The Logic of Truthful Hyperbole

"The final key to the way I promote is bravado.  I play to people's fantasies.  People do not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do.  That's why a little hyperbole never hurts.  People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular.  I call it truthful hyperbole." - Donald Trump, The Art of the Deal

Self-aggrandizement is typical of Trump whenever he speaks in public.  Still, these words reveal something peculiar about his character.  Outside of the liberal meandering, on and on about his supposed mental sickness, or the notion that something is "seriously off", graver explanations exist.  Trump's dull and mind-numbing desires are consumed by an insatiable lust for business careerism.

Donald Trump sees business as a field in which men prove their merit by scoring endless points in a series of triumphant deals.  Seen this way, his apocalyptic sense of nuclear brinkmanship, while incredibly reckless, is a means to force Kim Jong-Un into a corner with China and the United States over the negotiation of nuclear weaponry - this is despite North Korea's stated aims that its nuclear program is merely a defensive, a deterrent against future attacks.  Trump plays the card of brinkmanship, an extreme form of negotiation that borders on the brink of nuclear war.  This is not a new phenomenon.  Rather, brinkmanship is a relic of Cold War Era hawks, such as John Foster Dulles, who saw it as "the ability to get to the verge without getting into the war is the necessary art."  Both former businessmen, Dulles and Trump saw it their duty to enter politics and use deception as their art.

Business and politics are battlefields, transactions  that prove the ability of higher deal-wielding men.  From this perspective, Donald Trump's addiction to hyperbole is logical despite its deranged and childish motives.  Still, there always losers on the battlefield.  The CEOs of Trump's short-lived manufacturing council, along with a slew of Silicon Valley executives,  are increasingly vocal in their opposition to Trump's courting of white supremacy and his attacks against immigrant workers.  Not that they are genuinely concerned about oppression, the greater bourgeoisie sees a threat that is looming on their borders: the damaging invasion of economic and racial nationalism.

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