A Rich Kid Taking It All the Way

A rich kid may be able to break the rules, because the teachers answer to the principal, who answers to the school board, which may answer to his parents.

Some part of such a rich kid's status among his peers derives directly from his wealth. He can spend, and some other kids may start to hang around and onto him, hoping for some of that spending to fall on them. But another portion of a rich kid's status is drawn from that ability he has to go around or through the rules. The combination can take the rich kid pretty far in the social worlds of junior high, high school, and college. He attracts some attractive people, and his hangers-on hope for some of those to fall on them.

As he grows the rich kid can get better at rule-breaking, can get used to doing it, may start doing it all the time, and naturally then would do it in bigger and bigger ways over time. Since the teachers let him do it, he sees the rules as a fraud that the teachers must not really believe in. And to the extent the rich kid thinks about those peers who aren't his hangers-on, he thinks they are suckers, oppressed by this fraudulent scheme of rules, who need only follow him to cast it off.

For most rich kids, though, the exit from the school world into adulthood means forced entry into law-following. The post-school world is run by governments’ laws for adults, not by a school's rules for kids. Courts might be less subservient to a local rich man than school boards are to a rich parent, and their dictates are more severe.

But courts and governments can indeed be corrupted, yielding effects similar to those when a school board is intimidated by a rich parent. Laws can be bent or broken by the rich man who corrupts or intimidates the courts. So it is possible for the rich kid to keep living the same way he always has, and in fact to be validated in his youthful worldview—if, rather than being forced to submit to the rule of law, he keeps finding that it's the same as the rules of schools, that judges don't faithfully enforce the law when he pushes on them, and thus that laws are ultimately a fraud and a yoke that can be cast off if you have the courage.

But the ‘system’ retains an independent reality, continuing to be. Each time the rich kid beats the system, the rules and laws still stay in place for others—the rich kid's battles free himself, but the rules and laws are not generally shattered, the people at large remain under their shackles, and his cases are treated by the world beyond his school and his locality as exceptions, not as examples or harbingers of liberation.

Donald Trump has taken the foregoing approach to a human life almost all the way. He has broken bunches of rules and laws, and being elected President twice he stands about as confirmed as can be in his confidence that those rules and laws are all a scam and a joke. Why, he could shoot someone on a Manhattan street, or grab a woman between her legs, and he might find that even those rules are just some bullshit that they try to throw at you. They're keeping you down, America. Look at him—on the TV—they are afraid of him. He doesn't let them do it to him. And he says he won't let them do it to you.

As the incoming President, Trump is now supposed to enforce the rules and laws, which, he thinks, are for suckers. That can work, though, because the rich kid in our story develops from youth a rather thorough contempt for suckers. How weak they are. Suckers lack the courage to free themselves—heck, they aren't even smart enough to follow a rich kid to freedom. And the suckers are everywhere, following rules and laws, living for some reason. The suckers must like it. And if the suckers want rules and laws, you might as well give them rules and laws, good and hard.

Interspersed with the rule-following suckers out there are the unbelievably bad people—the ones who imposed the old, fraudulent scheme of rules and laws, which tried to make the rich kid keep his hands to himself—the teachers, the school administrators, the judges, the regulators, and the legislators. They tried to give him detention, they tried to make him live up to contracts, and now it's time for them to go to prison. These people are so bad, so unfair, that they continued enforcing rules and laws on the poor suckers even after rich kids proved in class and court that the rules and laws themselves are the real scam.

Those attracted to Trump's political leadership are those who see his ability to evade laws and wish themselves to evade or eviscerate existing laws. Those who want an all-new constitution—those who want to carry out huge frauds—those who want sex but don't have consent—those who’d like to be violent—anyone who thinks that the bulk of the existing rules and laws is a problem. They wish to extend Trump's exceptions to themselves—to make principles and precedents out of his personal cases, to which they and their lawyers can appeal, in courts friendly to them.

Right now we see Trump trying to implant the same form of social organization throughout the federal government, choosing to put at the top of each cabinet agency a rich guy, experienced in managing hangers-on, determined to keep out any rule-followers, narcs, moral people, or anyone else with concerns that conflict with his impunity.

The open question is, as everyone knows, whether any American institution will soon turn back these efforts, and by doing so restore an aspiration that everyone should fall under the equal protection of the law.

Featured image is A Cabinet That Could Afford It, by J. S. Pughe