Marty Levine
January 31, 2025
In the second week of the second Trump Presidency, we can see clearly how he and his acolytes envision the nation. As a candidate, he was clear in stating that he had nothing to do with the Heritage Society’s blue print for a MAGA America, “Project 2025.” In the less than two weeks since his inauguration, we can see how big a lie that statement was.
At its core, this is a plan to operationalize a belief that every individual is responsible for his or her fate. If one is homeless, that’s because you don’t work hard enough to afford your rent. If you are a retiree who doesn’t have sufficient savings to meet your needs, that is because you didn’t work hard enough and you didn’t save enough. If you are addicted, it is your fault for being too weak-minded to avoid the temptations of a substance-induced high. If you can’t afford medical care, just work harder and spend less on frills. If you don’t have enough food on your table, work harder and buy smarter.
It is a prescription for individualism and elitism. It’s a perspective that can come from only those who have never have had to worry about where they would sleep or get their next meal.
The quality of your life is your responsibility. The government isn’t responsible for bailing you out. If individuals want to help a neighbor, let them do so, but don’t look to the government for help. The government’s job is to protect the sanctity of the marketplace so that businesses and the wealthy can flourish. And the government is responsible for manipulating the marketplace to allow American businesses to succeed over any foreign competition even if that worsens the lives of most people.
That our government should not be providing a safety net could not be illustrated more powerfully than by an executive order the new administration issued freezing of government expenditures and effectively shutting down many of the ways our Government has supported those in need. Medicaid, which provides medical services to more than 70 million, was halted. Grants to a wide range of non-profit organizations that had been contracted with cities and states to use federal pass through funds to provide a wide array of services were suspended.
And just today the Administration launched an effort to radically reduce the federal work force, limiting the federal government’s reach and effectiveness.
This follows the braggadocio of the leaders of Trump’s DOGE effort that plan to reduce federal expenditures by $2 trillion, a number that cannot be reached without significantly reducing already weak safety net programs. It followed the President’s threats to end FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) and thereby limit aid for those victimized by natural disasters.
Behind all of this seems to be a belief that those who are wealthy have acquired their wealth solely because they work harder and are just plain smarter than other people. They are being rewarded for their hard work and brilliance. Not only are those who struggle personally responsible for their own struggles, but they are failures if they cannot pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
What gauls me so much is how untrue this is, especially about the people who are leading the fight for the MAGA agenda. The President himself is certainly not an example of a self-made success story. Many of the people who funded his campaign and who now fill his administration and stand behind him are not self-made success stories either.
Trump’s own story is anything but a story of rags to riches because of his hard work and business brilliance . Russ Buetner and Susanne Craig tell us that in the recent book, “Lucky Loser.” You just have to read the book’s sub-title to understand how he was born into wealth and power and how his wealth comes from anything but great business acumen or innovative thinking: “How Donald Trump squandered his father’s fortune and created the illusion of success.” Brad Delong began his review of the book for The Guardian with these words:
Donald Trump started his career at the end of the 1970s, financed by his father Fred Trump. Over the years this transfer of wealth added up to around $500m in today’s money in gifts. My rough calculations say that, had he simply taken the money, leveraged it not imprudently, and passively invested it in Manhattan real estate – gone to parties, womanized, played golf, collected his rent cheques and reinvested them – his fortune could have amounted to more than $80bn by the time he ascended to the presidency in 2017.
And yet Trump was not worth $80bn in 2017. Instead, Forbes pegged him at $2.5bn – which, given the difficulties of valuing and accounting for real estate, is really anything between $5bn (£4bn) and zero (or less). It is in this sense that Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times reporters Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig call Trump a “loser”. He is indeed one of the world’s biggest losers. By trying to run a business, rather than just kicking back and letting the rising tide of his chosen sector lift his wealth beyond the moon, he managed to destroy the vast majority of his potential net worth.
Elon Musk did not grow up dirt poor either. According to The Independent, Elon Musk’s father
became a half owner of the (emerald) mine, and we got emeralds for the next six years,” Errol Musk said. As a result of this, the teenage Elon Musk once walked the streets of New York with emeralds in his pocket. His father said: “We were very wealthy. We had so much money at times we couldn’t even close our safe,” adding that one person would have to hold the money in place with another closing the door. “And then there’d still be all these notes sticking out and we’d sort of pull them out and put them in our pockets.”
The family’s good fortune made it easier to for Musk to afford his time in college and take the risks of developing his successful software and other businesses. However competent he was and however good a programmer he was when he founded his first business ventures, he had the backstop of family wealth to make risk-taking easier.
The same is true for Mark Zuckerberg, whose parents were successful professionals able to make him a $100,000 loan as he was beginning Facebook, and Jeff Bezos whose parents could make an even larger investment in the early days of Amazon. And this is true also of most of the mega-wealthy men (and they are mostly men) who are now populating the Trump administration.
The focus on personal responsibility, on the ethos of everyone, can be as successful as they are if people just were as smart as they are, as business savvy as they are, and would just work as hard as they did, allows them to ignore all of the structural inequities that have allowed wealth to be hoarded by a few throughout this country’s history.
And this explains why the new administration is attacking Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) with such fury. DEI requires us to understand that there are structural forces that allow some to prosper and most of the rest of us to struggle. DEI requires us to come to grips with the historic economic and social impact of slavery and the subjugation of our land’s native population. It requires us to come to grips with all of the impacts of gender-based bias. It forces us to recognize the unfairness of a system that continues to reward some of us because of historical wrongs and masks that reality in a false narrative of personal success and failure.
Let’s not be fooled by the discussion of government inefficiency or personal responsibility. Let’s stand up and call out the need to see our nation clearly, as one that has deep flaws as well as important strengths. Let’s not ignore that there are so many people who are working very long, very hard, and very smart and who still cannot pay their rent or feed their families. Let’s not stop saying that this is just plain wrong.
The next years may be difficult because we are going to have this personal responsibility nonsense shoved at us in every way it can be. But that is no reason to stop standing on the side of what is right and what is true. And there will be plenty of opportunities to do that, and do it we must.
