I’ve been thinking about my father recently. Although he and my mother are now long dead, and I don’t think about them very often, I think of Dad less often, perhaps because he was a quiet man. Taciturn. Guarded. Thoughtful. Except, that is, when it came to his work and sometimes to politics and social issues, about which he could feel quite passionate. Those subjects were often intertwined for him, and he repeatedly tried to influence how his teenage son (me) thought about such things. Our dinner table arguments could get quite fierce. No matter what position one of us took, the other would leap to the opposite extreme even if we knew we were being absurd and actually pretty much agreed with each other. I often think I take after Dad in personality far more often than I ever thought I would or wanted to. Which just goes to show you … what? That fathers have far more influence than you think they do? That slow and steady sometimes wins the race? That male role models really do matter, that they make a difference (for good or ill)?
Why, you may well ask, do I bring this up now, at this juncture in our lives as Americans? It’s an accumulation of things that are not as disparate as they may first appear. Consider the following: Donald Trump (unfortunately, his name crops up all the time), the role of the super-wealthy in politics, and the ethics of Supreme Court justices. What is the common denominator in all these stories? Money. More specifically, the wealth of the uber-rich, the 1% or, maybe, the 0.1% of the 1%, and their relationship to the law and ethics. You could also say power, but I’ll stick with money because money in the quantity I’m talking about creates power or is, sometimes, a byproduct of power. And, yes, I know that Supreme Court justices are not billionaires, but I will note that extreme wealth can act like a magnet, which is the point.
F. Scott Fitzgerald was one of our greatest writers and social observers, no matter how much or little he is in favor these days in academia. The Great Gatsby is unquestionably one of the greatest American novels, with its observations of the wealthy at play. “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” Remind you of anyone? Or perhaps this from The Rich Boy, a short story: “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.”
I would differ only slightly in my appraisal. I would agree that we think that they think they are different from the rest of us. But I also think it’s not something they think about. They know they are better than us. They know it because the world tells them it is so. And it is that — that knowing without any thought involved — that allows people like Tom and Daisy to be careless and smash things and people up and just go on their merry way, leaving the debris in their wake.
Think for a moment about Trump. Unlike many extremely wealthy people, Trump wants us to think about him constantly. He’s been like that his entire life. His name is his brand, and he sells it daily to his associates and sycophants, his peers (despite their frequent — often hidden — disdain), and all the rest of us. As a businessman, he claimed that he was a builder. But he hasn’t been that for a long time and isn’t today. He makes money from licensing his name, which has supposed value because of his incessant self-promotion. But as a business creator, he has primarily been a failure. Whether it’s airlines, ties, mail-order meat and education, casinos, charities, or who knows what else, all these businesses have either been failures or downright fraudulent. And that doesn’t even touch the individuals, the subcontractors, and lawyers, among others, whom he has stiffed, daring them to sue him in court.
Abraham Lincoln did (or didn’t) say, “You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” It’s also been attributed to PT Barnum. Trump — huckster and snake oil salesman that he is — learned a lesson from it that is not possibly what Lincoln had in mind (if he had anything in mind because no one’s been able to find documentary evidence that he said it). He learned that you don’t need to fool all of the people of the time. You don’t even need to fool all of the people some of the time. You just need to fool some of the people all of the time. In that, he’s been enormously successful. And that, in a nutshell, explains Trump’s whole approach to politics and the presidency. Trump came to office promising to the MAGA world (a world that he either created or unmasked and invigorated) that he would be a destroyer and not a creator, that he would destroy the world that is. It’s not that he invented that mindset in Americans. It’s been a part of right-wing paranoia and on the fringe of Republican politics for decades. But because Trump became president, he amplified and legitimized it. His desire to destroy the world — our world — is a goal that has only intensified since he lost to Biden. What, you ask, is he promising to destroy? The United States of America.
For Trump, the Constitution and the entire legal and regulatory system are mere pieces of paper he’d like to burn up. But it is those things that constitute the United States of America. The USA is not a land mass or merely a land mass. It is an idea, perhaps the only nation created based on an idea. That idea is defined in the nation's founding documents and its laws. They are how we define our civilization, our aspirations, our reciprocal obligations, and the limits of our behavior towards one another. For Trump, they only serve to limit what he can do; they seek to constrain him. His disregard for them is what makes him a criminal, a mob boss. As Jim Comey told us years ago, it's not simply having people who will carry out his hinted-at desires. It’s the belief that the rich and famous, as he once said, can get away with murder or grab some woman’s genitals without penalty. The law, he thinks, should not apply to him. And, of course, he’ll spend whatever it takes to stay out of jail, to corrupt the system, to delay and delay, and maybe never have to stand trial at all. For Trump in particular, because he is such a public figure, because he has fooled some of the people all of the time, he doesn’t have to spend his own money for his defense; he’s spent 27 million dollars of his supporters’ money to defend him, a billionaire, a person to whom that money is a mere drop in the bucket (if he’s actually worth what he says he is).
And if he successfully destroys America, guess who’ll be left holding the bag? The debris he leaves behind will be not only you and me, but his followers in the MAGA world as well. Fitzgerald’s Tom and Daisy Buchannan have nothing on Trump.
Why bring up Trump? Because he is such a public figure. Because we can plainly see his gravitational pull, a pull that exists because of his four years as president, his money, and the hope that if he returns to the presidency, all who do his bidding (whether direct or implied) will benefit even if they have to compromise every principle they thought they had to gain whatever advantage they hope will result.
The great virtue of Fani Wallis’s RICO indictment of Trump and his minions is that it makes clear how widespread the criminal conspiracy spread and how many people it took to try and overthrow the election, even if, in the end, it did not work. In the Georgia indictment, we can clearly see the mob boss and the mob he created. I know little or nothing of the lives or ethics of the eighteen named co-conspirators, much less the thirty unnamed co-conspirators prior to the 2020 election and coming into contact with Trump. But every one of the thirty-eight, from the highest (like Mark Meadows or Rudy Giuliani) to the lowest, has been knowingly or unwittingly corrupted by the association. Seemingly, just about everyone, no matter how high or low, who touches him comes away dirtied. Think of it as a reverse Midas touch.
This is not the first time we learned how many people it takes to commit a Trump-style crime. Didn’t we learn that during Trump’s first impeachment? Trump’s “perfect” phone call to Zelensky, during which he tried to muscle Ukraine’s president to announce an investigation of Hunter Biden by threatening to withhold arms aid, required far more people to ensure the threat was deemed credible. It didn’t matter to Trump if Hunter was guilty of something or not or even if there was an actual investigation; what mattered was that the announcement of an inquiry would be enough to dirty his father. Some people, like the US ambassador to Ukraine, refused to play along (which got her fired), as did Brad Raffensberger, Georgia’s Secretary of State during the 2020 election, and a couple of election workers (despite implied threats or actual to them).
But Trump is not alone. Do you think for a moment that Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerburg, or the founders of Google think about you and me as anything other than sources of money or that they are obligated to play by the same rules as the rest of us? Do you think the Koch family cares what happens to us after they’ve extracted everything they can from the ground and befouling the air we breathe? Or the Sacklers, who tried to make addicts of as many Americans as possible? And what about all those compliance officers in corporations, banks, and hedge funds? Are they there simply because they are required to be? I’m sure that many of their employers want to do the right thing. But I’m also sure there are plenty whose purpose is to help their employers get away with as much as possible.
Trump is not the only one who goes shopping for lawyers who will tell him what he wants to hear while turning a deaf ear to those who won’t support blatantly illegal or seriously dodgy schemes. And look what’s happening with them: at least some will be going to jail. Stand too close to the flame, and you’ll get burned.
In the past few weeks, a 9/11 defendant long held in Guantanamo Bay had his confession thrown out because it was obtained through torture. John Yoo wrote the legal opinion that torture was legal and justified, then in the White House’s Office of Legal Counsel, a decision that Bush, Cheyney, and Rumsfeld very much wanted. To be fair, Yoo also advised Mike Pence that he had no right to delay or overturn the Electoral College vote for Joe Biden. I wonder what Yoo privately thought about torture. I seem to remember that either John Roberts or Samuel Alito, in their Senate confirmation hearings, told the Judiciary Committee that a lawyer’s job in the Legal Counsel’s Office was to find a legal justification for the desires of the president, regardless of their own beliefs or principles. One of them also implied that resume inflation was both common and not so bad. Being a lawyer trained to argue both sides of any argument with equal conviction can sometimes be a pretty slippery thing, don’t you think?
But getting back to the very wealthy, these people live lives so far removed from most of us that they might as well be on another planet. Yes, they put their pants on one leg at a time, and yes, if you cut them, they will bleed. But they all live in an isolated bubble, one in which they make up their own rules because they know that they have enough money and enough power to get away with almost anything, a world in which they can buy and sell almost anything (and, maybe, anyone) without blinking an eye. As drug lord Pablo Escobar famously said, “Everyone has a price; the important thing is to find out what it is.”
Am I being unfair to all billionaires? Yes, of course, I am. Probably. Mike Bloomberg comes to mind. He was the best mayor New York City has had in my lifetime (and that includes his predecessor, Rudy Guliani, once “America’s mayor,” whose anti-gay bigotry and racism, not to mention his moral slithering, were revealed to New Yorkers well before 9/11). But Bloomberg’s excellence doesn’t mean he was a “man of the people” then or now. I’ve met a (very) few billionaires and extremely wealthy people in my life, but I can’t say that I really know any of them, and I’m pretty sure the ones I’ve met didn’t want to know me either, except, perhaps, in a transactional way when I was working.
But most of them would just as soon not be known by anyone other than whomever they consider their peers. Maybe they’ll occasionally peek out from behind the curtain on CNBC or the Fox Business channel or allow us to catch glimpses of them at this or that social event, but rarely more. Maybe it’s simply the inevitable arrogance or self-assuredness of those who have been very successful in their business lives. They are often sure they are right about everything, including that the rules that govern the rest of us don’t or shouldn’t apply to them. And that also applies to the political sphere, where they seem to think that what is true for them, what benefits them, will benefit others. Sometimes, it may be true, but not too often.
Regarding politics, the super-wealthy control most of the political funding in this country. We can talk about all the small-dollar donors, but when it comes down to it, most (though not all) politicians depend entirely on the wealthy to fund their campaigns. Sometimes, they prefer to live in the shadows, hiding their influence behind dark money PACS that enable them to be anonymous to us, if not their direct beneficiaries. Billions of dollars have been spent since World War 2 to tilt the whole political system in their favor, trying to reduce taxes on themselves while making symbolic gestures to the rest of us and fighting against any attempt to make themselves and their businesses accountable to anyone. Regulation of companies didn’t happen because of their virtue, and it’s no wonder they’d all like the “administrative state” to be diminished. And the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, which allowed the wealthy to hide their political efforts even more effectively, only served to accelerate the process. No matter how many small-dollar donors there are, not a single one of them will ever have access to a politician that having donated a few million dollars to their campaign does.
Having begun this piece with my father, you may be asking what any of this has to do with him. After all, Dad was not a wealthy man. Not that he was poor, but he was never more than, I suppose, upper-middle-class. Meaning he worked for a living as a salaried employee who lived in a rent-controlled apartment in NYC and bought a house in upstate NY for $15,000, which he paid for in cash. In financial matters, he was very conservative, never taking out a mortgage or a loan, even for the new car he bought every two years, never wanting to owe money to anyone or any institution. He never went to college, nor did my mom. They both went to work as soon as they were out of high school. The absence of college degrees was no barrier to their success in their fields. When he was in his 20s, Dad worked as a railroad bond analyst on Wall Street and came to distrust those who ran financial America. I’m sure the stock market crash and the Depression had something to do with that, but even more, it was his observation of others on Wall Street and of the executives whose businesses he analyzed. His opinion of Wall Street and corporate America led him to leave Wall Street, and he found his home in philanthropy as the Budget Director of the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, a job he held until he retired in the early 1970s.
As the Budget Director, Dad’s job was to analyze the goals, spending plans, and practices of the 127 organizations that comprised the network of agencies — everything from hospitals to community centers — that were partially funded by Federation and to recommend how to best allocate the money they raised. In this, he chaired the so-called budget committee, a group of the wealthiest people in New York. Ironically, having left Wall Street at least partly because of his principles and observation of the ethics and behavior of financial and business executives, he was firmly enmeshed with Wall Streeters and business owners who were extremely wealthy. He was frequently invited to enter their social world (at least as a visitor), their parties, and dinners. Just as often, he refused. He felt that the world they inhabited was too different than his, that their values — the values they exhibited in their lives, both personal and business — were not his values. He felt that if you joined them in their world, your values would inevitably be tainted, that they would lead you to want things you should not want, to compromise your judgments to suit their interests and biases. Not that the shift in your values would necessarily be large or even conscious, but that it would inevitably happen. It would be better, he felt, to stay away.
And that brings me to the Supreme Court and its justices. The Supreme Court occupies a unique place in America. The judges have lifelong tenure. Yes, they can be impeached (the same process that applies to a president), but that is a rare occurrence. To date, no justice has ever been impeached by the House and convicted in a Senate trial. One judge, Samuel Chase, was impeached but was acquitted in the Senate in 1805. In 1969, Abe Fortas felt forced to resign from the court after his impeachment seemed inevitable, the only sitting justice ever to resign.
But the justices, collectively, are the final arbiters of the law and the Constitution in America. Decisions made by them affect the lives of every American. However final a decision may seem, we’ve also discovered that no decision is really final and that a subsequent court with different justices can overturn a decision. Sometimes, we applaud a decision’s reversal and, at other times, are dismayed by it. Both things have happened in my lifetime with significant consequences. Don’t let anyone tell you there are no activist judges, no matter what they claim.
As much of a bubble as they live in, the Court justices are not totally isolated. They go to parties in Washington, mingling with politicians, journalists, and lobbyists. They give speeches. If they are limited in the income they can earn by their salary, their spouses have no such limit. John Roberts’ wife may be a first-class lawyer, but does anyone doubt that her income is partly a reflection of the glow from her marriage to the Supreme Court’s Chief Justice? And could there be any doubt that Ginni Thomas’ influence is enhanced by her marriage to a Supreme Court justice, whether or not they ever discuss any case before the court?
Their position also gives the justices access to some of the wealthiest people in America because the rich want to court these judges for obvious reasons that don’t necessarily have to do with specific issues before the court. And some justices take advantage of it. Yes, I’m thinking of Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito in particular. Forgetting about whether either rightly or wrongly didn’t report trips and/or gifts of one sort or another, do you suppose those things were simply evidence of the friendship of the billionaires who handed them out? Were Randall Crowe’s gifts to Thomas of 32 trips in his private jet and stays at his ranch, his mother’s house, and who knows what else, simply because they were pals? Did both Thomas and Alito (and who knows what other justices) think that these gifts were obtained because they deserved them despite their exalted status, that if they were simply lawyers — even successful ones — Crowe and his fellow billionaires would have befriended them? Did they think that the gifts didn’t affect them in the slightest? Do they think they are immune to flattery?
I don’t know the answers to those questions with any certainty. What I do know is what my father would have thought, and so do you.
Trump hasn't been President for 3 years! Anyway, why the picture of Gold? I tried reading the article, but must have missed the part about what your dad taught you. It was, Trump this, and Trump that. If your dad, the budget director was here, maybe he'd say we shouldn't be paying billions to Ukraine to kill people, when Hawaii and American Citizens are homeless, and inflation and spending is run amok.
Well said, Michael. As it happens, I just started reading Robert Reich, "The System. Who Rigged It, How We Fix It." It's a very readable, short book, expressing similar views, actually stronger than yours.