Donald Trump, a modern-day Marie Antoinette
When I was a young man, just starting my career in the software industry, I had a client on Long Island, New York. The location was in the middle of Long Island, not quite out to the prestigious sections in what are known as “The Hamptons”, but prestigious enough that residents were not a bit discrete exhibiting their wealth.
The wealth of residents was particularly on display at lunch time when the ladies of Long Island would lunch where they were most conspicuously on display. It all had a very Great Gatsby feel to it and I was particularly entertained with the gossip and social chatter that took place at almost all of the luncheon tables.
Much of the chatter at Long Island luncheons had to do with who was donating to what charities and of course how much. In Long Island society, like that of New York City’s, there are rules. For one, if you want to attend everyone’s fancy charity parties, then you’ve got to make a donation. If you don’t make the donation, then you need to be prepared for everyone to stare daggers at you, to worry about your financial situation, to judge you.
If you don’t give, then eventually you’ll be invited to fewer events. They’ll consider you especially rude for going to the events to which you’ve been invited out of politeness. That’s when you’re truly rejected by people who, ideally, since you’re a “billionaire, too,” should be your peers.
It was my experiences at those Long Island luncheons that I’m not at all surprised in the least when I read stories that trump’s courtiers are responsible for policies that have separated thousands of children from their parents with little chance of them being reunited. ( https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/us/family-separation-trump-administration-migrants.html )
While they may show little concern for Trump’s policies they are not something the vieux riche or “old money” of New York would ever be accused. These are the same groups that spurned Donald Trump when he vigorously courted them.
While much of America has spent decades seeing Trump as a billionaire with a lux lifestyle, New York’s elite spent the same amount of time seeing him very differently — as a tacky sideshow with no place at their Gatsby-like events. It’s one of the reasons he finds it necessary to fly around with his name embolden on the side of an airplane and aglow in the bright lights of Casinos and 5th Ave. office buildings.
It may sound a bit hyperbolic to compare the behavior of Trump and New York’s old-money elite to that of Marie Antoinette but the Queen of France’s commentary regarding the starving citizens of France, “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche” ( Let them eat cake) is little different from the disdain Trump shows for citizens of the United States. Trump uses citizens of the United States with the same disdain the French nobility used citizens of France in the latter part of the 18th century.
The only difference is Donald Trump will always find more on the menus of Long Island restaurants than cake.
Trump’s type of help — “Local companies offer to hire Carrier employees who will soon lose their jobs”
