Trump is a loser.
A massive, massive loser. Has been for most of his life. This is not an opinion; it is a fact. He inherited his money. He failed at most of his businesses. He had to have his dad bail out his casino in a fashion that was almost certainly illegal — a business where the government allows you to rig the game in your favor. He almost single-handedly destroyed a football league. In the United States. Not even Roger Goodell, a man whose picture is in the dictionary next to the phrase “empty suit” could do that. He lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, a woman who had spent thirty years at the center of a constant two minutes of hate, by about seven million votes, then lost the reelection to the only politician running who was older than him despite being the incumbent. And then he screwed up a simple coup.
Trump was born on third and stole second.
And yet our media has been extremely reluctant to lay out any of these simple facts. Part of it is that, as Josh Marshall says, DC is wired for the GOP. Part of it is sexism. Part of it is a simple inability to do their jobs beyond the basic horse race reporting (political reporters tend not to be remotely interested in policy). But I think a significant portion of the reason is the idea that in America you get what you deserve. Trump is rich, and so he should be rich. More importantly, he is the son of a rich person, and so the elite press see their children in him and see that their children, too, deserve to be rich.
There is no bottom in America. If you fall, you can fall all the way to destitution. There is no safety net to catch you. And so it is reasonable for people to worry about the future of their children, what will happen to them if they do not have the same combination of luck and skill their parents had. It must be easy, then for these people to believe that Trump deserves his fame and fortune. That the benefits he received from his father are as a minor consideration in his life as they would surely be in the lives of their own children.
I don’t think this is the only reason, but I think it is an under played one. Some of our elites got their positions through nepotism or legacy admission or the benefits of coming from a rich family. Many of these people have a hard time admitting that such luck significantly contributed their positions in life. The cult of meritocracy almost forces people to pretend that all outward markers of success are true indicators, and that all success is entirely earned. Neither are true, but admitting such means admitting luck plays a large role in life, something that our elites are not constitutionally capable of as a class.
Because if they did, then they would have to admit that our society should have a bottom; that it not just that the wrong accident, the loss of a job, the wrong medical bill could ruin a person. They would have to admit that it is better to care for all than pretend for a few. They would have to admit that we are a society, not a collection of economic units. They would have to admit that they were, at least in part, lucky.
Easier, surely, to pretend that a man who could not make gambling and football work in America is a business genius.
Leave a Reply