By Jeb Bladine • President / Publisher • 

Jeb Bladine: If you don't support Trump, you're fired!

When there’s an elephant in the room, it’s surprising when no one seems to notice. But that’s my take on this week’s second debate among Republican candidates for president.

Donald Trump didn’t have a lampshade on his head. His persona, as always, was transparent. But the other candidates just couldn’t quite paint an accurate image of why Trump cannot possibly become president of the United States.

Whatchamacolumn

Jeb Bladine is president and publisher of the News-Register.

> See his column

It’s all about reality versus television ... public versus private power.

To Trump, other people are apprentices who must tolerate his unconcealed arrogance. The most telling analysis comes from NBC Entertainment Chairman Robert Greenblatt, quoted by TV Guide saying, “Whether you agree with anything he (Trump) says, he says it without any kind of filter … But the world likes a star, and he’s a star.”

Greenblatt was announcing the search for another host to replace Trump on a delayed new edition of “The Celebrity Apprentice.” NBC wants someone with “Trump-like qualities,” since, according to Greenblatt, “Trump’s big personality has always been his main appeal.”

As TV show host, Trump could pontificate and insult people with impunity before uttering his famous finale to their pretend hopes and dreams: “You’re fired.”

As president, Trump apparently assumes that everyone would bend to his will. That ill-conceived opinion generates his ego-driven certainty that on Day One, Mexico will pay for a border wall and all the “bad dudes” will be imprisoned or deported. Anyone standing in his way will be fired.

Radio host Hugh Hewitt, one of three questioners in the debate, approached this Trump phenomenon, saying, “There are 190 countries; you can’t run the world by yourself.”

Candidate Jeb Bush approached it another way: “The lack of judgment and the lack of understanding about how the world works is really dangerous.”

The reality is, a president can fire only the people he or she appoints. That doesn’t include the vice president, any member of Congress or, obviously, any other world leader. It doesn’t include a rural sheriff in Arizona or a dockworker in Seattle. The president can fire only a handful of people among 140 million American job-holders who might resist one presidential policy or another.

The all-encompassing authority Donald Trump wields inside his business empire and on “The Apprentice” is the persona he projects as would-be president. But once in office, that particular emperor, as they say, would have no clothes.

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