrawn, with what grace he could muster, from the public stage. Pushing 80, astride the summit of the world, elected twice to the world’s highest office, there was nowhere left for him to travel but downhill.
Instead, he grasped at immortality. A triumphal arch. A Trump ballroom. “Trump Accounts.” The Trump Kennedy Center. A Trump “Board of Peace” to supplant the UN. His visage upon a $250 bill, upon the passports of the Republic, chiseled into the hard rock of Mt. Rushmore. But it all looked more like unrestrained vanity than celebrations of real achievement.
And while his bullying and bragging made him a champion at politics, at the actual business of policy, of diplomacy, of leadership, he was an unrelieved calamity. And he surrounded himself with the sorriest bunch of incompetent yes-men the White House has ever seen. Two heads are often better than one. But Trump had only his own weary noggin to consult — with precious little genuine knowledge or useful experience stored somewhere within it.
Everything ran on-again, off-again, hostage to the slow grind of the courts or the quick change of the president’s moods. Tariffs, immigration, war — scarcely had the citizen become accustomed to a program than it was reversed, revised, or repudiated. Instead of retiring the national debt with tariff revenue, as advertised, the feds now scramble merely to refund the money they seized in the first place, illegally.
DOGE, deficits, deportations, and the war upon Iran — all have arrived at very much the same destination: a great blast of trumpets at the launching, and then a whimpering neglect once the thing was quietly abandoned, withdrawn, or forgotten.
And now, poor Mr. Trump confronts an enemy that won’t give up, the courts that won’t let up, and elections that could set him up at odds with Congress. Even worse, he faces the one adversary against whom his creed and his training are both useless. There is no deal to be struck. There is no way to hit back even a single time, let alone tenfold. There is no insult on earth that will land the smallest blow.
Each passing day makes him less of what he once was — such as he was — and more of what we are all fated to become. His thoughts hang together less and less. His policies grow ever more incoherent. His speech slides, sentence by sentence, into blabber. Like it or not, he is mortal...and all mortal things decay. Life’s unkind.
Poor Mr. Trump. He climbed so very high. The way down must be particularly painful.
Regards,
Bill Bonner
Well Bill I think your overall summary of Trumps wild up and down life seems to be about right from what I have observed. I am about six months younger than he is so (like you) he's been a constant presence in my life. BUT....like Mackinac below, this guy has done a lot of good that no other president would even attempt to do. He is a warrior in the greatest definition of the word.
Most important for me, HE STANDS UP FOR AMERICA and the rest of the world knows it!
I do not like some of the things he says or does but he is who he is. I voted for him and I am not sorry I did.
Jim Marshall
Bill, your such a hater. TDS has completley destroyed you.