Monument to a man

In a recent post, we suggested that Dolly Parton-style personal humility could help Donald Trump‘s opponents, both in this year’s midterm elections and in the 2028 presidential elections, by standing in sharp contrast to Trump’s desperate need to be seen as “the greatest.” Trump has spent his career surrounding himself with gold fixtures, fawning sycophants, and participation trophies, all meant to broadcast a false impression of success.

Thirty-five years ago, Bret Easton Ellis’s novel “American Psycho” savaged this type of excess through Patrick Bateman, a young stockbroker who worships Donald Trump. Bateman treats Trump as the yardstick against which he measures his own success: looking like a winner means looking like him.

This selfish elitism, easy to satirize in Trump’s lifestyle, also shapes his narrow priorities in the White House. In his second inaugural address, in January 2025, he called for a new “Golden Age”, saying: “We were at our richest from 1870 to 1913. That’s when we were a tariff country.” What Trump left out is that such wealth flowed overwhelmingly to a narrow class of industrialists, while most Americans worked long hours for low wages. He has been working to restore the “Golden Age” only for a select few, such as the four men who sat closest to him at his inauguration: Elon Musk (Tesla), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), and Sundar Pichai (Alphabet). Their companies have since disclosed that, in 2025, on a combined $315 billion profit, Tesla paid no federal income tax, and the others paid only single digits, largely thanks to Trump’s tax breaks.