Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Donald J. Trump were born rich. They were born 64 years and 214.3 miles apart in very different times ─ FDR at the cusp of the last century, Trump in the very first year of the exhaustively studied Baby Boomer years. Culturally, the two presidents were and are very different, with FDR exhibiting the personal restraint expected of an American Brahmin and Trump opting for a newly fashionable extravagant display of wealth, to the point of gilding the White House in fake gold paint to shiny, low-budget whorehouse standards. Growing up, the whole world was open to these two men, who knew neither hunger nor the adolescent embarrassment of wearing hand-me-down clothes to the prom.
As a second comparison, in his memoir Man of the House, legendary House Speaker Tip O’Neill (tenure 1977-1987) pondered how he and his political contemporary and nemesis Ronald Reagan, both born into middle-class families of modest means, could have ended up on such opposite sides of the political divide. O’Neill blamed it on Reagan’s move to Hollywood and his new circle of rich friends, eventually dubbing Reagan “Herbert Hoover with a smile,” and “a cheerleader for selfishness.”
So how did these four national leaders, half born rich and half born middle class, end up with such divergent world views? Empathy ─ the ability to understand and feel what others feel ─ played a big part in it. The two empathic men, FDR and Tip O’Neill, couldn’t look away when faced with the poverty and suffering of the poor they represented. Reagan and Trump couldn’t care less about them. Reagan belittled “welfare queens” and counted ketchup as a fresh vegetable in subsidized school lunches. Trump gazes out at his country’s ocean of need and feels nothing other than the urgency to swerve quickly around his people’s struggles like the speed bumps he believes them to be.
It struck me while watching Trump’s self-congratulatory news conference last week that, through his own self-absorbed lens, everything looks great. The stock market is booming, employment is booming (though the nature of unfilled jobs is rarely unexplored), unemployment is down (never including those who have timed out of unemployment benefits and become invisible to the stats), and Trump’s minions are working hard to increase tax cuts for corporations and the über rich while steadily broadening the executive branch’s reach, even into the hallowed halls of the Supreme Court where he treats justices he appointed as employees beholden to him personally.
My American history high school teacher said, shockingly in 1968, that she could care less if people are racist, that trying to change a bigot’s mind is a fool’s errand. What she said she cared very much about was that no one be allowed to act in a racist or discriminatory manner, whatever the issue: racial, gender-based, or for any other societal reason. This is why we need to strengthen laws prohibiting discrimination instead of eliminating them ─ laws and that can hopefully withstand the Trump steamroller that views them as annoying speed bumps to circumvent rather than as protection against a President who cares nothing about them.
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