Seventy years ago, an Australian mused that “Americans had a taste for a ‘democracy of manners,’ which was not the same as real democracy,” Nancy Isenberg wrote in White Trash: The 400-year-old Untold History of Class in America.
“He meant that voters accepted huge disparities in wealth but at the same time expected their leaders to ‘cultivate the appearance of being no different from the rest of us,’” she added.
The Aussie’s observation reminded me of Donald Trump’s fast-food fake out.
Trump was born rich and is evidently richer. (We still haven’t seen his tax returns.) Yet he wants us to believe he’s just a Big Mac-doting, blue-collar everyman at heart.
“But his highbrow, lowbrow image — of the jet-setting mogul who takes buckets of fried chicken onto his private plane with the gold-plated seatbelt buckles — is also a carefully crafted one,” wrote Ashley Parker of The New York Times back on the campaign trail.
I can imagine the cries of “fake news” from Trump and the Ever Trumpers over that.
Of course, Trump’s appeal to the Ever Trumpers — almost all of them white folks — is a lot more than a shared love affair with serum cholesterol. He’s their Great White Hope, who panders non-stop to prejudice – from racism, sexism, and misogyny to xenophobia, nativism, and religious bigotry.
Trump, too, is a plutocrat who is part and parcel of America’s moneyed elite. But when he rails against elites, the Ever Trumpers eat it up faster than the president can polish off a pair of Big Macs and a large order of fries.
Anyway, Parker quoted a Republican strategist and ad crafter: “There’s nothing more American and more of-the-people than fast food. It is the peculiarity of the brand that he’s able to be on his multimillion-dollar jet with the gold and black branding and colors, and at the same time eat KFC — and what makes it perfect is he does it all with a knife and fork, while reading The Wall Street Journal.”
Trump courtier Kellyanne Conway told Parker: “It goes with his authenticity. I don’t think Hillary Clinton would be eating Popeye’s biscuits and fried chicken.”
Of course, Trump’s a phony populist. Trump’s authenticity is a core conviction that the fundamental goal of government is to make rich people richer, especially him.
Trump’s not the only wealthy New Yorker to occupy the White House. The last one said this: “I believe with Abraham Lincoln, that ‘The legitimate object of Government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done but cannot do at all or cannot do so well for themselves in their separate and individual capacities.’”
That president was a patrician who was partial to cigarette holders and pince-nez spectacles. When he talked, he sounded like an old-money blue blood and a “Hahvad” man, which he was.
He eschewed Trump-style demagoguery, race-baiting, and immigrant-bashing. He teamed up with a Congress dominated by his party to do more than any president before — or since — to enact legislation to uplift real everymen and everywomen.
Oh, the plutocrats loathed him. Some wouldn’t even speak his name; they scorned him as “that man.”
His support among working class voters dwarfs Trump’s. (Contrary to conventional wisdom, better-heeled white folks without college degrees — many of them Christian evangelicals — are Trump’s key demographic, according to Times pundit Thomas B. Edsall. Most union members voted for the alleged Popeye-avoider over Trump, by about 55-38 percent, if polling guru Nate Silver is right.)
Trump lost the popular vote and won the presidency only by another electoral college fluke. The other president won 42 out of 48 states, more than 57 percent of ballots cast — about 80 percent from union members — and piled up 472 electoral votes to 59 for his opponent.
That other president was — you guessed it — Franklin D. Roosevelt, “the first man in the White House to understand that my boss is a son of a bitch,” according to a South Carolina mill worker.
No matter how many burgers Trump bolts, he’s just another boss.
[click_to_tweet tweet=”No matter how many burgers Trump bolts, he’s just another boss. – Berry Craig” quote=”No matter how many burgers Trump bolts, he’s just another boss. – Berry Craig”]
Tweedy, aristocratic Wall Street Republicans might cringe at Trump’s corrupt, mob-boss-style presidency, and his nouveau riche boorishness, shallowness, willful ignorance, preening narcissism, and ostentatious self-aggrandizing. But they’re still on Team Trump because they know that that deep down inside this venal variant of the amiable Al Czervik in Caddyshack is someone who is one of them and will deliver for them.
History will not be kind to Trump, the most brazenly corrupt president in American history. With a year still to go on his first term, Trump is the third-worst president ever, according to the latest Siena College Research Institute’s survey of historians. In time, presidential scholars doubtless will send King Leer to the bottom past womanizing Warren G. Harding (R) and spineless Franklin Pierce (D) as the biggest bust of all.
I don’t give a flip if Trump or any other politician prefers an Egg McMuffin to Eggs Benedict or KFC to volaille de Bresse, fancy French chicken. I also couldn’t care less how any of them stack up in those asinine which-politician-would-you-want-to-have-a-beer-with surveys.
A politician can be irascible, an egghead, and challenged in the congeniality department. All that counts with me is where he or she stands on my issues. The one that’s closest gets my vote.
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