'Working Class Hero'

Donald Trump has never worked an honest day in his life. Neither have his children - they are a lazy family of drug addicts and entitled grifters; mediocrity personified.

The entitlement that oozed off of that clan of conmen and women when I worked around them on a D-list game show was palpable. The thing that one noticed first was just how broken they were as people - irritating, vacuous and under the influence, both of substances and greed.

I remember having to show up five hours early to meet Vanky’s glam squad in the basement parking garage of the Museum of National History where the finale episodes were shot towards the end of the series run. She would show up past her call time and saunter in from her limo with a bevy of assistants.

Vanky was the only member of the cast to receive a trailer and her demand was that it be extra large. She clearly viewed herself as the queen of that murky kingdom.

At that point the show seemed to exist only to fill the pockets of the Trump family and provide a meet and greet for them to mix and mingle with various Russian mobsters and gangsters. Trump himself would wait in the hallway outside the after-party until the room was suitably packed and then make a grand entrance surrounded by a phalanx of private security guards, as if he was already a head of state.

It was one of the more pathetic and desperate stunts I have witnessed but in hindsight a harbinger of what was to come. The man is nothing if not needy.

Melania was mostly absent and out of it and clearly had nothing but contempt for the rest of the family, a feeling that seemed to be mutual. Marriages of convenience and contractual obligation were nothing new; Vanky and Jared seemed to have perfected the art of business arrangement passed off as familial bond.

I remember an instance when Trump demanded a golf cart to travel fifty feet from his SUV into the backstage area; another time when a member of the production team’s transportation department attempted to open a car door for Don Jr. upon his arrival to set and he curtly instructed them, ‘I can get my own door!’. Little big man had arrived.

Eric seemed the dumbest of the bunch, his homeliness was clearly a contention point for his father who also kept his daughter Tiffany at arm’s length for the series run.

To a man as insecure and incompetent as Trump, image is everything.

He has built a kingdom on lies and illusion, masking the nefarious underworld in which he swims freely by courting an image that corporate media was only too happy to help propagate.

Trump understands greed and he sniffs it out of his partners and public - and acts accordingly; feeding his own narcissism and appealing to the avarice of those around him. He is a man whose only labor is the exploitation of others - including his racist exploits and decades of sexual predation with Jeffrey Epstein.

It has been a winning formula for him for too long - the sooner we cut off his supply of attention and opportunity, the sooner we begin to break free. Trump may hold the cards in this moment but he is very much a man without the mettle needed to sustain his assault on our democracy if we can become organized and strategic in our response.

The folks in Trump world that I knew were looking to expand his empire and solidify their power base and grifting opportunities. This was long before he ran for POTUS. Trump was still a registered Democrat when I began my time on the show, but with the advent of the Obama administration and his newfound love of online trolling and fomenting racist conspiracy theories, he seemed to have found a new purchase in the art of exploiting socio-economic resentments and reaching into the pockets of working class, mostly red state, Americans.

Ironically, just the sort of people his family would gleefully refer to as ‘trailer trash’. It would be hard to emphasize just how far above the folks that support them the Trump clan view themselves; it is no accident they spend most of their time in places like Palm Beach, Indian Creek Island, Bedminster and Fifth Avenue.

Not to mention the White House which has taken on the chintzy pallor of a wedding hall in Paramus, or one of Imelda Marcos’s shoe rooms.

They will never want for the things in life that most families struggle to provide - healthcare, affordable housing, higher education and a standard of living that used to be an integral part of the American dream.

A dream that is turning into a nightmare now that the leading cause of death for children is firearms, and the CDC has fallen under attack by RFK, Jr. (another scion of a wealthy clan who has never really worked an honest day in his life). Bobby seems to inhabit the polar opposite of his uncle’s famous entreaty to an earlier generation, “Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country”. He seems dead set on destroying public health in the United States - it’s nothing short of criminal.

RFK Jr. is all but ensuring we no longer have the capacity to respond to global pandemics while making vaccinations harder research, distribute and develop. This will be fatal to many children and elderly people in the not so distant future.

Science itself is under attack; we should take a long, hard look at who is doing this and why. An unhealthy, uneducated population, where basic healthcare becomes a luxury item out of the reach of many of our fellow citizens, is not a country many would envy. It is a country being plundered and destroyed from within by a man with a decades-long allegiance to Vladimir Putin and many ties to Russian organized crime.

Trump himself is physically and mentally deeply unwell - and has all but disappeared from the public eye over the last several days. He will cloister himself out of the press’s view and accuse anyone seeking transparent information on POTUS’s health as conspiracy theorists.

DJT has been hiding his myriad ailments and addictions for decades and has a cadre of immoral sycophants willing to go along with the deception. Down to the Secret Service that began a break with protocol and ethics during his first term. Not to mention folks like Ronnie Jackson and Sean Conley that as White House physicians helped him turn his bout with COVID into a photo-op, which culminated in a Mark Burnett-produced campaign commercial, espousing his virility and stamina. (The long, slow helicopter ride over the Potomac at sunset was a Burnett-signature shot. Trump had to be talked out of taking of his dress shirt off to reveal a Superman emblem when alighting Walter Reed - no joke. We all remember his dramatic removal of his mask upon wheezing himself up the South Portico stairs of the White House).

That Secret Service destroyed text messages from January 6th, and the agents closest to Trump accepted reassignments outside of DC rather than turn on the boss; their apparent allegiance of course culminated in his Butler, Pennsylvania ‘assassination attempt’ which would never hold up under any real scrutiny but much of the mainstream media still seems to accept as fact.

Several of the women in Trump’s immediate family reportedly had affairs with Secret Service agents during his first term; often times seemingly relegated to becoming shopping companions on Worth Avenue and baggage handlers over the elite protection service we had always known.

Like every other agency, Trump has a way of sniffing out the folks that will do his bidding and purging the ones who will stand in his way. This makes all of us much less safe - and it is as unpatriotic as it is reprehensible. POTUS has always had an uncanny way of bending folks who wear a badge or uniform to his will.

One might have thought the U.S. government would have been harder to infiltrate and denigrate in such a rapid fashion but MAGA-ism is a psychological disease in and of itself - and authoritarian regimes have a long and violent history of exploiting blindspots and weakness in the public psyche and using them to foment their ignoble desires.

I am afraid this dynamic is reaching its apex in modern day America and we won’t recognize much of what we took for granted about the U.S.A. in another six months.

Labor Day Weekend belongs to all Americans, but most especially the sort of hardworking folks that Trump has both turned against and enlisted as foot soldiers in his terrible reign.

Visit a job site in the United States and what you will most likely witness is hard working immigrants doing the lion’s share of the work, with skill and precision, while a white contractor in a shiny new mega-pickup truck, festooned with flags and MAGA stickers, supervises.

Extend this tableau out to a federal infrastructure or state construction project and you will most likely see dollars and jobs pouring into the local economy thanks to the Biden Administration’s legislation - all of which was opposed by every member of the GOP during his term.

They now claim credit for it, as does Trump, who hasn’t passed any significant legislation that benefits anyone other than the wealthy. His ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’, passed earlier this summer, is all but a death knell for the working class folks he has hoodwinked. That so many of them continue to support him is the irony of our age and will come at a cost that will be a burden for generations to come.

Many of us now in our middle age can hardly imagine the country that today’s children will inherit. Climate change alone will reshape much of the landscape - and the gutting of FEMA and the CDC, as well as the attacks of NIH, USAID and the promoting of the NRA and Christofascist agenda of ‘America First’, will make for a dark place indeed.

It is incumbent upon all of us to recognize this reality and react swiftly to the storm clouds that are gathering. We are not powerless - and we must recognize our innate ability to promote a peaceful alternative the cruelty and rancor of our age.

Ignorance is abated in the sunlight of the spirit. Peace and non-violent action are more necessary than ever before. We should look to each other for strength.

Most of the folks who voted for MAGA have much more in common with the folks they are demonizing than the billionaires who are backing their destruction. Fox News, ‘Bro-Country pablum and puffy-lipped plastic patriotism may seem appealing to them now but I have faith they will come to see through the illusion when reality finally sinks in and the sugar-high of being anti-woke and ‘owning the libs’ wears off.

French-fried fascism eventually leads to heartburn. Open hearts lead to positive change, progress and equanimity.

Looking out for our neighbors and lending a helping hand to those that need it. The ‘American way’ used to mean something in the world: it is time to return to our previous ideals. A land where hard work and determination are met with opportunity for all those willing to seek it out. This of course was all too often not the case for many, but the systems put in place to correct our shortcomings are being dismantled before our very eyes.

Before it is too late we must remember who we want to be and what we are collectively working towards.

We owe it to the many decades of hard work that so many generations before us put in to roll up our sleeves and expedite this process.

This Labor Day we need to get to work. While we still can.

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