Reason # 18: The Silver Spoon
Why do we need to defeat Donald Trump and ensure that a Democrat occupies the White House?
Years ago, I was dining alone at Smith and Wolensky along the Chicago River and could not help overhearing the conversation of four young businessmen at a neighboring table, speaking of George W. Bush. “He’s just a regular guy, one you could sit down and have a beer with.” After I intruded and asked “how many of you know a regular guy whose daddy’s friends gave him a professional baseball franchise to play with”, I was threatened with a beating.
In 1969, after twenty years of education, I entered the full-time job market and accepted an offer from the Mayo Clinic for job slot as a surgical intern. The job paid me a starting salary of $6,500 dollars a year and featured every other night on call stints that often resulted in 100-hour work weeks. Clearly that was an extreme situation. Most others were more fairly compensated but precious few as well as young Donald Trump.
In 1968, at age 22, Donald went to work for his daddy, Fred Trump, for an estimated $1,000,000 per annum.
Nine years later, in 1978, after seven years at Mayo, interrupted by two years of government service in the U.S. Public Health Service, I accepted a job with a group of thoracic surgeons in Arcadia, California, at $60,000/ year.
In 1971, Donald Trump was appointed president of the Trump Family business. This phenomenon has been described as
“I was climbing the ladder of success, when the boss’s son went past on the elevator.”
This is a real-life representation of what is meant by being born with a silver spoon in one’s mouth. Almost everyone in the workplace, except the toadies, loathes those who rise based on privilege, rather than hard work and competence but strangely this natural aversion to inherited advancement does not stick to Trump, as it rightfully should.
Perhaps, but didn’t the young entrepreneur earn his generous compensation? In his mind, he did. He has frequently narrated the myth that he started with a mere million-dollar loan from his dad and parlayed that a thousand-fold into an enormous fortune, accumulating billions and becoming one of the richest men on earth.
Let’s parse that sentence. Did your father loan you a million dollars? Do you know anyone whose father loaned them a million dollars? What we are viewing is a modern plutocratic version of ancien regime, aristocratic advancement and enrichment based on birth rather than merit. But strangely, today’s sans culottes applaud this anointed princeling.
More relevant, has Donald Trump really accumulated billions and still more important, how did he do it and what happened to the money?
The answer is a long and complicated narrative of greed, sordid personal behavior unethical business and inter-personal dealings, on a number of occasions rising to the level of formal investigation, indictment for civil and criminal behavior and culminating in impeachment in the U.S. Senate on, not just one but two occasions.
Before we go there, we need to stop and consider how Donald became available for his new job at a period in time when millions of other young Americans were serving their country.
Have a heart; use your mind, search your conscience, and vote for Democratic candidates – across the ballot – on November. 5th.
Please share this message with your friends and please, add your thoughts, to expand upon what are only brief sketches here.
Fred Grannis
August 2, 2024