Randal Pinkett on Donald Trump

Vaհe H Apelian

I have not seen a single episode of the popular The Apprentice, the American reality television series. But like most adult Americans, if not all, I had heard of the popular television series. 

Randal Pinkett is one of The Apprentice’s winners. I came to know about him in the Netflix documentary, “Trump, An American Dream.” I have watched that documentary more than once to get to learn more about Donald Trump, although I did not vote for him. But his policies will affect me no less.  As to Randal Pinkett, it turns out that he is a distinguished person in his own right. I quote Wikipedia ;” with an education background in engineering and business, Pinkett is both a Rhodes Scholar and a Walter Byers Scholar, and hold five academic degrees. Before entering the reality show, Pickett had already established a career in business and had become the co-founder of business consulting firm BCT Partner in 2001. As winner of The Apprentice season 4 in December 2005, Pinkett undertook a yearlong apprenticeship with Trump Entertainment Resorts in Atlantic City, New Jersey.”

This is what Randal Pinkett said about Donald Trump in the Netflix documentary “Trump, an American Dream.”

“I remember the day I arrived at the Trump Tower for my first day of apprenticeship. Donald was seated at his desk in his office at Trump Tower. He had this stack of magazines and newspapers on his desk, each of them had a Post-it note, a little yellow note inside it. He would grab one the stacks and he’d put it on his desk, and he’d open to the Post-it note and he’d red and he’d close it and grab the next one. I’m thinking “what is it, current events, stocks?” So I leaned as he’s going through this ritual, and he did not stop it while we’re talking, he continued with it. I see each one of the Post-it note was placed in the magazine or newspaper to an article about Donald Trump, that Donald Trump was basically reading about himself and that someone’s job is to gather all these materials, I suspect on a daily basis for Donald to read about Donald because Donald loves Donald. 

Donald runs his company with a very tight-knit inner circle, very tight. Primarily his children. He trusts them. They trust him. There’s a level of loyalty that’s “beyond just business”, but rather blood relationship that they have and I believe he looks them his much-trusted confidantes. Ivanka seemed to be the one who was most prominent among his children. I think he trusts the most. 

Donald’s philosophy in business is very adversarial. He believes that “for me to win, somebody has to lose.” The culture of the organization very much reflects that.”

My take is that the Donald Trump and the Trump family’s wealth came about in the aftermath of the World War II, and because of the economic policies America advocated. What a restrained global power America was at that time. The world history would have been much more different had any other power held the monopoly of the nuclear power, America did during and in the immediate aftermath of the WWII.

Thirty years before, in the aftermath of WWI, the European powers that ruled the world at the time, had dealt with Germany they had vanquished very harshly imposing upon it inordinate harsh terms in the Paris Peace Conference of 1918 in Versailles, France. Yes, at that same conference that dangled in front of the Armenians the Wilsonian Armenia. Historians claim that it was those draconian punitive demands upon Germany that gave rise to the Nazis. 

But in the aftermath of WWII, America helped built Germany and Japan, it had vanquished, along with them the rest of Western world. In the words of the Winston Churchill, it was the doing of the English-speaking peoples of the United States and of England, that shaped a better future of the world on the west of the world portioned by an iron curtain. It was that American brand inclusive economy that also enriched America and enabled its post WWII inordinate economic growth, of which Trump family became a beneficiary. But it is this growth, that America built in the aftermath of WWII as its own of economic model, that Donald Trump is imposing punitive tariffs and curtailing its natural growth. 

Along with the punitive tariffs, it is personalization of power that Donald Trump is pursuing,  is very concerning. 

I am reminded of Julius Ceaser and the demise of the Republic of Rome. In transitioning the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire, Ceasar was not an emperor, nor the Senate was abolished. It was its legislative power of the senate and the institutional checks and balances of the republic that were curtailed in favor of an individual, the emperor. In the aftermath of the Ides of March, the average Roman citizens, caught in  their day to say struggles to make ends meet, may not even have remained aware of the historic change that was taking place. 

If it so happens that any of our grandchildren happen to read this blog, I hope that they would send word to me that the American Republic, for which I also stood, as one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all, still endures along the path of the Republic it was.