Below the Beltway

I just got back from a 10-hour personal empowerment extravaganza by famed self-help guru Anthony Robbins. It changed my life.

I have learned the value of perseverance -- namely, that no matter how bored one is by an endlessly stupid, fist-pumping greedfest for an arena full of self-besotted mercenary wienerheads, one should resist the urge to leave early, because Donald Trump might just show up as the last speaker and, talking solemnly from the bottom of his heart, make you nearly wet your pants.

The show, which billed itself as a serious seminar on Success based on philosophies developed by the leading motivational scholars of our time, began with motivational calisthenics performed by Washington Wizards cheerleaders in tight leather trousers. Then Robbins -- a man of Frankensteinian proportions -- strode the stage and harangued the crowd to awaken the giant within themselves. People roared their approval for whatever Robbins said, even things that were not, technically, English: "Focus is reality to the individuality, even though it is not reality in actuality."

Periodically, Robbins hooched up the crowd into a "peak state," where they bellowed at the top of their lungs and leaped into the air -- 9,000 people ecstatically bouncing up and down as though on trampolines. If you are thinking that as sophisticated self-help concepts go, this one might be an entertaining spectator sport, you are (1) male, and (2) correct.

The show featured speakers such as Joan Lunden ("The World's Best-Known Broadcast Journalist") and Stormin' Norman Schwarzkopf, the grizzled Hero of Desert Storm, who is a little less imposing without fatigues but still packs a whole shirtload of grizzle. Norm knows how to bring down the house: "The United States of America is still the Greatest Nation on the Face of the Earth, bar none!" (Sound of house being brought down.)

While Schwarzkopf was speaking, Robbins was backstage in a private huddle with the struggling Wizards, telling them how to marshal the giants within themselves. The following day, the team would swagger onto the floor against the hated Philadelphia 76ers and, newly empowered, get whipped like meringue.

By and large, Robbins's message is touchy-feely: He has the audience hug one another and administer back massages. But the final speaker turned out to be billionaire developer Trump, the famous presidential almost-candidate, international bon vivant and bounder. To say that Trump has class doesn't do him justice: He has giant wads of class. He walked into this goody-two-shoes event and altered the atmosphere as suddenly as a stink bomb in a eucalyptus grove.

Trump shuffled on stage, shoulders hunched, and explained his presence thus: "Tony pays me a lot of money. I don't ask questions. I come, I do it."

Financial downturns in the early 1990s taught him humility, he said. He used to be a boor: "I was following fashion shows. The designers didn't like it 'cause they knew I wasn't after their dresses, I was after what was in the dresses."

Then Trump confessed that he likes to hang around with people who are suffering financially -- "frickin' losers," he called them -- because they're depressed, and keep their mouths shut at dinner, and don't hog the conversation.

Trump appeared to be serious. He was refreshingly blunt. Think of the bluntest object you can, blunter than a torpedo -- let's say, a cow. Well, Trump's words hit the audience like a cow dropped from a helicopter. People didn't seem to know what to make of it. I think part of them wanted to cringe, and part -- remember, these were 9,000 acquisitive and ambitious business people -- wanted to cheer.

Next, Trump enumerated his principles for success. Points one and two were to think big and stay focused. Then came: "Be paranoid."