^_^
So I happen to know certain things (I've got information, man) about the "professional wrestling" industry (from which McMahon made his billion(s?)). I happen to know that Trump happens to know what is or isn't fake, hence his constant and consistent use of the term "fake news." (The whole thing where he "said" that Charlottesville neo-Nazis were "very fine people" and that either he never explicitly repudiated at least 3 or 4 different forms of "far right" racist groups or his very repudiations must have been a dog whistle, somehow, is essentially nothing more than a fabrication of a fevered leftist media. You can look this all up, google is your friend.) So Wrestlemania 4 (1988) was held at Trump Plaza, where there was this fake wrestling "tournament" (all in the span of 4 hours, mind you, and you'd think Macho Man Savage and Million Dollar Man DiBiase would be absolutely spent by the final fake-title-match...), where the Hulkster (Chump Hogan, as Jesse the Body always called him) used a chair when the referee was "knocked out" to knock DiBiasi out and win the title for his then-buddy Macho Man (the Mega Powers the duo would be called...). This, mind you, all after Hogan fake-lost the title the previous month or so to Andre the Giant through a whole shenanigan involving a fake referee who was a not-fake identical twin of the real referee (and on the pay by Million Dollar Man, to whom Andre was just going to give the title he won right away to Million Dollar Man; then-WWF "president" Jack Tunny decided the most "fair" solution to this whole dirty trick once inevitably exposed is to vacate the WWF heavyweight title and have a tournament - all in one day, all within a 4-hour span - for the belt at, you guessed it, Wrestlemania; it's all quite believable to a credulous preteen audience of that certain time period before all the fakeness was exposed for sure at last...).
So, after about the time that Hogan fake-lost the WWF heavyweight title "fairly for the first time" to Ultimate Warrior in what was otherwise an epic-ly billed WM 6 (1990) face-off between two truly iconic figures of fake wrestling - it's basically up there by that point in time with the WM 3 (1987) battle between Hulk and Andre the Giant. (I guess the idea there was for Andre to "lose" the match in a gesture of good will or whatever for the profession or the company, handing the torch much as Hulk would do himself at WM 6....) (Also, let's not forget that the venue for WM3 was the Pontiac Silverdome with a crowd of over 90,000, setting some kind of record for like an indoor venue or something. I just remember this kind of shit, somehow.... :-/ )
Then fast forward about 20 years to WM 23 (2007), and there's this "Battle of the Billionaires" between Trump and WWF/E founder Vince McMahon. As you can see above, Trump ends up shaving McMahon's head while McMahon "protests." It's all staged, all faked, of course. But by then, the staged/kayfabe thing itself became part of the whole WWE shtick in a meta/ironic/satire way; it's all more like a stage play at this juncture with real life people "acting" for a crowd the role of heel/face/turn/troll/etc.
Anyway, come 2020, another Battle of the Billionaires may take place, and it might not be so staged/fake/kayfabe this time around. "Little Mike" Bloomberg, as the mini-Billionaire said of the $50B man, has jumped all into the race. I may have to eat my words from earlier this year about Trump being a guaranteed victor in the 2020 election since at the time Mike B had said he had no plans to run. (I'll let the differently honest context-erasing fake-oppo dig up that post, where they'll also find an inductively compelling bundle of links, all taken together proving beyond a doubt the intellectual bankruptcy of the American Left. June or July of this year is that post.)
Now, one thing that a philosopher armed with (a) a general knowledge of the whole fake-wrestling/kayfabe/acting thing that Trump's been involved in (did I mention he's in the WWE Hall of Fame? Not in this post I hadn't...), and (b) with a reasonably good working knowledge of the American national political system and scene over the last quarter century or so, must do is to determine all of the relevant differences between one "kind" of (scripted, dramatized, fake/not true to fact) Battle of the Billionaires and another. To identify all relevant differences one would have to also have a good way of identifying relevant similarities, whatever those might be (beyond the similarity of there being two billionaires "cast" against one another). And integrating and differentiating so, a philosopher might also have a pretty fun time, and perhaps even more fun of a time doing so while enjoying whatever creativity boosting substances one might find.
[Gotta take another hit, hold on.]
(in the meantime, ponder also the Schiff-Lebowski connection. Evidently Schiff believes the prick is stonewalling him.)
Okay, I am thinking of how to liken and differentiate late-1980s WWF matchups from late-2010s presidential matchups. As far as billionaire net worth is concerned, Mike Bloomberg is in the top 8 or so, so think the tier of WWF wrestlers who were in the "main event" of the first (1987) Survivor Series, maybe? Well, only about 5 of those top-tier guys are really memorable; this would include (for sure) Hulk, Andre, (likely) King Kong Bundy, Bam Bam Bigelow, Ravishing Rick Rude (pretty great qua heel personality, as well as being totally ripped), (maybe) One Man Gang and Mr. Wonderful Paul Orndorff. But top 5 or 8 is only a number; what's the proper adjustments? There were maybe a few dozen "star" wrestlers at any one time (including tag teams), and perhaps up to 10 or 12 superstars (the 1987 Survivor Series tier-2 undercard included such superstars as Macho Man, Jake "The Snake" Roberts, Brutus "The Barber" Beefcake, Hacksaw Jim Duggan, and Ricky "The Dragon" Steamboat (and the Honky Tonk Man was the Intercontinental Champion at the time, and I know who he lost it to in like 12 seconds hee hee . . .). So what's the comparable population, the top few dozen billionaires with like 10 or 12 "superstars" which would include most likely Bezos, Gates, Buffett, and . . . Bloomberg? But there are like at least a few hundred billionaires in the USA alone. In the WWF you had in addition to the superstars and stars the "jobbers," the weak wrestlers with no stage personality to speak of who may not even ever appear in more than a match or two; the jobbers are basically there for the stars/superstars to showcase their skills against, although the superstar-against-jobber action was pretty limited, of course. Let's just say that the jobbers aren't part of the regular rotation, but the numbers still seem a bit off here using a raw numbers-vs-numbers comparison.
What if we try out comparing the population of the few dozen stars/superstars in WWF in 1987 with the population of US billionaires? The ratio is something like, roughly, 10 to 1? And Bloomberg is in like the top 3% of the few hundred or so U.S. billionaires? So the top 3 percent of WWF stars is basically the heavyweight champion himself. (We have to take into account the fact that the wrestling talent that year was also spread out across wrestling associations. In 1987 the key superstar in the biggest non-WWF wrestling association was (of course? the legendary?) Ric Flair. Sooner or later they'd all basically merge, or something. (I lost track not long after WM6 and then Warrior "losing" the title not long after. All I know is, 13 years later there was the Battle of the Billionaires.)
So Trump's net worth is legitimately/documentably something like $5 billion. He boasts that his brand name itself is worth (an additional) $5 billion on top. (Is that a heel move? What would the Million Dollar Man - a pretty memorable heel character, BTW - do?) So that's in, what, like, the top half of U.S. billionaires, I might plausibly guesstimate?
That's assuming that measured net worth is the criterion on which to compare the "cards" here.
As far as heel stuff goes, the American Left does indeed have its heel figure in Trump, although that's mainly their problem since they're so deranged these days. (These are the same losers who treat Ayn Rand as a heel figure - Scumbag Duggan's 'Mean Girl' is the best/worst smear effort the left could come up with in all of 6 decades after Atlas; pathetic.)
I do like how this will throw the Demorats into a bit of disarray. Doesn't the existence of billionaires basically victimize the bottom 99%, or something? Are the less deranged/corrupted among them ready to examine more carefully the whole value-added-by-billionaires thing as they possibly end up explicitly or implicitly rating Mike B higher because of the rare-skills value-added generated by someone whose net worth is about ten times higher than his opponent's. (No doubt some hack-level MSDNC types are forming a wealth/skills narrative in their heads that conveniently fits with their possible Bloomberg-over-Trump narrative, seeing as they will also regard center-left politics as the view espoused by the more highly skilled people [unaccountably disregarding the libertarians as MSDNC hacks can be expected to do, of course].)
Trump says that Mike B would be the man he'd love running against the most. Now, Mike B got into this race because he rightly suspects that the non-Bloomberg crop of Demorat candidates don't have what it takes to beat Trump. The Demorat Party has (perhaps inevitably) let itself become beholden more than ever to a far-leftist-loser constituency and the public sector unions, giving the "moderates" like Biden that much harder of a time landing the nomination unless they shift their positions leftward. And I think there may be a good chance that the gradually dwindling number of non-insane Dems and lefties end up seeing the merits in his view that he's probably the only one who could beat Trump in the general election. (If he does become the nominee, then pretty much all but the staunch anticapitalist radical-left losers will rally around the "less-worse" non-Trump candidate.) Given his wealth, can his doing an independent run for the office be ruled out? (See, Ross Perot was the first billionaire [I think] to run for president (1992), and at the time his net worth was maybe like $1.8B, which was a much bigger deal back then. He gets 19% of the vote, even after a mid-election-year flake-out....)
Anyway, what possible connection is there between Trump's asking Little Mike to bring it on, and the imagery/promotion related to a Battle of the Billionaires that must have been going through his head all this time? Given his entertainment background, his mindset is only all that much more prepared for the concept. Exactly how, I don't know. It couldn't hurt his being prepared, could it?
