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Frank Bruni | NYT News Service
LIKE most Americans, I woke up the morning after Thanksgiving and thought first about atonement. How to work off all of that stuffing?
Also like most Americans, I thought next about Ivanka. What was her holiday like? More specifically, what was her holiday 'tablescape' like?
That gilded neologism appeared in a story that was published shortly before Thanksgiving on her company's website, promoted by its Twitter handle and exquisitely emblematic of her approach to her self-appointed role as heroine to and model for working women the world over. It recommended festooning the terrain around the turkey with Waterford crystal, Astier plates ($300 and up for a single place setting) and driftwood gathered from the shore. In Ivanka's world, the shore is never far, the driftwood is always photogenic and there's time aplenty, because there are servants galore, to forage for it.
Can Ivanka's"tablescape" coexist harmoniously with her papa's"populism"? I'm sceptical, but Ivanka coexists harmoniously with Louise Linton, most recently seen drooling over a sheet of freshly minted dollar bills at a US Treasury plant. They bore the name of her husband, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, so she gripped them with an elegantly gloved hand and displayed them triumphantly for the camera, an image that understandably went viral.
"Who could fail to be moved, at least a little, by the sight of Louise Linton photographed with the love of her life?" asked Kevin Williamson in National Review.
"Steven Mnuchin was also in the picture," Williamson added."Portrait of a marriage, right there."
Portrait of an administration, really.
If Donald Trump wants to keep insisting that he's some scrappy watchdog keeping the corrupt elites at bay so that the little people have their day, then I want to keep pointing out what an utter crock his supposed populism continues to be. If you can produce for me an administration that has showcased as much unabashedly, unrepentantly regal behaviour as his, then I'll personally collect and supply the driftwood for your Thanksgiving tablescapes for the next three decades. I'll throw in a few clamshells and pinecones, too.
Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Trump golfs at Trump-branded properties while working-class parents see their children's dreams of affordable college go up in smoke. This brings me to tax reform, which has taken shape in ways that hardly prioritise struggling Americans who are trying to climb the economic ladder a rung or two.
There is arguably no engine of advancement as powerful as a college degree, so what does the tax bill passed by the House do? At a time of mammoth student debt, it eliminates the deduction for interest on student loans.
My New York Times colleague Erica Green noted that it also taxes the value of college tuition benefits that thousands of university employees receive. She described one such employee, Fred Vautour, who worked a graveyard shift collecting trash and scrubbing toilets at Boston College in order to send all five of his children to school there. The House bill's proposed changes would make a success story like his much less possible, but it would do away altogether with the estate tax, so that a billionaire like Trump could pass down the entirety of his wealth to Ivanka and the rest of the brood. So much for the little people.
While it's true that simplification of the tax code was in order and had to come from somewhere, how can reformers justify erasing the $250 deduction for teachers who reach into their own pockets to buy school supplies but not getting rid of the carried-interest loophole? Both the House and the Senate version to be voted on as early as this coming week merely tweak it, though Trump pledged on the campaign trail to kiss it goodbye.
That was back when he was demonising Wall Street and the plutocrats gorging at its trough. Then he began filling positions in his administration.
For Treasury he picked Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs partner whose net worth, according to one authoritative estimate earlier this year, is $385 million. Another Goldman Sachs alumnus, Gary Cohn, became director of the National Economic Council. His net worth is apparently north of $250 million.
That's unremarkable in Trumplandia, where such colossuses as Education Secretary Betsy DeVos ($1 billion) and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross (around $700 million, according to financial disclosure forms) reign."I love all people, rich or poor," Trump explained at a rally in June."But in those particular positions, I just don't want a poor person."
News flash, Mr President: There's a whole lot of acreage, and many worthy people, between those lining up for free soup and those flying high in private jets. What's more, a net worth upward of $100 million isn't necessarily proof of genius. It's as often a sign of ruthlessness and shamelessness. Surely you know something about that.
Trump shuttled on the morning after Thanksgiving from the splendor of Mar-a-Loco to the verdure of the Trump National Golf Club, thereby tugging the media's focus from one of his revenue sources to another. All the presidency's a marketing opportunity, and no juncture is too busy for golf. He slammed President Barack Obama for hitting the greens too often but has easily outpaced his predecessor by playing golf at least three dozen times since his inauguration.
It's in the context of his extraordinary sacrifices for American workers that we can view the similar self-effacement of those at his side for instance Tom Price, the toppled secretary of health and human services, who squandered hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars on private charter flights.
Or Scott Pruitt, the remaining head of the Environmental Protection Agency, whose bill for noncommercial flights topped $50,000 and who spent nearly $25,000 on a soundproof communications booth of ambiguous necessity. Or Mnuchin, who also hewed to an administration-wide predilection for requesting or using government planes instead of cheaper commercial ones. For Trump's Cabinet, populism means never having to worry about legroom.
Ah, Mnuchin. I can offer no description of him better than the one rendered by Williamson, who observed that he was"pure Wall Street malignity in concentrated form," while Linton, an ostensible actress with an almost nonexistent r`sum`, was"raised partly in a castle outside Edinburgh" and posted that cringe-inducing Instagram photo alerting her dubiously interested followers to the Herm'e8s, Tom Ford and Valentino items that she wore on a government trip with her husband.
"Linton, being a Hollywood nobody, has not exactly been beset with paparazzi, but this is the age of social media, and so she has become her own paparazzo," he wrote.
Ivanka maintains a glam Instagram feed of her own. The people whose lives she and her father are bettering would settle for nothing less.
