SPECIAL TO THE DAILY NEWS
February 5, 2017
An infinitesimal number of people in human history know what it's like to possess many millions or billions of dollars.
Money to keep your descendants rich long after you're dead. Money to follow whatever impulse coursing through your brain. Money beyond all reason.
Money that tends to surround you with people who praise you at every turn and nod when you speak.
Donald Trump, by most accounts, is the wealthiest person to ever occupy the White House, though details of his income and wealth won't be known until he releases his tax returns, which will probably be never.
His cabinet-in-waiting and inner circle is undoubtedly the richest ever assembled. Betsy DeVos, Wilbur Ross and Linda McMahon are all billionaires. Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state, is worth hundreds of millions. Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser, occupies a similar stratum, and the architect of Trump's apocalyptic nationalism, Steve Bannon, is an alt-right mogul who has earned a fortune from Seinfeld royalties, despite never working on the show.
Being extraordinarily rich, either through inheritance or hard work or some combination of the two, may or may not be an indicator of aptitude.
But one thing is certain: With great wealth comes great confidence. If you've acquired a fortune in the private sector, and the swagger to match, the public sector must seem wholly tamable, crammed with bureaucrats who've never had a "real job" or had to claw for a paycheck in a world without discernable safety nets. "I alone can fix it," Trump declared at the Republican National Convention, a show of hubris that comes with believing you've amassed enough money to do just about anything — including running the United States of America.
It wasn't the first or last time Trump saw a straight line between business-world success and a string of certain victories in public service. "I'm the most successful person ever to run for the presidency, by far," Trump boasted in 2015, shortly before he kicked off his campaign. "Nobody's ever been more successful than me."
The fatal flaw in Trump's psychology is endemic to many wealthy people who attempt new ventures. Prior spectacular success (Trump's business triumphs are debatable, but he at least has enough money to campaign in a private jet) clouds doubt, and a messianic assumption takes hold: Whatever I do, it must be right.
For New Yorkers, this mindset was often evident in a man who would go on to become Trump's harsher critics, Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg, the self-made billionaire and former three-term mayor, was transformative, rightly recognized for leading the nation in banning indoor smoking, repurposing post-industrial waste for parkland and guiding the city out of its post-9/11 doldrums. His national campaigns for gun control and against obesity were commendable.
And unlike Trump, Bloomberg usually surrounded himself with a cadre of qualified individuals willing to disagree with him when the time came.
Even still, the man's Pharaonic net worth fueled a singular arrogance that was ultimately his undoing. Though he never declared, like Trump, that "I alone" can fix the city, his actions spoke to that sentiment. In 2003, as rising real estate prices began to drive the city's middle class and poor to the fringes, he said that New York was a "luxury product," not the "lowest-priced product" like Walmart. If working stiffs couldn't live here, too bad.
After the 2008 economic collapse, he engineered an overturning of the popular term limits law, granting himself a third term. He reasoned that New York needed his financial expertise one more time, rejecting the notion that any other leader, Democratic or Republican, was fit to lead the city.
Bloomberg's third term, borne out of this arrogance, marred what could have been a far more uplifting legacy. His choice of Cathie Black, a Kushner-like neophyte when it came to education, as the city schools chancellor was so disastrous that the former Hearst executive resigned after only 95 days.
When a blizzard rocked the city in 2010, Bloomberg blithely encouraged residents to take in a Broadway show and rode out the storm Bermuda, his weekend getaway. More miseries piled up later, from the CityTime corruption scandal to Hurricane Sandy, a storm the city failed to adequately respond to, leaving residents homeless for years.
Most unfortunately, perhaps, Bloomberg allowed his unflagging belief in himself to cloud his ability to respond to complaints about his police department. Since he, as a powerful white man, never knew what it was like to have a police officer stop and search him repeatedly, he disregarded the pain of black and brown New Yorkers, and indulged in Trumpian hyperbole when activists and Democrats called for the NYPD to curtail the ballooning number of stop-and-frisks, telling reporters in 2013 he "wouldn't want to be responsible for a lot of people dying."
There was never much soul-searching from Bloomberg. Even today, he would never lament the unintended consequences of his economic policies, like the rampant gentrification driving ever increasing numbers of poor and working-class people out of the city. For Bloomberg and Trump, apologies are all but nonexistent.
How could a relative pauper possibly pass judgment on a man with enough money to purchase a small nation-state?
Perhaps it comes down to this: The ultra-wealthy, especially those who owe a great deal of their wealth to family and circumstance, forget how much they owe to happenstance. They misconstrue lucky breaks with native skill. The happenstance and circumstance, the narrative-ruining realities of genetics and timing, are conveniently forgotten.
Trump has credited his own brainpower-a "winning gene" in at least one interview-with his success.
As the late Wayne Barrett meticulously documented, Trump owes many of his accomplishments in the real estate world to his father, one of New York's most powerful developers. Fred Trump's substantial wealth and political connections paved the way for Trump in Manhattan, allowing him both an entry point into a rarefied world and a cushion for his monumental failures. His father had to sign his bank documents.
So far, Trump's White House is not only America's wealthiest, but perhaps its most incompetent. Yes, it's early, and all administrations are prone to rookie mistakes. But Trump has surrounded himself with so few humble, practiced hands than he's dramatically increased the odds of making major mistakes.
He is far rasher and more impulsive than Bloomberg ever was, so hideously cocksure that he can hardly trust anyone but himself.
Have any doubt that Trump doesn't know what he doesn't know? Recall his regular boasts that he knew more about ISIS than the generals do, and had good reason to trust sources other than the U.S. intelligence community.
The shoddy execution of the immigration ban demonstrated the consequences of such an attitude in horrifying real-time. Trump's executive order barring citizens and refugees from seven Muslim-majority nations, beyond its immorality, was implemented in isolation, undertaken as only a tone-deaf mogul with excessive confidence in his own abilities would.
The State Department, the Defense Department and the Justice Department did not help him craft it. Trump's secretary of homeland security, John Kelly, only saw the details shortly before the order was finalized.
The result? American citizens and green card holders, in addition to refugees who thought they'd already secured a place in our nation, were halted at airports. Chaos ensued. Officials on the ground scrambled to catch up. Federals judges issued stays.
Around the same time he was signing the immigration executive order, Trump was elevating Bannon to a post on the National Security Council while limiting the roles of his Joint Chiefs of Staff and director of National Intelligence. Bannon has no foreign policy experience. But he is rich and Trump likes what he says. In Trump's Alice in Wonderland White House, a deficiency of expertise is an asset, and pretenders truly can inherit the throne.
The pretenders may well have cost the life of an American Navy SEAL. Over dinner, less than a week into taking office, Trump hastily approved a military raid in Yemen to gather intelligence on an Al Qaeda collaborator. The raid was risky and the Obama administration had postponed the operation. But with Bannon and Kushner's blessing — the two men of course attended the dinner with military advisers — the soldiers were sent into combat. There is risk inherent in any such operation, and we'll never know exactly what to attribute to poor planning. But we do know that Trump's team made a series of bad judgments.
Al Qaeda fighters knew they were coming, dooming the raid. In addition to the American commando, several civilians died, including the 8-year-old daughter of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born Al Qaeda leader who was killed in a drone strike in 2011. A $75 million aircraft was also destroyed.
Past Presidents understood that advisers with high-level experience in government were mandatory. Even Presidents who experienced meteoric rises, like Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, knew they needed to surround themselves with experts and seasoned hands. They knew from their careers as elected officials, attorneys and, in Obama's case, activism, that magic wands and obscene self-regard are not enough to move Washington.
Bannon and Kushner, with egos to match their bank accounts, are little more than enablers in this shambolic new order, overmatched for the tasks ahead of them. Kushner was a largely ineffective steward of a mid-sized, weekly newspaper, and a real estate developer who never would have had a career without his father, a self-made millionaire like Fred Trump.
After overseeing a presidential campaign that was largely improvised by Trump himself and the beneficiary of extraordinary luck, including a historically unpopular Democratic nominee, Kushner has been elevated to heights once unimaginable.
Money can't buy foresight or experience. This is something the historically unpopular Trump White House will learn soon enough.
===================================================
The old adage, "never wrestle with a pig. You'll both get dirty, and the pig likes it," holds especially true here, since most billionaires or millionaires aren't sincere nor willing to make positive contributions to uplift humanity.
No comments:
Post a Comment