Elon Musk and Donald Trump. Images: Musk, Marcel Grabowski / UK Government. Trump, Gage Skidmore. Both via Wiki Commons
Elon Musk and Donald Trump. Images: Musk, Marcel Grabowski / UK Government. Trump, Gage Skidmore. Both via Wiki Commons
It is good to be the king as they say, but America has always been a bad place to try and build a kingdom.
Republished with permission from Steve Schmidt
Any person who has been to an American ski or summer resort will have had the experience of being served by a young foreign worker.
Young people from across the globe are able to have an incredible experience in the United States, and meet the American people while seasonal businesses have access to a low-cost work force.
Mar-a-Lago is a perfect example of the type of private clubs that are all over Florida that are filled with foreign workers working at wages below market rates.
Two years ago, I was having a conversation about foreign workers in a Florida club when a member of the club said that they were necessary because Americans didn’t want to do the jobs.
It is a common refrain and a deeply embedded dogma at this point, but wholly untrue. It is deeply rooted in a mythology that has obliterated the concept of how markets should work.
The issue isn’t that Americans don’t want to fill service jobs at Florida clubs like Mar-a-Lago. It is that they don’t want to do it for the wages paid to European teenagers on an excellent adventure.
Living wages set by the marketplace would dictate either less profit for Mar-a-Lago’s owners, or higher costs for Mar-a-Lago’s members. What is the right thing to do for the American worker?
The answer is obvious. Tighter job markets increase wages, and in America, too many people work too many jobs in an economy covered by people on TV who make millions of dollars a year—sometimes millions per month.
Fifty dollars per hour across 40 hours per week creates an annual gross income of $104,000.
Imagine being the person making $100,000 a year and living so frugally that you were able to save 40 per cent of your NET salary EVERY year. After 25 years, there would be almost enough to pay the initiation fee at Mar-a-Lago, and be served a juicy Jared burger by a Bulgarian teenager making $8 per hour.
Donald Trump will step forward with his chin on January 20th. His rhetoric does not match reality.
The laws of physics hold that two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Let’s imagine that this is true of ideas as well.
Trump will proclaim himself as all powerful. He will claim that he has fixed everything that is broken in America before very long. He will spin magical yarns about making America great again, and everywhere he goes he will brag about fixing every problem except one.
Yours.
When it comes to your problems, Trump will say that he doesn’t have the power to do that.
Even the most powerful wizard of all will eventually run out of winged monkeys to attack the truth.
I was driving across Oklahoma a few weeks back. It made me think of the opening to “The Grapes of Wrath,” which tells the story of the great migration west to California from the Dust Bowl.
The language is exquisite—the suffering and rapaciousness tangible:
The Oklahoma territory existed outside of the Union as a repository for American Indians, whose trail of tears ended there.
Once commonly known as Indian Country, Oklahoma is the home of the Cherokee Nation and 37 other federally-recognized Native American tribes, including the Osage.
When is the last time that an American television network said the words “Cherokee Nation” or “Navajo Nation” on a national newscast?
I wonder if any thought has been given to covering the obligation of the United States Congress to seat a delegate of the Cherokee Nation as required under treaty as the 119th Congress convenes. Perhaps it might be good to think of the rule of law again—outside the example of Donald Trump.
Perhaps it might be good for Democrats to embrace the unseen and unheard Americans, and meet them where they are, as opposed to reaching out with photos from the Met Gala.
Who will speak for the unbanked?
Who will see the American wage earner and farmer, and most importantly, see their titanic dignity?
There are 340 million souls in the United States, and the news media doesn’t just ignore most of them, but holds them in cruel contempt.
What cable show speaks for the American farmer, or trucker?
Where does opportunity come from in America?
What restricts opportunity?
Do the giant monopolies that control vast sectors of the US economy and manipulate opinion with algorithms serve the American republic and the American citizen?
Do the giant monopolies that control the agricultural sector serve the interests of the American farmer and citizen?
Do the billionaires who spent hundreds of millions electing Trump do it because they wanted to help you, or make themselves richer? Do they expect anything in return?
Donald Trump is the king of the hill. He has taken the proverbial castle, and it is the castle that he must now defend from the horde he incited and will soon disappoint.
Who will highlight the contradictions and absurdities?
Who will refuse to get in line?
There is a word for most of the people cheering Trump and Musk.
It would have been instantly recognized by any English Lord from the 14th century transported to our current idiocracy: serf.
Are we to be a nation of unseen serfs pitted against each other by a few billionaires who live as kings, and control everything everywhere?
Elon Musk has embraced his white South African pedigree with a zeal that would have made even the most vicious Afrikaner beating in a black skull with a club smile in delight. Whether cheerleading for the British racist Tommy Robinson or the German AFD, which holds that the SS was not a criminal organization, Elon Musk is dropping the curtain. Following the connective thread is not difficult—or rather should not be—but for much of America’s media it is a bridge too far. For them, it is better to pretend that it isn’t happening. The news these days is often what can be seen and heard, but is not allowed to be spoken. That’s too bad because the danger is coming closer.
Donald Trump and Elon Musk are kings in America. Their courts are happy, fat, rich and powerful. Millions of people whom they disdain and despise cheer for them, and will countenance no criticisms of them.
It is good to be the king as they say, but America has always been a bad place to try and build a kingdom.
There is a simple reason for that, and it has do with the national character.
I remember reading somewhere once upon a time about a land of fierce people who topple kings because “all men are created equal,” and some people have an allergy to tyranny in all its many forms.
Steve Schmidt is a political analyst for MSNBC and NBC News. He served as a political strategist for George W. Bush and the John McCain presidential campaign. Schmidt is a founder of The Lincoln Project, a group founded to campaign against former President Trump. It became the most financially successful Super-PAC in American history, raising almost $100 million to campaign against Trump's failed 2020 re-election bid. He left the group in 2021.
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