The Pettiness of It All

Morning Dispatch

Dana White, Donald, and Donald’s UFC World Heavyweight Championship belt that he totally won. [Photo Credit: Dan Scavino]

I had to work on a project over the weekend that, for a change, had nothing to do with politics or the current state of America. But before I unplugged, or, at any rate, shifted gears, I did a survey of all of the news from the past few weeks—some of it is meant to distract us, yet all of it is consequential to one degree or another:

Donald’s continuing to deploy military troops and federalized national guardsmen to Democratic cities; the Republican-led government shutdown now in its fourth week; the laying off thousands of federal employees in order to deny them back-pay when the government reopens; the corrupt indictments of New York Attorney General Letitia James and James Comey (John Bolton is a different story); the continuing abdication of some of the federal judiciary; the near-complete destruction of the Department of Justice; the total destruction of the East Wing; more corrupt pardons; more corrupt business deals.

The Trump regime continues to flood the zone and, in the midst of the chaos and the very real and increasing threats to state sovereignty, the safety of Donald’s perceived enemies, and our constitutional way of life, I sometimes think it’s the underlying pettiness of the people in the Trump regime that’s going to push me over the edge.

The immaturity, pre-pubescent hubris, and sneering contempt of Donald and those with whom he surrounds himself (like Stephen Miller, Kash Patel, and Pam Bondi) get under my skin in a way few other things do. And the idea that somebody as petty and vindictive and cartoonishly thuggish as Donald is admired by tens of millions of people--yes, sometimes that is what drives me crazy.

On a personal level, after the 2016 election, it was knowing that the worst, most incompetent yet self-important people I’d ever known had been chosen over somebody whose shoes he was not fit to shine. This replicated what had happened in my family, even though it took me a long time to make the connection. That’s because when I was growing up, I was kept in the dark about what my father had accomplished. My dad had put himself through flight school during college and then, at the dawn of the jet age, became a pilot for TWA flying 707s from Boston’s Logan airport to LAX. He was the only self-made man in my family who not only succeeded on his own, but he also succeeded, at least for a while, without the support of anybody in his family. In fact, he was treated with contempt.

Donald, on the other hand, couldn’t even get into college. When he graduated from New York Military Academy that spring, he hadn’t yet been accepted anywhere and asked his older sister, Maryanne, for help. She drove him around to local schools close enough to my grandparents’ house so he could commute, and Fordham University finally found a spot for him. Fordham, however, wasn’t prestigious enough for him. He had his sights set on the University of Pennsylvania and the Wharton School.

Because Maryanne did his homework for him and wrote his papers, his grades were decent enough, but he worried about the SATs. To hedge his bets, he paid a guy he knew, with a reputation for being a good test taker, to take his SATs for him. Just to be on the safe side, he also asked my dad to speak with his fraternity brother, who worked in Penn’s admissions office to put in a good word.

The pattern of the unfair advantage continued after Donald graduated from college in the late sixties. Within four years, my grandfather made him president of Trump Management despite my father’s seniority. At the time, the company was already worth hundreds of millions of dollars and for the next three decades, Donald received over $400 million in gifts and unpaid loans, as well as access to my grandfather’s considerable political and real estate connections. Three of his siblings got considerably less. My father got nothing.

Donald has been failing upward ever since.

Because my grandfather ran his family and business as a zero-sum game, the problem wasn’t simply that Donald usurped my father’s fortune and place as their father’s successor. His elevation meant my father’s destruction through humiliation. That’s the United States of America right now. It’s not enough that Donald has everything—more power than anybody on the planet, endless opportunities to increase his family’s wealth, unchecked corruption—but anybody who defies him or stands up to him or even does their job on accurately reporting on him or holding him accountable must, as far as he’s concerned, have their lives and their livelihoods destroyed. Just as was the case with my grandfather, having everything isn’t enough unless you’re able to humiliate the person you’ve stolen from.

The list of petty actions is itself practically limitless, from using the word “democrat” as an adverb to making the construction of a now-$350 million ballroom his priority during a government shutdown while over 600,000 civil servants have been furloughed and over 700,000 are working without pay.

There are plans to degrade the People’s House even further by hosting a series of UFC cage matches on the grounds to “celebrate” the 250^th anniversary of this nation’s founding. The once storied Kennedy Center, designed to honor the pinnacle of artistic achievement, will now honor politicians and businesspeople while focusing on “non-woke” productions like Cats.

Donald has recently ended trade negotiations with Canada and imposed a new ten-percent tariff simply because they ran an ad during the World Series of old footage of Ronald Reagan saying, in part: “High tariffs inevitably lead to retaliation by foreign countries and the triggering of fierce trade wars.”

None of this is new. Donald has been a past master of pettiness and humiliating others since he was a teenager. During his first term, he placed a credibly accused sexual predator on the Supreme Court and then replaced feminist icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg with Amy Coney Barrett, a religious zealot and misogynist. The far-reaching consequences of their decisions are what matter in both the short and long term but deliberately elevating two people who are wildly unfit was meant to drive us all crazy.

There are serious real-world consequences to the pettiness of the Trump regime’s actions, but knowing that the weakest, least qualified, and in many cases, most crass people at the highest echelons of our government are purposely trolling us in order to demoralize us often feels like a bridge too far. How much, after all, can we take?

Yes, it’s the pettiness, sometimes more than anything else, that makes it hard to saty connected to all the very serious ways in which the same people who delight in shoving their immature vindictiveness in our faces are also dismantling our democracy.

But I think I have an answer to the question: “How do we keep doing this work if I allow them to get under my skin in a way that, ultimately, doesn’t really matter?”

It’s simple: Letting them win in any way is unacceptable (just as letting my family win would have been)—especially in ways we can protect ourselves from. It’s a matter of taking it in stride and remembering—even if it isn’t always easy—to find solace in this thought:

It would be so much worse to be them.