John Wayne. John Wayne explains it, and is maybe the best example.

There were Hollywood actors who were actual war heroes. John Wayne wasn’t one of them. In fact, he not only didn’t volunteer, he got two deferments to avoid being drafted, opting to make movies about being a hero instead of actually being one. Jimmy Stewart was an actual hero, flying 20 combat missions as a bomber pilot for the US Army Air Force.

Eddie Albert, the mild-mannered star of “Green Acres,” won a bronze star with the “V” for repeatedly taking his boat to the shore at Tarawa under fire to take wounded men off the beach (by reports he evacuated 47 wounded). Even Clark Gable flew a combat mission as a filmmaker during the war.

But Wayne? He liked to play the hero. My Marine uncle, who saw combat in the Pacific during WWII, told me that the men used to jeer at the screen when a John Wayne movie was played for them. In fact, his career really took off when he was one of the few primary actors left in the States with so many others actually serving their country.

To SO many people, though, John Wayne is a hero. They don’t seem able to discern the difference between the image projected on a screen and reality.

Donald Trump sat (on TV) behind a big desk and pretended to be a successful businessman on “The Apprentice.”

And there are so many people who think that was real.

There are some other answers to this question that reference Trump’s 500 businesses and the fact that only five (I think it may actually be six, but that’s minor), or about 1%, were failures because they went bankrupt. That just demonstrates how poorly these posters understand business.

First, bankruptcy is a specific, legal term that refers to a process in which creditors try to recover as many of the insolvent organization’s debts as they can through a court. Some bankruptcies result in reorganization of the insolvent organization so that it can be an ongoing concern.

Many, many organizations go out of business without going through bankruptcy. In Trump’s case, his airline, steaks, vodka, university, et. al. never went through bankruptcy. They were simply dissolved by their creditors without that legal process.

Second, many companies cannot EVER become insolvent because they have no liabilities … and sometimes no assets. Landlords, for instance, often form an LLC in the US for each property they own. If they have bought that property with cash, no insolvency is ever likely to happen. That doesn’t mean they make money, always. It just means that there are no debts to speak of that would need to be resolved in court.

Other LLCs are formed that do nothing but hold stock in another company. Sometimes, these LLCs, or shell companies, will hold stocks in other shell companies. There can be legitimate business reasons to do this, and also nefarious reasons. Regardless, “owning” one of these companies indicates neither business success nor failure. They aren’t real businesses in the usual sense.

I owned a business that was successful that I simply let lapse because I had moved into another line of business, primarily. So, I renamed the company, got another LLC for it, and simply didn’t renew the old one. Had it been a failure, I wouldn’t have had to go through bankruptcy because it was a service business with no debt.

Trump’s 500 companies include a very large number of holding companies. He also has some licensing companies that almost certainly have no debt and would never go through bankruptcy, but could still be closed up if no one in a given nation wished to license the Trump name. That would be a failure, but no a bankruptcy.

I hate to do it, but I’ve had to shut down comments. Many of them were of the “what have you ever done” variety, which is predictable … if depressing. After all, I’ve never been Chancellor of Germany, but I don’t think that prohibits me from criticizing Adolph Hitler. Nor has Daddy ever given me $400 million. Plus, it’s a tu quoque attack, which is a well-understood logical fallacy.

Not that this matters to MAGAs.

In the end, though, there are simply too many comments to keep up with, and it’s been interfering with my ability to find useful and reasonable comments to other answers I’ve posted. So … I’ve had to shut these down.

Thanks to all of you who have upvoted.