Donald Trump’s star turn as host of The Apprentice on NBC completed yet another of his career’s successful rebrandings. He had replaced his wife with a newer, younger, shinier model and taken over the Miss Universe pageant line. By 2016, he had been mentioned in nearly 300 rap songs, becoming a ubiquitous signifier of wealth and womanizing. The man who played the biggest role in this was Jeff Zucker, president of NBC’s entertainment division when The Apprentice was created. By the time of Trump’s presidency, Zucker was running CNN, the network that treated Trump’s success as nothing less than apocalyptic.
To compare and contrast the media’s obsessive love of Trump the Celebrity versus their obsessive hatred of Trump the Populist Politician is an education not in partisan double standards but class warfare. All that changed about him was that he now stood to benefit the white working class instead of the cultural elite.
Such elites have always abided by a different social and moral code than us plebeians, and that shows no signs of changing.
Nothing illustrated the post-COVID double standard better than this year’s Met Gala, where unmasked celebrities donned $10,000 haute couture at the taxpayer-funded museum while The Help were forced to cover their mouths and noses. Even more ironic than the socialist superstar of Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, dining with the rich was the location of the evening’s primary festivities: the building’s Sackler Wing, named after the family whose Purdue Pharma (maker of OxyContin) was held up as the primary villain in the nation’s opioid epidemic.
The opioid crisis has claimed about as many lives as the pandemic, but unlike the coronavirus, opioid deaths show little sign of abating. Drug overdose deaths skyrocketed during the 2020 lockdowns,
reaching nearly 100,000
by the year’s end. Our control-freak government deemed the coronavirus serious enough to incur such deaths of despair. But it wasn’t quite enough to dim spirits at the Met Gala.
Public school students spent all of last year stuck behind a Zoom screen, but the then-governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, waived last summer’s mandatory quarantine rules for the celebrities heading to the MTV Video Music Awards. While the rest of the country had to say goodbye to their dying loved ones over Zoom, congressman John Lewis got an indoor funeral with hundreds of guests in attendance. Even now, Los Angeles County specifically exempts “film, television, and music productions” from the indoor mask mandate that otherwise applies to fully vaccinated people.
The ruling class has been rigging the rules long before the coronavirus struck. For years now, blue-state Democrats have tried to repeal Trump’s $10,000 cap on the state and local tax deduction, a de facto tax cut for the 1%. And on a local level, the wealthy have long pushed against extending subway lines from inner cities to neighborhoods such as Beverly Hills and Georgetown but in favor of single-family zoning to protect their own property values.
The pandemic raised the stakes. Champagne socialists were no longer trying to keep poor people out of their neighborhood schools. They were trying to ban the poor from their own. While Gov. Gavin Newsom let teachers unions keep California public schools shut for a year, his own children had the privilege of attending in-person private schools. When mayors such as Muriel Bowser of Washington, D.C., violate their own indoor mask mandates, it’s not just a run-of-the-mill act of political hypocrisy, when gyms and other businesses are suffering because Bowser rebuked their pleas to allow them to use proof of vaccination instead of a business-breaking mask mandate.
As evidenced by Trump’s rise and fall, the moral component of this double standard is just as important. In 2016, the media feigned shock at the release of the Access Hollywood tape featuring Trump boasting that “when you’re a star, they let you do it.” They shouldn’t have been. The same year Trump was secretly recorded on the Access Hollywood tape, he publicly bragged about barging into Miss Universe dressing rooms to ogle at undressed contestants.
“I’ll tell you the funniest is that I’ll go backstage before a show, and everyone’s getting dressed,” Trump said back in 2005. “No men are anywhere, and I’m allowed to go in, because I’m the owner of the pageant and therefore I’m inspecting it. … ‘Is everyone OK?’ You know, they’re standing there with no clothes. ‘Is everybody OK?’ And you see these incredible-looking women, and so, I sort of get away with things like that.”
This was to Howard Stern, live on the radio. But it was OK, because that was Trump the Celebrity, and when you’re a star, they’ll let you do it. That’s the truest thing the serial dissimulator has ever said. Just ask Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer, Les Moonves, and plenty of other powerful men who got away with even worse behavior for decades.
A similar phenomenon has emerged among the Eat the Rich Left. Just as Ocasio-Cortez frames tossing back Moet & Chandon as self-care rather than the nerd finally getting invited to the homecoming dance, celebrities are celebrated for the flagrant materialism and wealth that actual job creators such as Jeff Bezos and the Waltons are loathed for generating.
In 2019, Vox
feted
Ariana Grande for her song “7 Rings,” in which the pint-sized pop star croons, “Whoever said money can’t solve your problems / must not have had enough money to solve ’em.”
“The tycoons and tech gods sure aren’t letting us have any fun with their money,” Vox’s Kaitlyn Tiffany wrote, comparing Grande’s braggadocio to the wealth of entrepreneurs. “A person like Ariana Grande, on the other hand, has been publicly put through the wringer for events that were in
no way her fault
and which caused her
extreme personal pain
, yet the sole objective of her career is to dole out three-minute reprieves to the rest of us. I am glad to have her. I am glad that other people have her. She is not stealing my personal information or fudging the tenets of democracy. She is
telling me
I’m successful and beautiful, neither of which is as true as it could be, but feels good to hear all the same.”
By the end of the year, Grande (net worth: $180 million) would endorse Bernie Sanders, a literal socialist, for president.
A year after Kamala Harris endorsed a bail fund for the Black Lives Matter rioters who burned and looted cities, the vice president’s administration acquiesced to the National School Boards Association’s request that parents protesting race essentialism or unsafe bathrooms in their children’s schools be labeled “domestic terrorists” committing “hate crimes.” Long after free coronavirus vaccines became available to everyone over the age of 12, millionaire mayors and governors are laughing at small business owners begging for their right to operate without disastrous regulations. The elites would never deem other elites the true enemy, so moms, pops, and mom-and-pop shops get the designation instead.
Mothers have disproportionately been forced out of the workplace to accommodate the de facto school closures that are single-symptom classroom quarantine requirements. A majority of the business closures at the peak of coronavirus lockdowns are now permanent, and a generation of young people are economically and socially stuck. But the Bowsers and the Newsoms and, yes, even the Trumps don’t have to worry. When you’re a member of the ruling class, you can do anything.
Tiana Lowe is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner, as well as an on-air contributor for The First on Pluto TV.
