When Atlantic City's Trump Taj Mahal opened in 1990, my friend John and I made the pilgrimage from Penn State to celebrate the opening. During the drive, we listened to a books-on-tape bio of Donald Trump. He was quite the dude.
The Taj Mahal, unfortunately, directly competed with another Trump casino, the Trump Plaza. Almost immediately, the Trump Plaza was in financial trouble. Eventually, all of the Atlantic City Trump properties (the Trump Plaza, the Taj, Trump Marina, and Trump World's Fair) found themselves wading into and out of four bankruptcies under various Trump umbrellas.
One of the main issues was that they were competing with each other, cannibalizing a limited pool of potential customers. Unlike casinos owned by Las Vegas mega-corporations CET and MGM/Mandalay, the Trump casinos weren't different enough in tone or targeted demographic. Trump oversaw managerial teams waging financial war directly against each other for the same gamblers.
I've never been in the position to ride herd over teams of people fighting tooth-and-nail for the same pie while also competing to curry favor with me. One would imagine that sitting in judgement as they torch each other must be quite an intoxicating position.
One would similarly imagine that having attractive, intelligent women simultaneously competing for your attention and love while you're married to one or the other would be quite the narcotic. Seems like a standard rich boys' game, but heady nonetheless.
Eventually, this "getting off" on people eviscerating or humiliating themselves for your favor could be packaged as a kind of reality show. The orgasmic impact would be greater, one surmises, if well known people were plugged into the spots, begging to be guided, graded, and discarded by you.
Years later, of course, as a lethal pandemic begins to unfold, what better way to play the same game than to set states against each other, competing for supplies, federal money, and expertise?
In the case of casinos, it's not the brand name's fault for failure; it's the managerial teams. In the case of marriages, well, women do "age out," you know. As for television shows, the failure of subordinates is by design. None of them can look as good as the person in charge because episodes aren't written that way. And the states during a pandemic? If the pattern worked for 40 years for everything else, why not try the concept once again?
I think this is the very definition of modus operandi. Or standard operating procedure. A pattern put to good use in one venue may serve well in another. Just a few small problems. How does one file Chapter 11 against a pandemic? Or divorce it? I suppose one trick would be to deny the existence of something not solvable by your pattern. Deny it as along as possible. If and when you are forced to acknowledge the problem's existence, do it as late in the game as possible because then the end will be closer. If the end doesn't occur on cue, blink, swallow hard, and just pretend that it has indeed ended. Fake it. Fake it loudly. As long as someone isn't a shareholder, or a spouse, or a citizen with the disease, perhaps they won't notice. They'll just think it's some television show. A little formulaic perhaps, but the absolute finest in sociopathic entertainment.
Bob Dietz
June 11, 2020
