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While we're all talking about non-starter presidential runs by wealthy business leaders who believe only they can save America/only they can break the trend of independent runs going nowhere...
I wanted to turn back to a few choice quotes from my all-time favourite savaging of such a candidacy - Oswald Garrison Villard on Henry Ford, 1923.
"There are unschooled men who have natural aptitudes and good horse sense whom one would trust in any position," Villard wrote. "Henry Ford is not one of these."
On whether his public donations qualified Ford for public life, Villard wrote: "The milk of human kindness is not within him, though he may be charitable and philanthropic."
On Ford's lack of policy plans: "He has no philosophy of the universe on which to build ... He has not learned to control or subordinate his self, or to think things through."
"It was the mind of a suspicious child with which we had to deal; a mind without the necessary background of history and human experience to think its way through the first essentials of such a vast human problem."
On the idea that Ford would be able to surround himself with policy experts once elected: "This was precisely the argument advanced on behalf of Warren Harding when he was a candidate - and look what we got!"
Quoting Ford's biographer, "The confidence born in him of success along one line never forsakes him when he enters other spheres of thought and action. Adverse criticism reaches him, of course, but it does not penetrate."
On Ford's capacity for growth: "He apparently feels that he can do no wrong; he, too, looks with suspicion and positive hatred upon anyone who dares to oppose him or to thwart him."
In a rare moment of optimism, Villard attributes Ford's virulent anti-Semitism (which, along with his nativism, attracted substantial Klan support for a presidential run) only to "utter ignorance."
For Villard, it proves Ford's credulity to "every old slander - I have no doubt that if he does not believe in ritualistic murders, it is only because he has not been plausibly told about them."
Which is why, for Villard, a Ford presidency would be "the triumph of the unfit."
Finally, on the question of whether great wealth proves that someone could make a great president...
"It would be possible to stop at any one of the great factories that line the New Haven Railroad and pick out...some foreman earning $50 a week [who] would would be a far safer choice for the White House than the richest man in the world."
