By Eileen Workman
I know a little something that so many do not appreciate about Donald, but those of us who worked with him in the financial services game have known for decades — long before he ever made a run at politics.
His stated motives rarely reveal his true agenda. His showmanship and charisma bedazzles the uninformed, which is exactly how he likes it. He never signed a contract or met an agreement he wouldn’t violate or wriggle out of if it suited his hidden agenda. He never met an investor whose purse he didn’t consider his own in some strategic way. And he never met a human being he wouldn’t screw in order to advance or satisfy himself.
- If you want to understand his beef with Panama, don’t look at the canal to which he now points. Look at Trump enterprises and their fraught financial and criminal relationship with Panama, and look to the Russian oligarchs who bought condos in his Panama Tower.
- If you want to understand his fixation with Gaza, don’t look at the Palestinian or Israeli people. Look at the real estate value he now perceives that Gaza holds, and that he’d like to unlock.
- If you want to understand his insane, obsessive beef with energy renewable windmills, don’t look at the wind energy aspect. Look at his beef with Scotland over his golf course and the nearby windmills that damaged his idea of its aesthetics.
- If you want to understand his irrational hatred of Obama, don’t look at the policies of the Obama administration. Look to the annual press corp dinner in 2011 where Obama poked fun at him and bruised his ego.
- If you want to understand his demonization of Democrats, look not to Democratic social policy, but to the fact they didn’t want him to run under the color of their party.
- If you want to understand his hatred of immigrants, don’t look to the actual contributions and challenges related to immigration, but his own germophobia and personal disgust for all things “dirty and brown.”
What Trump does so masterfully, as many sociopaths do, is figure out how to align, however temporarily, his own personal agenda with the drives of those he can then use to help him execute it. And the Republican Party fell right in line with that abusive strategy in 2016, and has never deviated from it.
The GOP now looks much like a battered wife who would love to quit Trump, but who also knows their financial security, personal comfort, and social status would collapse if they ran away. And they fear they won’t get much sympathy or support from the people who tried to warn them not to marry the dude — a serial liar, cheater, thief, sadist, and a generally Bad Person.
Many Republican politicians today are busily masking their own abuse from the general public. But at some point, however, as they watch their power continue to erode, their reputations get smashed, and themselves blamed for the extensive abuse they now suffer, something’s going to give.
I don’t know what it is, but every bone in my body feels an energetic convergence heading toward a massive, massive explosion coming soon.
This piece was originally posted by Eileen Workman on Feb. 8, 2025. After 16 years spent in the financial services industry as first vice president of investments at a major Wall Street firm, Workman today questions assumptions about the nature of capitalism as an author and speaker. Panama City skyline photo courtesy of Mattias Hill © copyright 2017.