While it’s no secret which presidential candidate Barry Diller supports, the media mogul reserves particular scorn for Donald Trump‘s “plutocrat” supporters.
The former Paramount and Fox chief who now chairs IAC Corp. accused an array of top financial sector figures of embracing policies on Trump’s agenda even as they refuse to acknowledge Trump’s “rotten” character.
“I want Donald Trump pushed into the dust heap of history,” Diller said Friday at the FT Business of Entertainment Summit. Expressing hope that Kamala Harris wins by “five to seven” percentage points, he added, “My hope is it will be a repudiation of him. I think that would be extraordinarily healthy. I think that’s the only healthy outcome.”
Almost worse than Trump himself, Diller added, are the “plutocrats” who back him even as they “refuse to talk about the character of the person.” (Diller did concede that he himself may fit the definition of a plutocrat.)
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“A good many of them are saying they will vote for Trump because his positions on taxes and other things that will keep their dollars or earn them extra dollars, when they have more dollars than they ever conceivably could need for any purpose,” Diller said.
Asked to name an exemplar of this behavior, Diller cited John Paulson, a billionaire hedge fund manager, who recently offered his view of the race. “He went on sensibly for 25 minutes,” Diller recalled, without saying where Paulson was speaking. “What he never did was talk about the character, the person. Not a word about that. Not even, ‘Well, he says a lot of crazy things but he doesn’t act crazy.’ What he actually did and what these others do is they refuse to talk about the character of the person and distance their talk from this person’s policies and justify just on policies not on the character of what is arguably a rotten person. To anybody’s naked eye, even them they would say, ‘Oh my God, no. Him?! President?! Please.’”
Pressed for a prediction, Diller demurred. “Any sense of the race is idiotic right now,” he said. “If you take the polls, which are generally wrong, so I don’t know why we bother . … I hope it is not a close race. I don’t expect it to be a landslide, that would be hoping for too much. But I want five to seven points, meaning . … I don’t want a contested election, in any way.”
Moderator Matthew Garrahan ventured that Diller and Trump must “go way back” given their shared history in New York and the media business, but Diller reframed that assumption. He related an amusing story about the pair’s uncomfortable lunch more than four decades ago and maintained that he has not spoken to Trump since that day.
The lunch took place when Diller was in his 30s, running Paramount, where he introduced the Movie of the Week and revived the movie studio with hits like Saturday Night Fever and Grease.
Because he was “a little bit intrigued” by Trump, who was then an up-and-coming real estate developer from New York’s outer boroughs, he accepted the invitation to lunch. “I had never met him before,” Diller said, and quickly he discovered that Trump was a very specific kind of lunch companion. “All they do is say how great you are. No evidence, no anything. Just 40 minutes of whatever,” he said, as conference attendees started to chuckle. “I was up to my gills with hearing about how great I was – with no evidence! When somebody compliments you without evidence, it’s almost an insult. And I remember with absolute clarity going to the elevator and as the door closed and I was on my own, I said, ‘I never want to see this person again in my life.’”
Over the ensuing 40 years or so, Diller observed, life brought he and Trump into each other’s orbits for various reasons. “It was my mission to never speak to him,” he said, pantomiming the act of physical avoidance. “He, of course, is sensitive to rejection and he knew it.” Years later, then, “he would take public, mean shots at me just because it was clear I did not like him. And I can say to this day and this is, whew, 45 years later after my first encounter and I have never spoken to him. So I have a badge.”
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