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Okay, I know I have all of ~20 followers, but I just have to get this out. Trump. Is. Not. Elite. He never has been. Let me explain.
Trump is from Jamaica Estates, Queens. Nice area, largely built by his dad. Lived in a nice house,what would eventually become a prototype for the suburban McMansion.
His dad, Fred Trump, was a German immigrant who built utilitarian, middle-class housing developments all over the outer boroughs. Those places are still around. Trump City. Trump Village.
He made money, lots of it, thanks to government housing contracts after the depression and cutting costs in every way possible. So yeah, the Trumps were rich. But they weren't the old 400. Elite kids of that time had dads with seats on the stock exchange, not Woody Guthrie folk
songs written about them. Elite boys of that time went to Buckley, St. Bernards. Not Kew Forest. They didn't choose to stay at home and go to Fordham for two years before transferring to Penn. That would have been highly unorthodox.
They weren't ostentatious. They were discreet. They stayed away from the media. They had plain wives they'd known their whole lives, not pageant queens or immigrant models. They were a tight-knit circle that eschewed flashiness of any kind, and Trump, with his Queens accent
and slumlord dad, wasn't invited. That's how we got here in the first place.
You can't get into the Social Register without at least three recommendations and a tough vetting, even today. It doesn't matter if you singlehandedly save Mar-A-Lago from demolition, you're still not going to be invited to the Bath and Tennis Club.
You can send your kids to private schools and have them live in a gilded tower like 80s Eloises. But unless you instill the right habits, instincts, and tastes in them, they STILL won't be elite, and neither will you.
Trump spent half of a century trying to get Manhattan to respect him, or at least give him the attention he thought he deserved. He had the gold-plated apartment, the hot wives and daughter (w/ plastic surge to help her out), the Penn BA, ownership of the Plaza, and people
still laughed at him. He bought more and more country estates, fixed Wollman Rink, donated to both political parties. People couldn't stop laughing. But when he ran for president (half-heartedly, mainly for publicity), he saw his chance. He could finally be respected.
All he had to do was govern and speak like a normal person. Palm Beach society still wouldn't love the guy, but they would respect him. He could pal around with Bush, Clinton, and Obama. But he couldn't even do that.
"But he IS the establishment!" You say. "He's a billionaire!" FFS, social class is barely about money. Al Gore and John Kerry had relatives pay for their educations at St. Albans and St. Paul's. They have a certain bearing that Trump doesn't and will never be able to replicate.
So did both Bushes. W's Texan accent was still typical of a good ol' boy from Tanglewood. He still could act right (or act wrong) in public. Trump is not elite, and now his kids won't be either.
/Fin.
