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Trumpian Invasions from the Past in Sun Tzu Was a Sissy by Stanley Bing (Gil Schwartz)

Another pre-Trump book with Trumpian intrusions, but more than most such encounters. The book itself is a kind of light satire and actually motivated me to read Sun Tzu's original book (which is not long by today's standards), but mostly it's just a lot of tongue-in-cheek jokes. What strikes me about so many of the books I've read since Trump suddenly seemed to matter is how much of "the environment" he had becomes, and this book is an especially poignant reminder of that age of innocence, when Trump was just funny background noise.

So here's the list of cameos:

On page xxv in the introduction he presents a little ontology of wars with one bullet point: "Total conflagration: Donald Trump wants the ground your business is sitting on. Microsoft likes the business you're in and wants to suck it all up for itself. The Wall Street Journal has..." That's between the entries for "Medium-sized War" and "Guerrilla War".

There's a big table of weapons on pages 66-7, where "Outright rudeness" is listed as a weapon that "May be Used Against..." various categories of people, but ending with "Donald Trump" as a singleton. Amusingly, this is a weapon that is "Not Advised Against" such categories as "elderly Republicans" and "Japanese businesspeople". The prior weapon is "Sarcasm", but it's more interesting that the next weapon is "Lying", which is probably Trump's favorite. Among other categories, lying is recommended against "people of the opposite sex you do not intend to see again, even by accident" and "any lawyer but your own". Obviously a problem for Trump since he lies even to his own lawyers.

On page 69 he has a list of people who weren't dead enough. After Hamlet's father (who came back as a ghost) and Napoleon (who escaped from his first exile) and before Slobodan Milošević (who died in 2006, about 2 years after the book was published), here comes Donald Trump with the notation "The big doofus just won't stay down."

On page 116 he is writing about potential discomfort enemies can cause. He presents a scale from "tiny" to "grotesquely Trumpian". An adjectival usage is rather rare.

On page 166 the page starts with a mention of Kim Jong Il, father of Trump's new buddy in North Korea, but the main reference is in the section numbered 12 about PR representatives. (As part of the parody of Sun Tzu's original book, this book also uses lots of small numbered sections.) The list of examples starts with "Jesus himself had the four apostles, plus ... Mel Gibson. Samual Johnson ... had ... Boswell...." and then "Trump has himself." I think this is actually talking about self-promotion, though we now know that Trump sometimes promoted himself by pretending to be someone else.

Finally, on page 195 is a final and weird appearance of Trump. The section is comparing the taste of victory to cheese. I really can't imagine what motivates this short paragraph: "A guy like Donald Trump has got to have a big, hearty cheese, a little smelly, a little sweet, that goes great with ham. Swiss, maybe. It's got holes in it." Maybe the joke has to do with the placement between cheddar and Limburger cheeses?

The other page that strongly struck me in this book was on page 29, where he refers to fake journalist and super-hypocrite Bill O'Reilly, which sound almost prophetic and also seems prophetically related to Trump's current attacks on real journalism. O'Reilly did as much as anyone to promote the "fake news".

More evidence of how Trump invaded the public consciousness long before anyone regarded his candidacy as anything but a sick joke. Too bad Trump lacks the capacity to laugh at himself. Just another part of why he can't learn from his mistakes.