Let’s get one thing straight before Election Day — and before nearly half the electorate votes for him: Donald Trump was never remotely qualified to run for president of the United States of America, let alone to hold that office.

Likewise, although he still pathetically boasts about being “like, really smart” and attending a great business school, Trump never had the brain power, seriousness or attention to detail necessary to become a legit businessman.

That judgment doesn't come from me; it’s what people closest to him have said for decades, from the journalist who first warned us about Trump to the ghostwriter who regrets working on “The Art of the Deal” to the people who worked most closely him during his four years degrading the presidency, shredding political norms and tearing our country apart.

And let’s not forget that professor at the Wharton School of Business who privately told friends that Trump was the dumbest student he’d ever encountered during his lengthy teaching career.

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Protected by a fortune from his father while playing the part of a canny real estate developer, Trump repeatedly bankrupted himself upward. The “King of Debt” learned early on how to profit from public money and make the public pay for his mistakes. Wayne Barrett, the journalist who saw Trump’s grifting ways from the get-go, wrote: “Like his father, Donald Trump has pushed each deal to the limit, taking from it whatever he can get, turning political connections into private profits at public expense."

Occupying the White House allowed him to amp up his shameless grifting and shady dealing, from profiting on his office via Washington’s Trump International Hotel (which has since been sold and rebranded) to selling Trump superhero NFTs and golden sneakers and hawking Bibles that encourage people to laugh off all that nonsense about the separation of church and state.

So as we at last (and yet somehow too soon) come to Election Day 2024 and hear from ever more prominent people that Trump is unfit and unqualified to be president — often from the highest level people who worked with him during his first term of occasionally occupying the Oval Office — we should not forget that he was never fit, or qualified, to be president.

Indeed, one could easily argue, as people have for years, that he is not qualified or fit to serve in any job in any capacity.

It’s difficult to imagine a compulsive liar with dozens of sexual assault allegations against him being hired by any legitimate business. He may have recently play-acted working at McDonald’s, and for whatever weird psychological reasons may insist that Kamala Harris never worked there in college (as she evidently did). But the larger truth is that his beloved purveyor of “hamberders” would never have hired him, given his lengthy record of accusations,........

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