Donald Trump is scary to a lot of people but he has never scared me copypasta

Donald Trump is scary to a lot of people, but he has never scared me. I am inoculated against men like him. Most people, decent and good-hearted people, listen to Trump and their stomachs churn. I listen to Trump and hear only a death rattle. I know how men like him end. I already outlasted that kind of toxic masculinity. I had to survive my father, a small-time crook who played at having millions the same way Trump plays at having billions. I used to look up to my father. His name was Tom Bateman, and he was, for a time, as big as the whole world. He was built like a refrigerator. He was the man, the drake, the alpha. He was an ex-college football star and successful businessman who had all the answers. He flew planes, repossessed cars, and owned scores of firearms. Nobody screwed with him, nobody talked back to him, and nobody told him what to do. He was an irresistible force who won every fight, because he sucker-punched every foe. Then, in 1994, while attending a convention for auto dealers, he encountered a warm white light in his hotel room. The light suffused his body. A lilting female voice with a Welsh accent assured him he would never have to work again. When he got home, he assembled me, my mother, and my brother around the dinner table. “I have to show you all something,” he said, removing his t-shirt. “It’s absolutely awesome.” There, on my father’s bare left pec, was a tattoo of a wolf’s head. He thumped his chest and pointed at me. “I heard my mother’s voice and felt her warmth. She told me I was free to be me. There are going to be big changes.” “Why aren’t you at the dealership right now?” asked my mother. “It’s two o’clock in the afternoon.” “I’m never working again,” he replied. “It’s not an option. But I am going to grow the ponytails I was meant to have.”

He was true to his word: He stopped running his business, which he left in the care of my older brother, and proceeded to grow a series of ponytails, each of which he carefully snipped and sealed in a Ziploc bag. He then more or less vanished for two years, traveling through the Pacific Northwest, and only occasionally bothered to send us support. After he left my mother, he seduced various women and stole their money. My father started dating online in the early days of the Internet. I wrote his first Yahoo! Personals ad in 1996. I was 14 years old. It said that he had “arms you can get lost in and a gap-toothed smile as big as the whole world.” While catfishing for sugar mamas on the World Wide Web, my father often mused about death. “I’m ready to meet my maker,” he declared, adding that he “didn’t care what happened to any of us. His explanation: “Death will be the happy end.” But he kept on living, and grifting, for far longer than he or anyone else expected. Since he didn’t work, my father had unlimited free time and Internet access. All of the women he lived with sprang for high-speed because he couldn’t bear to wait while his favorite websites loaded. He used skiptracing services to locate his high school sweetheart, whom he had “dumped like a hot potato” the day he left for college. He used the Web to stay in touch with me after the two of them bought and furnished an expensive house — with her money and several credit cards he opened in her name — near Glacier National Park in Montana. And by staying in touch, I mean he would send me two or three dozen emails a day. Initially the emails were innocuous. When I neglected to contact him, he would write, “Your fingers broke, Moses?” But as he got older and closer to the end, the emails became longer and darker in tone. He spiraled into detail. He began exploring big themes, trying to impart what he believed were valuable moral lessons for me, a young man who was coming of age in a dangerous world. Between 2002 and his death in 2014, I received tens of thousands of emails from him, most of which I never opened. These emails were his legacy. They were scattered fragments of the world he had wanted to make for me. An email he sent me in 2013 serves as a kind of overarching manifesto. He wrote:

“I am going to grow the ponytails I was meant to have” Rambling non-apologies were sent one after another. He didn’t believe in apologizing, “because if you did it, you must have meant it.” Yet he began to change his tone. He began to assure me that he had “no regrets…except all of them.” And what did he have to regret? Sure, he had abused me and my mother. He beat us black and blue. He concocted a scheme that led to her indictment by a grand jury on charges of child abuse. The case made national headlines. I was called to testify against her, reciting outrageous claims that he had fabricated. I was 14 years old. He stole hundreds of thousands of dollars from those who were closest to him — including us. Sometimes the scams were big and egregious, as when he chose to stay married to his dying first wife for seven years after he moved in with my mother, just to collect a bunch of term life insurance payouts.And sometimes they were pathetic, as when he convinced me to give him the $1,500 I had earned from my first job, ostensibly so that he could help me buy a computer. “It’s for safekeeping,” he claimed. “I’ll take better care of it than any bank, and you’ll get what you wanted.”

Sure enough, I got the computer — a crummy Gateway model used primarily for his online dating — as well as a credit card bill for over $2,000. He had pocketed the money I gave him, used my social security number to secure financing for the computer, and then neglected to make a single payment.

Submitted November 10, 2016 at 06:14AM by funkenzwangsvorstell https://www.reddit.com/r/copypasta/comments/5c4wst/donald_trump_is_scary_to_a_lot_of_people_but_he/?ref=search_posts&utm_source=ifttt copypasta