Trump parlayed that successful TV show run with the image of himself that he’d cultivated over the decades into becoming president of the United States. No 401k gives you the presidency. That egomaniac will spend his last day knowing that school kids a century from now will know his name.
There is no doubt Trump knows how to work a room and get people riled up, and how to convert that into things he wants, those are classic narcissistic and psychopathic traits, the high-level ability to manipulate people. He will definitely be in the history books as the worst president to ever hold the mantle and as one of the greatest con men of the 20th and 21st centuries, if not the greatest. After all, he duped an entire nation into letting him be president with no credentials and abhorrent morals that (we hope) do not reflect the morals of the country he was supposed to "lead"..
Frankly, his ability to rise to high levels from such dismal failures through deceit and manipulation are simply unrivaled, maybe ever in history. Other than the guy who the term "Stockholm Syndrome" was coined after maybe. In that, you have to give Trump credit. Since he had so much money given him from his birth, he was able to take what could be a debilitating psychological condition and turn it into incredible renown. Believe me, there are plenty of other such psychopathic con-men who just never had the means to manipulate on such a grand scale. Take his money away from birth and he is likely a used-car salesman or a scheister running multiple grifts in back-alleys in New York. He has already proven he has zero financial acumen, since he failed so spectacularly to turn his money into anything more than a mutual fund would have brought him.
It is really funny when people equate wealth and the power wealth provides as evidence of superior judgement, superior character, or superior morals. When so often the exact opposite is the reality. I guess when we are starry-eyed for someone who has what we wish we had, we put them on a pedestal and buy whatever ******** they choose to sell. Maybe we can have what he has if we follow him and act like he does. If you want to be rich, surround yourself with rich people, as the saying goes. Sad state of the human condition, how heavily we are driven by - no, not money - but by envy. I guess that is partly the tribal nature of our evolution, the desire to have what the neighboring tribe has if you think it will advance your tribe's chances of survival, whether it was chances to pass along our genes, or just the food or tools they had that we wanted. We are driven by instinct to covet. And now, in the modern world, that instinct to covet leads us to idolize those who have what we want and cannot obtain. Funny when we claim to have such disdain for the "ruling classes" yet we follow them to the ends of the earth and extol their virtues. Maybe the full access to the lifestyles of the rich and famous we have had for a handful of decades now, specifically curated to deceive and manipulate us into believing we need and want what they have, and that they are accessible to us common folk, have enamored us to them as they get better and better at hiding their true faces. And Trump is the poster-child for all this, the inevitable outcome.