Mr. Trump Instructs

Isn't it peculiar how often people criticize others for failings they, on some level,  perceive in themselves?

Donald Trump somehow knows he is a fat rich kid who had everything in the world handed to him which could be handed to him--wealth, expensive schools, celebrity, but in many ways he never earned the respect a rigorous mind, a lean body, a subversive sense of humor could accrue.

Having been a pugnacious behavior problem in school, his rich Daddy shipped him off to the New York Military academy to straighten him out. That's the story. Donald was bright enough, just too assertive and high spirited.

Or read another way, Donald was so slow witted even his Daddy could not buy him a place at Andover or Exeter or Groton, so Donald wound up at the school for wayward boys where you didn't have to be all that bright. From there to a respectable school, Fordham, but not the Ivy League. That's a bit of a flag, because Ivy League admissions in the 1960's while highly competitive were still very much available to the sons of real estate magnates who just might donate a building or more to the campus. One way to read this story is Donald had to demonstrate to the University of Pennsylvania he could behave himself well enough to be allowed on campus, and then Penn could be happy enough to accept Donald's father's largess.

So now Donald, who claims he was an excellent student, is attacking Obama for having had everything handed to him because he was black. (And Donald would know a thing or two about having everything handed to him.) That stokes the fury of the blue collar Republican Resentfuls, who think the only reason they are not living in McMansions and driving Mercedes Benz automobiles is all the good jobs were given to the undeserving Affirmative Action blacks who got the best schools and from that the best jobs.

The attack on Obama serves both purposes: It says Donald is deserving and Obama is not. And it fits right into the Resentful Republican narrative.

There is a wonderful scene from the movie "Do The Right Thing," where two old black men are sitting in an alley with their liquor in brown paper bags, looking at the Korean owner of a grocery store just across the street, and one says to the other, "Lookit that. Them Koreans only been here in this country, what? A few years. And they got that business up and going and everyone in the neighborhood buys their groceries there. And we been here since they brought us over in the ships three hundred years ago. What's wrong with that?"

And the other says, "You mean, what's wrong with us?"

This is not an exact quote, but that's the way I remember the scene.

And it's a very poignant scene which really bites. But the honesty of the man who can look at where he is in life and take responsibility for his own failings is enobling.

When Donald Trump looks across the street at a black man who had nothing but disadvantage and is now President of the United States, he cannot stand what that says about himself.


Of course, if Donald Trump were actually bright enough, he'd realize it doesn't matter whether Obama is magna cum laude or whether Trump's college grade point average was worse or better than Obama's.  What matters is where  they are now, intellectuallly.

You have only to read the two Obama books and then take one look at Trump, who looks as if he's been inflated like a Macy's Thanksgiving balloon, with that dead animal on his head he calls hair and know the difference.