It has been hilarious to watch the political order of our day react to the potential of a Donald Trump presidency—particularly in relation to Russia. The assumption is that the political class on planet earth is something of a magical aristocratic entity of supreme knowledge. Some silly businessman from New York couldn’t possibly know how to deal with Russia’s supreme leader, “Putin.” After all, business people are “common stock” who are picked by politicians to succeed or fail in life based on their altruistic contributions to charity and events organized by the political establishment. For me it has been excessively funny to read the many articles in USA Today, Rolling Stone, the New York Times and elsewhere as this supposition has taken place regarding Donald Trump’s reaction to events around the world. The basic premise of every article is that Trump is not very smart and is poised to be outplayed by every player on the world stage to the disadvantage of America.
Everyone who reads here knows I am a Star Wars fan and I do think it’s sad that Carrie Fisher—the actress who played Princess Leia in the films–died essentially on Christmas Eve of a massive heart attack. I enjoyed her character in the movies she played and I thought she was a brilliant writer—and a witty personality. I enjoyed her appearance in The Force Awakens, but honestly, she was a broken person in that film barely able to hold a presence on-screen because she essentially had destroyed herself over the preceding 30 years. One of the treats for me of the new film Rogue One was that Princess Leia as a nice 19-year-old young lady appeared at the end of the film which restored her reputation a bit in my eyes—and I felt this before the death of Carrie Fisher. In the original films, Carrie Fisher was turning out to be one of those Hollywood liberal girls who are essentially destroyed before they turned 25. The drugs and hard living as a pass around celebrity ruined her body making her into a joke by the time she was resurrected in The Force Awakens last year. I watched her interviews as a 59-year-old and winced many times as she spoke because she was essentially a destroyed human being and she had at least enough wit to make fun of herself over it. After all, what else was she going to do?
Carrie Fisher’s lifestyle is what killed her—it wasn’t some cruel act of fate—it was years of bad living and taking too much anti-depressant medication—being overweight, then losing weight and straining a body that was already destroyed two decades before. It was sad to hear just prior to the Donald Trump election of 2016 that Fisher was criticizing the president-elects sniffing during the debates as if he were a “coke head” because she knew from experience. And that she had written a book featuring her young affair with Harrison Ford attempting to tell the world psychologically that at one point in time, she was “hot.” Harrison Ford was gracious about the whole episode letting Carrie have a fond reflection of a time when she was a 19-year-old girl sleeping with a 33-year-old married man and running around the streets of London with him in 1976. He didn’t ask her not to do it, and let it run its course right up to the day she literally died.
As much as I like Star Wars and those actors for the part they played in the movies, I found their public comments about Donald Trump disturbing because they assumed as celebrities they knew something about the world that the rest of us didn’t. Harrison Ford I think is a great actor, and I admire how well he has kept himself in shape, and he was fun to watch in Force Awakens because he was able to resurrect a good character he helped create over thirty years ago. But Harrison Ford is still the idiot who gave himself an earring for his 50th birthday because he thought of it as some kind of rebellious proclamation he had earned with advanced age—and he’s maintained that earring now for over 23 years. I am coming up on my 50th birthday soon, and I can tell you dear reader—I have no temptation of getting an earring. That’s just never going to happen—so these liberal actors live in some other world and they constantly fail to understand their role in it.
Since Carrie Fisher’s death along with many other celebrities and their fans, those soft minded modernists who get most of their news from People Magazine, and Entertainment Tonight, are sad that in 2016 stars like Prince, David Bowie, Carrie Fisher, George Michael, and many others died giving Generation X a harsh taste of mortality. What nobody has essentially discussed was that most of those deaths occurred with a common theme of personal use of antidepressants to solve addictive personal problems stemming from poorly managed lives—and that the deaths were not so much a sad proclamation from the gates of Heaven, but just average people who faced crises and disappointments in their lives with real life blandness. The magic of their imaginations lived through in their music and characters they played through their art—but they were not able to bring that art into their personal lives—which is the real tragedy. The real Princess Leia would never do drugs or suffer through depression because that character would dominate those emotions and fight through them without chemical aid. Unfortunately, most people never really get to know these people up close—to smell their bad breath, to see that they have pimples on their foreheads covered up with caked on make-up—so all they know of those stars is what they see in their art. They never know the real people. It wasn’t that long ago where I went to dinner with a few of the members of the hit television show Beverly Hills 90210 and I was surprised at how average the girls were who were there. They spoke and acted just like 20-year-old girls in Cincinnati, Ohio where I was from—and they had the same problems. These are the people who make up our media culture and the same idiots who think that Donald Trump is a joke and not smart enough to deal with major problems around the world.
I had a chance to work in Hollywood, several times if I played it right—and believe me I thought about it. All I would have had to do was laugh at the stupid jokes of those same girls, pander to the intelligence of the 30-something directors and producers and not advertise my conservatism so boisterously. I never thought it was fair, but honestly the way that culture is now you have to be a pretty superficial underachiever to make it in Hollywood because very few people of any real talent can survive unless they put their face on some really bleeding heart liberal causes—otherwise you are cast out of their aristocratic society. Washington D.C. operates in much the same way only instead of that aristocratic society being pretty actors and actresses—they are lawyers too afraid of private practice still trying to justify the massive investment their parents spent on their college educations by hiding on K-Street where the easy money and prostitutes are. Since I didn’t fit in any of those categories and was by instinct a person of action—I had to live authentically, and that meant that my talents needed to be the kind that people wanted to make movies about—not of the type that were about people who wanted to be people who really did things but were afraid to try—then tried to cover up that fear with lots of cocaine and antidepressants coupled with self-destructive sexual relationships. It is harder to live real life and to a spectacular person that history will want to remember than to be some second-hander actor or politician who thinks it’s cool to get an ear-ring on their 50th birthday—because it helps start dinner conversations with other weak people at mindless Hollywood dinners.
Trump unlike all these other people and celebrities is a man of achievement—a guy who has built himself over and over again and always succeeded. Success is not an accident—a successful person can have everything stripped away from them—they can have every hard luck issue tossed in their direction—every unforeseen death—every perilous catastrophe and they pound, and pound and pound right on through to see a successful resolution. That is the common trait of all successful people. They don’t hide from their problems behind alcohol or other drugs and they don’t yield to personal addictions. They simply outwork those around them until their personal goals are met.
The best example of this that I’ve ever seen in a popular movie is from the Ridley Scott film, Gladiator. In that film Maximus the star general of the Roman emperor had everything stripped away from him, his career, his family, his reputation—everything only to be resurrected as a slave to society. By the end of the film Maximus had risen to the top of Roman society once again to challenge the emperor’s successor in a fight to the death—which truly captured many of the themes our current society are built upon—where does power come from? Is it granted by the gods? Is it really in whom you know? Or does it come from an individual and their personal skills coupled with a daring approach to the problems which befall them? The answer is in the last offering, everything comes from within—and Donald Trump is a completely self-made man. The wealth and success he built came from his family and he has literally bent the will of those around him to achieve his objectives. It took him most of his life to figure out all the elements with the help of a loving wife—his third—but the person who ran for president is essentially a person who never stopped trying and bent the world to his will. People like that don’t have time for drug addictions and prescription medications—they self-regulate and they always have the answers because they worked hard to get them.
It is for those reasons that Trump will easily deal with Putin and every other world leader who will soon find themselves begging for the approval of the United States. The world has literally never seen anybody like Trump before on such a stage and no, Hollywood doesn’t understand. The media doesn’t either because they’ve been taught all their miserable lives that failures and weakness are admirable traits by the same people who are befuddled by Carrie Fisher’s death whose final claim to fame in order to sell her latest book was an affair with Harrison Ford on the set of the first Star Wars film when she was 19-years-old and still uncorrupted by drugs and bad living. I picked my career path not because it was easy, but because it was hard—because it was more important to me to be free to live my way all hours of the day than to take any direction from the society aristocrats who think freedoms should yield to terrestrial desires for ear rings on 50-year-old birthdays. And that is the big difference between Donald Trump and everyone else. Some people merely reflect the actions of others and they become actors, politicians, lawyers and media people. Others actually do things worth reflecting and that is what Donald Trump is. What you hear from those social aristocrats toward Donald Trump is not that they think he’s stupid—even though that’s what they say—it’s that they are so weak. They resent him because he’s everything they aren’t—but it is their future decedents—the giggling girls with pimples on their foreheads and the young males afraid of fire who will tell the stories of such modern heroes—only at a future time when history can forgive their insecurities. But not before then.
Believe me, Trump will dominate the world stage—easily. And the value of wealth building among the human race will increase proportionally. Mark it on your calendar. Hollywood and their media culture will never understand it because like the emperor from the movie Gladiator, they don’t get their power from within—but from whom they know. And that is the difference in life between success and failure—or depression and happiness.
Rich Hoffman
CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT
Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.
The Gunfighter's Guide: 