As Fate or Chaos would have it, the LoA collection of Jimmy Breslin arrived on my doorstep this week, so that on the evening when Trump’s guilty verdict was announced in Manhattan, I got to read Breslin’s verdict on Trump from 34 years earlier.
As I wrote on social media last night, I hadn’t been sanguine about a verdict, and was relieved to be wrong.
My blanket praise of New Yorkers should not be construed to include the New York Times–then and now, A Part of the Problem!™ I was interested to read Breslin’s take on Trump “The Master of the Steal”, a column that appeared in Newsday back in 1990.
Trump was going through one of his periodic stages of bankruptcy and financial disaster at the time, but Breslin, though contemptuous of Trump, was confident that he would find more people to give him money. “Trump survives by Corum’s Law,” said Breslin.
What is Corum’s Law, and who was Corum? Not the Michael Moorcock character, unfortunately. Bill Corum was a sometime journalist who was hired to run the Kentucky Derby at a time of crisis: “Newspapers all over the world claimed Louisville was a place where Derby visitors were robbed.”
Corum took the job, but he insisted that the problem was not a problem.
“If a guy from North Dakota goes home from here after the race and has to be met because he doesn’t even have cab fare, that guy is going to say to himself, ‘Wow, I must have had a hell of a time. I can’t wait for next year.’ But if that same guy goes home and still has half his money, he is going to say, ‘I guess I didn’t have such a great time after all.’
“Because, gentlemen, this is the rule. A sucker has to get screwed.”
—Bill Corum, quoted in Breslin’s “The Master of the Steal”
Breslin explains Trump’s otherwise inexplicable success with banks and other suckers (like the NYT) by applying Corum’s Law.
It goes a long way to explaining Trump’s television and political career. Suckers have to get screwed, and they flock to his banner. He’s the Sunk Cost Fallacy in (approximately) human form.
