“That’s Not Fair!”

The more advantages and privileges you have in the United States today, the more likely you are to perceive as unfair the fact that you don’t have every last advantage and privilege it is possible to have.

This is a corollary to my thesis that the larger your home and the nicer your neighborhood, the more likely it is not to be your only home or neighborhood. Yes, winners take everything. It is their right.

Today this right turns out to include the right to blame a rigged system for the one election you don’t win, and to “correct” the system by changing the few remaining rules that might still thwart your inexorable victory.

Red cards don’t apply to us. We change the rules as convenient. Go Team America! Make America Great Again!

***

The kernel of this hypothesis did not originate with me. A close friend who recently retired after a near four-decade career as an elementary school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area observed something curious when he was just getting started. By then he had been teaching for several years—first in two private schools and then in an “inner city” public school. I remember his observation as though it were yesterday; and just to confirm, I double-checked with him earlier this week.

The observation was this: The private school students, particularly in the tonier of the two schools, were always saying “That’s unfair!” when something hadn’t gone their way. He heard the phrase all the time. In recess. In class. During after school activities. “That’s unfair! That’s unfair! That’s unfair!” By contrast, he never recalled the inner city public school students ever uttering the phrase even once. Most of those kids hailed from the bottom rungs of the socio-economic ladder. Many were the children of immigrants. Few of their parents spoke English as a first language. Some not at all.

But unlike their peers in the “better” private schools, not a peep about the fairness or unfairness of their plight. He was struck by the stark difference. The weird inversion. The strangely crossed wires, leading to the backwards, upside-down, exact wrong conclusion. Those who had massive comparative advantages, for whom the socio-economic scales were decisively tipped, complained constantly about things being unfair while those who had no advantages to speak of, who bore the brunt of their challenging circumstances in silence, did not. They accepted their unfair fate without complaint.

He wondered what this meant, big picture.

More than a generation later, one gets the impression that the perverse dynamic encapsulated by this observation has only grown more flagrant. It is in full fetid flower in the person of our president.

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***

Once upon a time I used to think that, whatever our historical crimes, gaudy excesses, and rank hypocrisy, the United States remained committed to some semblance of truth, justice, and fair play. The old even playing field argument. Everyone getting an equal shot in theory. Rule of law, not rule by men. That kind of thing.

Silly me.

For example, I still recall feeling morally superior, even sanctimonious for a fleeting moment, when serving as an American diplomat in deeply unequal Peru. I heard about an incident at the American school in Lima involving a wealthy Peruvian parent from the highest rungs of the country’s most rarefied “pituco”1 class. You know, the kind of people who live in lavish places on spectacular grounds in San Isidro or La Molina—the equivalent of high society Beverly Hills or the upper Upper East side. A member of the sanctified few who are driven around by a chauffeur in a large, late-model Mercedes, accompanied by a small team of attentive “cholo”—mixed race—nannies and servants. Often an inconspicuous security unit too. High net worth, high-privilege, high-minded people who literally stand at the tippy top of Peru’s steeply inclined (and for that reason fragile) socio-economic pyramid. Had she tried to climb any higher, she would have fainted or fallen over.

Needless to say—and this part is germane to the anecdote that’s coming—she was also of unsullied lily-white European extraction. (So am I, by the way.)

During the incident in question, this high-privilege lily-white person claimed publicly—and for the record, inaccurately—that mongrel American students at the school had received an unfair advantage and that their Peruvian counterparts, including her own children, had been discriminated against due to— get this—their “ethnicity”.

Long pause here while I catch my breath.

I’m not sure I can convey a sense of the brazenness of this assertion, the gall of it, its absolutely outrageous nature. I was dumbfounded. Speechless. What to make of it? Here was a person who literally had everything one can have, every advantage, every privilege accorded to her race, class, and money. And then some. More than just everything, she had the best of the best with nothing to spare. Moreover, she was making a false claim about an incident that did not happen as she claimed. But even that doesn’t quite get at it. It turns out that having every privilege, every advantage, every conceivable leg up wasn’t enough.

Like Morrissey’s lazy sunbathers, she wanted more. So she anchored her false claim of unfair treatment by asserting the existence of a supposed handicap—her children’s ethnicity2, which in this case insidiously implied skin color or at least social disadvantage and not just cultural heritage and language—to advance and reinforce her array of already unassailable advantages. She was twisting the logic of political and social privilege, setting it on its head, and using it to further cement the citadel of her own privilege. It was literally dizzying. It was absolutely preposterous.

***

Only fast forward to now, and it sounds oddly familiar.

Now I don’t think that that preposterously false claim was even so exceptional. Now I’ve seen the same pretzel logic being applied here, and I see it more and more frequently all over the place. So let’s stop picking unfairly on Peru already. Instead, let’s visit the leafy neighborhoods of suburban Maryland, just outside DC, where my family lives now. This is not just rarefied Jamie Raskin-town, this is Bret Kavanaugh Country-Club country.

On both sides of that unbridgeable divide, not just anyone can come and live here. Once you’re in, you’re pretty much two miles ahead of the rest. Indeed, in the light of my own modest upper middle class background (the son of a college professor who was not much interested in money), I sometimes feel like an intruder in this sanctified environment. Or, much as I did while serving as an American diplomat interacting with the power and money elite in a series of highly unequal and stratified countries, I feel like an honorary member of the privileged classes who manages to fake it tolerably well.

I know. I know. Whatever my self-serving feelings of impostor syndrome, I have a few advantages of my own.

Be these as they may, our sons were privileged to complete their secondary school education in a rarefied Maryland zip code after a more than decade-long spell in South America. So here comes another telling anecdote. A year or two after our enigmatic arrival here, a parent in their high net worth public high school (it’s all about the tax base, as we well know) overheard one of my sons speaking Spanish with his mother, a native of Guatemala. I recall hearing that parent remark—the tone sounded more like a complaint—that her own kids had not had the unfair advantage of growing up in other countries, nor of speaking a foreign language with an unfairly privileged foreign parent. I exaggerate only slightly. The parent, we later found out, was among the wealthiest in the school.

No wonder. If you don’t have every available advantage and privilege, there’s got to be some way to buy them.

Luckily for people like us, perhaps, not everything can be bought or sold.

Does this fact point to the way through or out of the crisis?

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***

Let me conclude these meanderings with a few words about a sorry individual about whom more than enough has been said: The omni-entitled, infinitely advantaged, supremely privileged spoiled brat in the White House. He is surely the perfect personification, the pinnacle embodiment, our quintessential Representative in Chief of this twisted context. Indeed, by now “fair” and “unfair” have been grotesquely inverted. Consider if you will the savage irony, the sheer gall, the absolute preposterousness of his continuing claim to have been “treated very unfairly” over the years and still today.

The mind bends to the point of breaking to make sense of it. Here is a person who has had every privilege it is possible to have, indeed, every material advantage it is possible to imagine having from the very beginning. Not only that, he has gained more and more along the way. Moreover, in amassing his colossal riches and achieving his monumental achievements, he has relied on a strategy of systematically shattering the norms, rules, and laws of human civilization, violating the categorical imperative on which our intrinsically fragile social order depends. This well established and repeatedly demonstrated fact—the precise opposite of putative unfairness—explains the countless court cases against him and his criminal arrest and conviction in one. (There should have been at least two others.) Following the tried and true pattern of inversion, he’s even converted the fact of being a criminal into the fiction of being a victim. Nicely done! Either way, few people in history can credibly claim achieving such glories and possessing such golden things as he. Indeed, these many-splendored wonders lie beyond a drunken madman’s wildest dreams of infinite delirium.

For kicks and giggles, let’s ask Claude quickly to run the numbers:

– He has been elected President of the United States, still (for now) the world’s most powerful office, twice, only the second person in history ever to serve non-consecutive terms;

– He owns a veritable empire of golf courses, 14 outright and one more via a licensing agreement, worth close to $1 billion total;

– He owns a slate of marquee properties, including Mar a Lago (worth more than $500 million), Trump Tower, 40 Wall Street, and a broad portfolio of hotels, office space, and residential buildings valued o/a $1.2 billion after debt;

– Since returning to office, he has reaped a $2.1 billion in crypto-related holdings and liquid assets, mostly from World Liberty Financial and $Trump meme coin, now his single fastest-growing asset class;

- He has a net worth of $6.5 billion (according to Forbes in March 2026), up $1.4 billion this past year, making him one of the wealthiest presidents in U.S. history.

And yet it still isn’t enough, he wants more. So of course, he continues to expand his personal holdings and licensing footprint while serving as president, in blatant contradiction of longstanding rules governing conflicts of interest. But like limits of any kind and all other rules that constrain him, these rules too amount to “unfair treatment,” more evidence that the system which has made him its perhaps single most successful, even exalted figure somehow remains rigged against him.

This leads to the logical endpoint of the inversion. What would happen if/when he got literally everything, without limits or constraints? What happens when the unraveling and unrigging of the system has managed to rig it so completely in his favor that it now lies like an impregnable citadel beyond even the theoretical possibility of anyone breaching it? The answer can be found, as so many things can these days, in Alice in Wonderland.

“Off with the heads of everyone else!”