American Gargoyles

The Grotesquery of Trump's Billionaires

The gulf between rich and poor in this country is vast but not always physically unbridgeable. One winter night a few years ago, I crossed it, memorably. At a swellegant dinner, I met and spoke with the richest man in the world, a small, bald, and skittishly aloof fellow named Jeff. I had come to the dinner hoping to suggest to Mr. Bezos that he invest in the failing legacy news magazine that then employed me. I delivered my plea in the minute or two before his people hustled him off to other supplicants, then left and made my way to the Times Square subway. Racing to catch a coming train, I caught the heel of my boot on the top step and fell a full flight down, landing near the lap of a homeless man clad in rags. The indigent held out his hand helped me to my feet, and asked if I was ok. 

The polarity of those two moments has a fairy tale quality, although I have never managed to attach a moral or story to connect them. It’s just life in the big city, one of those social oxymorons that journalists and the curious might relish. Bezos never got back to me. I, humiliated but unbruised because swaddled in a fur hat and down coat, brushed myself off and boarded the train, after thanking the man who had helped me up and assuring him I was fine. 

I thought about this moment while watching a billionaire Trump supporter’s video statement released recently. Smug, self-satisfied, arrogant, lit and filmed from slightly below, a man in a suit and tie delivers an astonishing monologue. He urges Americans not to care if Trump “isn’t a good role model for children,” or if Trump “says silly things.” He plans to and wants you to vote for him because “the times demand it.” What are these times of which he warns? Wartime of course. But he’s not talking about a foe abroad. 

“We are in a war fighting an enemy of revolutionaries that kick and spit on America,” he says in what he clearly considers to be oratorical delivery, while scenes of BLM protests and people taking down Confederate monuments loop near his face. 

“I call this enemy the woke regime or the group quota regime.” 

The speaker, New York billionaire Tom Klingenstein, calls himself a “writer, playwright, investor,” but he clearly bought the first two labels with the hoard amassed via the third. Klingenstein is a partner in an investment firm with a $2.3 billion portfolio and is the son of an investor. Unlike other members of his family who put the Klingenstein name on medical pavilions and other civic enterprises, he is throwing the family fortune at a fascist buffoon. He apparently got to this ideological vanishing point after years bankrolling what has become a nest of ultra-rightists called the Claremont Institute. 

As a billionaire Trump donor, Klingenstein belongs to a club of men whose combined individual wealth is astronomical, who could do much good, but who have decided to invest it in Donald Trump and his MAGA movement. Some made their money on Wall Street like the strange, cat-loving Bannon-enabler Robert Mercer and John Paulson, investor and chairman of a Mar a Largo Trump fundraiser last weekend that hauled in $50 million for the Marmalade-colored accused felon. Other members of the claque got rich cornering the market on quotidian essentials, like the Uihlein family of Wisconsin who turned their dad’s workingman beer company into a trucking and cardboard box concern in time to catch the end of the brick-and-mortar store - and now pour money into Trump and issues like battling gun reform. 

The Trump years have surpassed language in some ways. There is a meanness in the Klingenstein video, a righteousness and aggressive hypocrisy that almost defies polite description. The video is instructive because Klingenstein is unabashed about what the rest of his clan tries not to say: they know they are financing a completely unfit man to be The Leader of the Western World because he’s willing to break the rules of democracy and because the ends justify the means. “If they manage to put him in jail, he will still roar like a lion,” Klingenstein says.

This lawless man is their chosen “commander” in a war with other Americans, “an enemy within,” that is, anyone at a systemic disadvantage due to race, gender, or social class trying or needing to level the playing field. 

Klingenstein makes much of the dangers migrants pose to “our American culture” while making clear he completely misunderstands that American culture is by definition a multi-culture, built on waves of newcomers and their culture and traditions.

There were no Uihliens and Klingensteins and Mercers and Paulsons in this land before anyone else. Unless I’m missing some family lore yet to be revealed, there was no Klingenstein among the original inhabitants of America. None of their forebears were among indigenous people who watched as first one, then another, then another white European popped up on the coasts and in the great forests until suddenly they were everywhere building Dollar Generals.

One does not find the Klingenstein name among the signers of the Constitution, those founding fathers Mr. Klingenstein alludes to as he insists migrants don’t share our way of life.

But it is a good bet the first Klingenstein to arrive in America was fleeing instability, poverty, discrimination, or violence somewhere else. Like the newcomers from south of the border today - those un-American Americans who clean hotels and patch potholes on bridges in the middle of the night - the first American Klingensteins didn’t arrive enjoying all the gifts of Wall Street, the bespoke suits, expensive media advisors and access to potential presidents that the current heir enjoys.

The video is disgusting to watch in its smug audacity, righteousness, self-satisfaction, preening. Here is the beneficiary of generations of American open-heartedness, Ellis Island’s multicultural intake valve, living out every immigrant ancestors’ dream, advocating yanking up the ladder, and supporting a man who has promised to ignore democratic processes that are the bedrock of the national culture he extolls.

Mr. Klingenstein and the cynical billionaires who support Trump - whether feverishly with piles of ill-gotten wealth or passively by not using their wealth and influence to try to stop the fascist train - are the real enemy within. They are the 21st Century American version of the German industrialists and bankers and wealthy families who bankrolled Hitler and the Nazis in the 1930s, similarly whipped into a frenzy over communism, willing to finance jackboot thugs to protect their interests against the interests of the nation.

The superrich American enablers of fascism justify ends with means because they imagine themselves under assault and more inherently worthy of their wealth and status than the less advantaged. The MAGA bankrollers believe that great individual wealth is a sign of the holder’s innate superiority, not the lucky fallout of nepotism, whiteness, healthy childhood, and access to education. They are susceptible to scary warnings about “woke communism” applied top every statute or regulation aimed at making life one iota easier for the disadvantaged, from student loan debt relief, to DEI in hiring and education, limits on fossil fuels - even as their wholly owned subsidiary the U.S. Supreme Court is already well along in process of dismantling all of that.

How can anyone be so rich and still so worried about losing everything?  We can only suppose that like the enablers of Hitler, for these ultra-right American oligarchs, the enduring fear of “communism” grows more threatening as the unearned pile expands (fun fact: Bezos made more than $7 million a minute last year, much of which time he appears to have spent lolling on the Aegean with Lauren Sanchez). 

It might not be enough to live in a gated manse, to travel with security and by private jet, to vacation on one’s yacht, to be oiled and waxed and fed and yes’d by a retinue of servants and managers. Maybe in never having to encounter a poor man in rags, one becomes, like Klingenstein and the other Trump billionaires, more afraid of him, more obsessed with the potential power and desperation of such people, and ever more concerned about losing one single dollar or a square inch of one’s vast domain.

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