Trump Is A Trust-fund Brat

I mean, I wish it mattered...

For all the criticism the Times legitimately gets, their recent expose of the Trump family finances is the sort of reporting only they can really pull off.  Encouragingly, the article's first sentence - undoubtedly vetted by their lawyers - calls out the Trump family for outright fraud.  Fraud is a crime.

To a certain degree, the crimes alleged here were perpetrated by Trump's father, Fred.  The problems are three-fold for Trump.  First, he benefited from those crimes, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.  Second, it completely undermines Trump's claim of being a self-made billionaire.  If he's a billionaire at all, it's because his father gave him such an extraordinary head start.  Third and finally, the GOP tax bill - their only significant achievement outside of packing the courts with conservatives - is an unprecedented giveaway to people exactly like Donald Trump.

The allegations in the well-documented article raise questions of criminality and would - in a sane world - puncture the rampant bullshit of Trump's self-mythologizing.  He's a trust-fund brat.  He has always been a trust-fund brat, hanging out with models at Studio 54, shitting on a gold toilet, squandering his family's money.  (Calculations of Trump's wealth have never presumed the scope and size of his father's largess.  If he's "just a billionaire," his rampant mismanagement of his father's gifts demonstrates his own fiscal incompetence.)

The idea that this will matter to the angry, 60 year old, white dude in a diner in Sixpack, Ohio is laughable.  It undercuts the idea that Trump was somehow an avatar for inchoate rage about the economic conditions roiling the working class of this country.  Here is evidence (which they won't believe because it's the NY Times) that demonstrates that their hero who wanted to drain the swamp is in fact a trust-fund brat with a set of purchased degrees from private educational institutions.  Unless Trump's approval rating falls into the teens, this is the final proof - as if it were needed - that Trump's appeal is cultural and racist, not economic.

And here, too, is the sinew that connects Trump with Brett Kavanaugh.  Trump, we now have proof, is a beneficiary of his father's riches, much of which he pissed away in Atlantic City.  Kavanaugh began at Georgetown Prep and parlayed that and his family's connection into degrees from Yale.  Yes, Kavanaugh worked hard.  So do lots of people who aren't legacies and the product of private school educations.

The whole world of these privileged white men is based on not being questioned.  There are built in assumptions that undergird the ideas of patriarchy.  You don't question these men and their power.  The rage that Kavanaugh showed at his hearing, the disdain with which Trump treats women, the constant news of white men using guns to shoot up public institutions...these are all of a piece.

I'm a white man, who went to private schools, inherited some money and has benefited from my whiteness and my maleness at countless points in my life.  I call bullshit on the whole rotten system.