Trump’s new book[Updated 11:55 a.m. on Dec. 6, 2011] The Donald has a lot to say in his latest book, out today. In between moderating debates for Fox News, taking gold bars as a deposit at 40 Wall Street, mulling a run for office and meeting with Republican presidential nominee hopefuls (as he did today with Newt Gingrich), Trump penned another political book: “Time to Get Tough: Making America #1 Again.”
In the latest advice volume, the developer of real estate from Israel to Florida, suggests that America’s problems are the result of President Barack Obama not loving America enough, that the only way to fix the deficit is to take Iraqi oil by force, and that Trump himself is worth a total of $7 billion, a disputed figure.
This is not the first time the matter of The Donald’s net worth has come up. In 2009, Trump sued New York Times Sunday business editor Timothy O’Brien for asserting that his then-net worth was closer to $200 million. The suit was later thrown out, but not before a 2005 assessment by Deutsche Bank was brought to light indicating that Trump’s net worth was around $788 million. In September, Forbes estimated he had a net worth of about $2.9 billion.
But Trump has lots more advice for the nation in his follow-up to “Midas Touch: Why Some Entrepreneurs Get Rich-And Why Most Don’t,” published earlier this year. He also wants the world to know that the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico last year was “no reason to put tighter clamps on domestic drilling,” that many welfare recipients, outrageously, own microwaves and VCRs, and that “high tax rates are literally transferring wealth and jobs abroad.”
In “Time to Get Tough” Trump decries Obama as a “globalist,” then expresses his desire to sue OPEC for price-fixing (which requires a key feature of globalist thought: international law). When Obama reported increasing U.S. exports to China by $45 billion, Trump said, it was “pathetic,” and “an insulting joke.”
Shortly after, in his discussion of how the U.S. should bully China, Trump cites a company that recently began manufacturing chopsticks in Georgia as a shining beacon of hope for America’s limping manufacturing sector. The company in question could create approximately 150 jobs. But clearly that wouldn’t put a dent in the $45 billion shift in the trade deficit with China.
Trump also states that “government cannot create jobs. All it can do is put more people on the taxpayer’s dime. All it can do is sap our nation’s wealth.” But, 20 pages later, in a reversal, he writes that “It may be time for new legislation to ensure that Treasury looks out for American workers.” And then, four pages later he writes “Congress needs to pass Virginia Congressman Frank Wolf’s bill called the “Bring Jobs Back to America Act.”
Trump calls out the U.S. for its dependence on foreign oil, for the erosion of our educational system and for allowing anti-competitive practices to flourish in the American healthcare sector. And he makes an argument that combating Chinese cyber-terrorism should become a national priority.
But most of the 216-page book, which costs $27.95, consists of claims about American superiority peppered with assertions that our “creampuff,” “socialist” president could fix our complicated economic and political problems if he were simply “tougher.”
Trump says: “We have to get tough, get smart, and get a president willing to stand up for America and stick it to the Chinese… Obama needs to wake up, stop taking so many vacations, and quit messing around…We are the greatest country in the world… After all, wealth funds our freedom.”