Reality Check (October 10, 2020)
Last night’s dream, a long, tangled embrace, me and the leader of the free world. We continued on, wrapped in each other’s arms, although people began to wander through the office.
In the next scene, beneath a Central Park bridge over pedestrian walkway, he offered me a job: bridgetender, or something low level like that.
I said, “No, thanks. That won’t be necessary,” surprised at the gesture, but just grateful for our moments of what felt like compassion and human caring.
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Later in the morning, I saw this in The Atlantic: The Very Ordinary Indifference to the Common Good, by Brooke Harrington. The following is an excerpt (italics added):
President Donald Trump is supposedly a billionaire, but the $750 that he paid in income taxes in the first year of his term doesn’t begin to cover his fair share of society’s expenses—much less the cost of government lawyers defending his personal and political interests or the health-care bills from the coronavirus outbreak within his own White House. But what The New York Times revealed in its recent reporting on Trump’s tax returns was not just one man’s refusal of his fiscal obligations. Those returns, along with Trump’s whole approach to governing, are a concrete manifestation of a broader and more troubling phenomenon: an elite insurgency in which wealthy, well-connected people around the world stiff the societies that gave them success. Observing Trump’s open defiance of the law and rejection of accountability, many critics have attributed the pattern to the quirks of Trump’s individual psychology. But they have missed the larger picture: This president is an entirely ordinary member of a global elite whose members believe that rules are for chumps.
I have spent more than a dozen years studying the planet’s wealthiest people and the experts who create offshore trusts, foundations, and other entities on their behalf. The clearest window into this world remains the 2016 disclosure of more than 40 years’ worth of data from a law firm, based in Panama City, that helped clients stash wealth outside their home country. That story, known as the Panama Papers, exposed a sprawling web of tax evasion, money laundering, and other financial misdeeds by the global elite. Also exposed was a brazen contempt for the law by many officials—including heads of state and ministers of justice and finance—who were empowered to uphold it.
Trump’s name came up more than 3,500 times in the documents; although he was not implicated in any wrongdoing, many of his customers, business partners, and other associates were. The Panama Papers, still the largest data leak in history, sketched a picture of elites in revolt: a growing refusal of obligation to the societies that had allowed them to become wealthy and powerful. That point was underscored 19 months later by the Paradise Papers, another offshore leak involving prominent figures as varied as Queen Elizabeth II and Trump’s secretary of commerce, Wilbur Ross. Both leaks showed that the offshore economy had produced something dangerous to the rest of us: a noblesse without the oblige. They also showed that the phenomenon was global.
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So,
He doesn’t care about you farmer in wheat field, he doesn’t care about you mother with child, he doesn’t care about you, assembly line worker, he doesn’t care about you everyday people.
But’s who going to stop him? So far, nobody can, and that, friends, is the plan.
Turn everything around, blame others for what you yourself do (just like his lawyer Roy Cohn did).
Because you have money, those who envy, respect, what they should reject.
They have fallen for the con, seduced by your illusion of power, when all you have done fails, and you now can fail like a failed king, and take us all down with you.
