Uncle Academic's: "Trump on the stump, and the long run-up"

This just in ....

• Hendrik Hertzberg: Trumpery (The New Yorker): "Donald Trump said the other day, 'They won't be laughing if I'm elected President'. That they won't; anyway, he won't be. But they are laughing now. As is well known, gallows humor is an excellent way to keep from crying."
• Donald Trump: Mitt Romney A 'Small Business Guy' (VIDEO) (AP/The Huffington Post, First Posted: 04/17/11 11:32 AM ET Updated: 04/18/11 08:59 AM ET). The dude can't resist "Mine is bigger than his!" It remains one of his standard themes.
  
• A bit earlier: Robert De Niro Smacks Donald Trump (The Daily Beast, 23 Apr 11)

Back in 1990, Michael Lewis reviewed Trump's self-magnifying Surviving at the Top (from which, ironically, he had just fallen) [NYT, 30 June 1990; reprinted in Lewis' wonderful The Money Culture, Norton, 1991].

Trump's relentless accumulation leads people often to mistake his motive for greed, when what drives the man is more a pathological need for control. But control of what? Perhaps there was a time when he wanted to control his business; now he seems merely to want to control the opinion others hold of him. Trump has come to believe that if he nurtures his fame, his business will follow. "Success," he writes, "is so often just a matter of perception." That may explain why he goes berserk when a journalist tries to tinker with his image, but it still represents an odd and (it now seems) wrong-headed approach to commerce. The man whose first impulse after he buys a building is to change the façade has himself become nothing but a façade. And his book is a strained, sloppy exercise in restoration.

Trump's maxim here could be the motto of the National Association of Confidence Artists. (It should be affixed to every instrument his PR machinery cranks out in the course of the forthcoming campaign.)

Half a decade ago Lewis did a follow-up: The Art of Offending Donald Trump (Bloomberg, 6 Feb 2006). It's a hoot. Flip-flop he may -- on the issues of the day. But in character, he's "a man of constancy."
Dooensbury has been on Trump's case since back in the late 80s and early 90s, and took up the cudgels again in 1997.

• `DOONESBURY' CARTOON STUMPS BILLIONAIRE TRUMP (Deseret News archives: Published: Friday, Jan. 13, 1989 12:00 a.m. MST). Nice quotation on another theme of The D: "Most people are like me."
• TRUMP FISHING FOR YACHT TO REPLACE `BOAT' (Deseret News archives: Published: Thursday, June 29, 1989 12:00 a.m. MDT)
• NJ Trump expansion foe cited in 'Doonesbury' dies (AP,Wednesday, April 28, 2010 at 6:58 p.m.)

Added tidbit for Doonesbury fans: in the course of scouting around for these I ran across Paul Oldham's excellent "very brief guide to Doonesbury" that deserves notice.