“For men change their rulers willingly, hoping to better themselves, and this hope induces them to take up arms against him who rules: wherein they are deceived, because they afterwards find by experience they have gone from bad to worse. This follows also on another natural and common necessity, which always causes a new prince to burden those who have submitted to him with his soldiery and with infinite other hardships which he must put upon his new acquisition.”
Machiavelli: The Prince
The Vietnam War and how patriotic president managed to dodge the draft
Not much is known about Donald Trump’s personal views regarding the Vietnam War when he was a student; however, he was given at least four deferments on educational grounds. So even as his fellow Americans were bleeding and dying in faraway battlefields the supremely athletic Trump cared not a whit for the defense of the American way of life.
However, it is his fifth and last deferment that is a cause for controversy. It was a 1-Y medical deferment and is only given to those individuals who are deemed medically unfit for military duty.
But the good man back in 1968, was a star athlete at a military academy and seemed to be as healthy as possible. In fact, many of his pictures taken during that time, the strapping 6 foot 2 inch, twenty-two-year-old young man is portrayed as the very paragon of health. At the Wharton College, he was fond of playing many sports including squash, tennis and even football. His medical history was practically flawless (barring a routine appendectomy when he was around ten years of age)
At a time when practically hundreds of thousands of fellow Americans were putting their lives on the line, he was diagnosed with’ bone spurs in his heels,’ which supposedly rendered him incapable of military duty effectively allowing him to sit out the war.
Trump: The beginning of a real estate empire
When it came to business acumen, the young Donald was definitely ‘a chip off the old block.’ Definitely not for him the vision of ‘carving his own path, that may well be completely spate and different from the family business though an exhaustive process of self-discovery.’ Rather, he quite cheerfully followed his father into a career in real estate development even before he completed his formal education. Donald Trump worked with his father during his summer vacations preparatory to joining the family company, ‘Elizabeth Trump & Son.’ Which he formally joined once he was over and done with his education, i.e. once he had completed his graduation and was duly armed with a bachelor’s degree.
However, in this regard he proved himself to be a whole lot more ambitious than most of his other family members. As could be envisioned by the fact that soon after joining his father, one of the first things he did was to convince the elder Trump that an expansion of the company holdings was a much needed ‘shot in the arm’ for the company. Moreover, he also managed to prevail not just upon his father, but the other members of the board to be more flexible in their usage of loans that were acquired courtesy the equity of the myriad number of apartment complexes owned by ‘Elizabeth Trump & Son. For Donald, such complexes were akin to sitting on a gold mine and he helped utilize the liquidity so gained though these loans, to further develop the assets of the company. However, business was quite competitive in those days and the company had to slash its profit margins quite substantially, merely in order to survive in such a cut-throat environment. (End of Part-II)
