I Had A Really Big Argument With Someone I Love About Trump Yesterday
It didn’t go well. I didn’t want to win. I wanted to find common ground.
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I am the black sheep in the family when it comes to Trump. My sisters won’t talk politics with me. One of them can’t find the time to return my calls. My brother reads the articles that I write and share with him, but he disagrees with me about every assessment I have ever made about Trump. And my mom thinks that I am unwilling to find one good thing about Trump to write about.
Well…
I had a huge argument with Mom about Trump yesterday. I’m very disturbed by it. I want to set things right. I really do. I love my mom and I know she loves me.
I see in Trump a man sitting on a pile of what is effectively unlimited resources, and it appears that quite a few people are willing to go to war for him. I see that in the words and actions of the people who talk about him and write about him. I see a real passion in the words they use when they talk about him. So I have to ask myself, why they are so willing to fight for him?
Why are they so willing to fight for a man who is arguably the king of the rentier class? He owns land, apartments, hotels, and golf courses. He collects rent. That makes him a rentier. I’m a utilitarian. I don’t believe in absentee ownership. I want everyone to have a home. I don’t hear Trump talking about that.
Trump has built an empire on rent. You don’t do that without really knowing how business and government work together. You don’t build an empire without having at least some knowledge of the corruption that goes on in the jurisdictions where you do business.
If you see something, say something. Trump was silent for at least 40 years from the 1970s to the 2010s. He really had nothing to say about all that until he decided he wanted to be president, and then suddenly, the “Deep State” is a thing. So I want to know why, why was Trump silent about all that for so long?
He has the power if he wants to, to explain the corruption of the rentier class and the aristocracy that supports the rentier class. He knows what that is. He has the power and the platforms, multiple platforms, to talk about the…
