Tag: Art of the Deal

Playing Poker with the Senate: The Art of the Deal with Pam Bondi

I think what we have going on with Trump is a lot of The Art of the Deal and a good sign of how he’s going to handle things in this next term.  This is the difference between a successful business guy and a bunch of people who sought political life because they couldn’t do anything else.  Over the years, this has been a real problem. Our current Senate has a lot of new people who lean toward the MAGA view of the world, but there are still RINO holdovers, and when J.D. Vance walked the proposed Matt Gaetz around to interview all the senators ahead of confirmation, it was like playing poker and walking around the table to see what kind of hands the other players had.  I thought Matt Gaetz was an excellent pick for Attorney General.  Probably the best pick.  But immediately after touring the Senate, Matt Gaetz mysteriously withdrew his name, and Trump announced that Pam Bondi would be the new pick, almost as if that were Trump’s plans all along.  He had talked to Pam about it, and a plan was playing out.  And what Trump learned was that there were 4 or 5 senators like Mitch McConnell who were hard no’s on Matt Gaetz and would not be convinced otherwise.  So rather than fight that uphill battle with great media fanfare, Trump just changed tactics and put a woman in that place to take off the edge for the more progressive senators and Democrats on the confirmation vote. 

Pam Bondi has done the Attorney General job in Florida during the Rick Scott as governor years.  Before that, Florida politics was a lot different as Jeb Bush set the standard, so these days, with Ron DeSantis, it’s a much different place, a much more conservative state.  When Pam Bondi was Attorney General there, she was pretty good.  My opinion is that she was more talk than action.  However, she has been loyal to President Trump and stood by an America First agenda, no matter what happened.  Is she the person who will kick down doors and drag the bad guys out for a hanging? I don’t think so.  But I think she will take on Trump’s personality in his administration, and I think that was always the gig.  I think Trump and Matt Gaetz have other plans looming in the background since he so quickly announced that he was leaving Congress during the next term.  His district is conservative, so that shouldn’t hurt during a special election.  But what we have going on here is a lot of poker playing that is not normal.  And the media doesn’t know how to report it.  And the political machines are not smart enough to understand what is happening.  Trump has a lot of senator confirmations that are going to be tough, but essentially, he put forth his most controversial pick, making all the rest seem very normal by comparison, and paraded him around to see how the Beltway would bet.  And he got his answer and gave the rest of his picks the ammunition they needed to pass confirmation in the Senate.  Although I was looking to Gaetz, Pam Bondi is about as good as we can get for a position like that, but it comes down to the Art of Making a Deal, which has always been Trump’s thing.  We will see a lot of deal-making that will come out very good for all of us.  Trump and the private sector are beating down the political machines of K-Street in a way they have never experienced before.

And that’s the name of the game in most things in life, especially poker.  I think it’s a great game, especially Texas Hold Em’ because it teaches players how to make a good hand win and how to recognize a good hand from a bad one.  Or, how to play a bad hand and still win.  Poker is about strengths and weaknesses and making the most out of personal circumstances.  It’s not about luck as much as manipulating the other players.  A player at the table could have the best hand in the world, and the person holding the bad hand can still beat them by coaxing them to fold.  And I think that’s what Trump did to the entire Senate, now led by John Thune, and appeasing the Mitch McConnell holdovers.  Trump looked at their hands and saw what he needed to do.  Matt Gaetz will be involved in something that does not require Senate confirmation but that won’t be announced until all the confirmations happen.  Once the Senate angers Trump, he’ll pull out Matt Gaetz and get things moving again.  If you are a fan of The Art of the Deal books or Poker, this is shaping up to be an exciting four years, and the established order of things is not ready.  The many media members who have learned to report political news a certain way are about to have the tops ripped off their business; there will be so much every day that nobody will understand how to process it all.  But this Matt Gaetz situation is just a hint of things to come.

You don’t always get things the way you want them.  But what’s important is that you turn unfortunate circumstances into victories however you can.  Seldom does anything work out the way you envision them.  And putting Matt Gaetz up for an AG nomination was an over-the-top bold move.  But not for the reasons people thought.  Rather than place him in a very contentious position as Attorney General, he used him to discover what the other players at the table were holding as cards.  Once J.D. Vance and Matt Gaetz learned who had what at the table, Trump put down his hand to blow them all out of the water.  And that was Pam Bondi, a pick just as good as Matt Gaetz, but she appears much more reasonable because of her polished personality after years of working in established administrations under challenging conditions.  She is the kind of person even RINO members of the Senate can vote for, if not for her politics, but because she’s a strong woman, and nobody wants to be on record going against that.  So Trump played the hand he had to best effect once he knew what the other players had.  And that’s how you win in these games, whether with a more substantial hand or a bluff.  Winning is the goal, and when it comes to getting Pam Bondi confirmed by the Senate in a way that will not harm his other picks, Trump just showed why we voted for him as the best option to Make America Great Again and why he was so successful throughout his life.  This is how business is done, and the world of useless politicians won’t be able to compete with him.  This is only the start of a lot of deals that will be made, and as Trump has shown over and over again in the past, making deals is his favorite thing to do in the world.  And he’s good at it.  And this nomination of Pam Bondi for Attorney General is just the beginning of many great things to come. 

Rich Hoffman

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The Art of the Comeback: Trump has been there before, and he can do it again

This is for the many Trump campaign people who read here; I have noticed something useful that should be utilized. It’s not just a campaign of unfairness what the FBI and Biden Democrats are doing by abusing their relationship with the Department of Justice to prosecute President Trump and keep him off the ballot in 2024. We all understand that, and yes, it’s grossly unfair. But their continued use of that pressure is more than just an abuse of authority; it’s a strategy. The raid on the President’s home was a stamp on him that there was an authority bigger than him. By calling into question Trump’s right to evoke executive privilege, the enemies on the other side want to deny that Trump was ever President and could never evoke such a thing. That is the game we are playing here. It’s more like football than anything, where the Biden cheaters’ defensive line intends to create so much pressure that our quarterback, Trump, can’t make his reads and complete his throws. Even though it’s evident that Trump earned more than 75 million votes in the last election and likely will again, the strategy going into a 2024 election cycle can’t be what it is today, where the message is victimhood.   Even though it has been unfair, Trump must stop saying it and appeal to people’s sympathy. He needs to show that he is bigger than the system, which is how he became elected in 2016. The system miscalculated him and figured he would never beat Hillary Clinton anyway, so they didn’t attack him enough. They won’t make that mistake in 2024.

Likely, the Democrats will put up Gavin Newsom to replace Joe Biden. Once Biden gets through the midterms, they will retire him off into the sunset, and he’ll play along, stating his age. That will all be to make way for Newsom, who is much younger and will pressure Republicans to give more support to DeSantis and lower the age of the candidates into something more favorable to Democrats. And they’ll hope to split Republican support between Trump and DeSantis and cause a rift between MAGA supporters since most of the Republican Party has already turned against Never Trumper types and RINOs. The constant pressure of investigation and court action are all designed to keep Trump off his game and reacting, rather than setting the stage for what the next election will be about. That is where Trump would benefit significantly from changing his strategy to more offense than trying to appeal to people’s sense of unfairness. Everyone knows the system is rigged. Everyone sees how corrupt everything is. What they want to know is what Trump would do about it. The first time around, in 2015, it was The Art of the Deal presidency. People wanted a real deal maker, and Trump had his books and television shows that showed he was a master at it. They voted for him to do what he would eventually do, run circles around the politicians of the rest of the world and make fools of them, and put America back into the winning column. And it worked, it worked too well, in fact, and the globalist types hit the panic button and pulled every string at their disposal to get rid of Trump so that the threats to their Liberal World Order would stop, which is where we are today. 

But Trump has another best seller, it’s hard to get these days, but it’s still out there, The Art of the Comeback, which I think is much more appropriate for this next campaign run. 2024 is much different than things were in 2016. Before Trump’s first presidency, we only suspected certain things, and so did he. After we have confirmation on many of those things, a different approach will be needed, and the ground rules for the next election must be set by him, just as he did in 2016. He made that election about deal-making and took it out of the realm of the professional advisors who wanted it to all be about taxes, abortion, women’s rights, and climate change. Democrats in 2024 will try to sell California socialism to the rest of the nation, which will be the platform. Usually, Republicans get caught reacting to that platform instead of setting it themselves, with inflation out of control. With respect around the world, that is so terribly bad. With the crush of the electric car market that is grossly underpowered and saturating American car makers by force of government intrusion, people won’t just want to Make America Great Again. Still, they will want to do so with a big fat exclamation point.   They will want a president that has shown them the roadmap to victory before and can handle the extreme odds stacked against us with poise and grace. Obviously, the enemies of America worldwide have set things in motion that many people don’t think could be recovered. They think it’s too late for America and that nothing we do can stop the country’s destruction at this point. And that is the primary issue going into 2024. It’s one thing to win seats and gain majorities in 2022. But how do you keep people focused on task for another two years once we’ve stopped the bleeding?

I’ve always liked Trump because of his books on business. And I thought The Art of the Comeback was one of Trump’s better books because it tells the story of how a big-time investment player lost everything, to become billions of dollars poorer than a homeless person, and picked himself up to become once again and permanently, one of the world’s wealthiest people. And in the aftermath of all that success, and running the hit show on NBC, The Apprentice, Trump married Melania and then set the stage for a run for President, which he won, of course. That is a story that everyone can appreciate, and it’s the story that Americans want to hear about in 2024. They don’t want to hear about the FBI and the election fraud, although that is the biggest story in the human race. If election fraud continues, then Republicans will never win, so we have to deal with it with tighter controls. But people don’t want to hear about how Trump is a victim. They want to see that he’s bigger than the system and that he is untouchable by the enemies of America. They want to see The Art of the Comeback. They want confidence, bravado, and an America First platform. Voters want to know that Trump made a comeback for himself; now they want to see it done for them, to save their country from the obviously bad people around the world who hate America and us and are salivating our destruction. When I went to campaign events for Trump in 2015 and 2016, I saw many people carrying around copies of The Art of the Deal, hoping they could get Trump to sign it for them. They would hold it up at rallies, and Trump would positively point them out to the audience. In a lot of ways, that was the campaign slogan of 2016. But few people know about his Art of the Comeback, and it’s time to educate them on its success. It’s the perfect way to start this new campaign and the ideal way to take the momentum away from the government antagonizers who are terrified that Trump will win in 2024. And the way to keep everyone focused on the right things would be to make The Art of the Comeback the foundation for the 2024 run. It’s part of Trump’s brand, and it certainly would set in motion great things to come, politically and socially. 

Rich Hoffman

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